Whom Do You Trust?

Who are you? What do you want? Where are you going? Whom do you serve – and whom do you trust?! – TV Series Crusade

I’m an American, of mostly Anglo-English descent, who mostly wants to be left alone to pursue happiness and a modicum of fame as a writer of historical or comic fiction. Frankly, if I am going anywhere, it’s slightly crazy, and as for whom I serve, my family, good friends and close neighbors, more or less in that order. As for whom I trust …

Not as many as I once did. One by one by one, the people and institutions which I once assumed to be competent, honest, and worthy of my trust and respect have revealed themselves to be corrupt, shallow, incompetent, partisan and cynical users of those ordinary American citizens like me.

In my personal estimation, the national institution that has fallen the farthest and most precipitously has been the FBI. I’ve been aware that for decades the general opinion was that J. Edgar stayed at the helm of that agency mostly because he had the goods on just about every person of note in politics. A lot of the FBI’s fame came from the man’s noted skill at PR, and years of mythologizing in radio, television and the movies. As long as his agency appeared to be a competent and impartial investigating authority, it didn’t seem that anyone in the outside world minded very much the means by which Hoover kept his agency going. But the series of flat-footed failures and failings, coupled with the decidedly partisan anti-Trump actions in the last four years, culminating with fitting a frame around General Flynn. Well, there you go – a good reputation for nearly a century of dedicated crime-fighting, all destroyed in a few years. Frankly, were I ever on a jury having to render a judgement in a matter involving testimony from an FBI agent or facility, I’d discount that testimony from the first word.

Who else has fallen almost as fast in my estimation? Most mainstream news organizations. The first cracks in my wall of credibility occurred during GW Bush’s first term, widened when Dan Rather perpetuated a political hit with the TANG memo, crumbled substantially when the establishment media all but dragged the juggernaut of Barak Obama over the finish line – not once, but twice. There was also my experience with the Tea Party, where for our well-founded concern regarding fiscal responsibility and fidelity to the Constitution, a bunch of otherwise inoffensive, middle-class citizens (and most of us were quite well-educated, honestly) got called bigoted, racist, stupid hicks by press creatures like Anderson Cooper, he of the “Teabagger” insult. Hard to believe it, but the mainstream media creatures have gotten even more insulting since that point. Papering over the Biden family corruption and enabling a presidential election to be stolen is only the rotten cherry on the top of the whole rancid sundae. With the result that – well, I don’t believe most of what’s in the American news media, these days, especially if it’s to do with politics. It’s all partisan spin and lies, all the way down. I can hope that eventually most print media and cable channels will die the death as readers and viewers tune out.

There are a couple of other institutions which have zeroed out all trust from and credibility with me, but since I didn’t have much to begin with when it came to professional sports, higher education of the Ivy League or would-be Ivy League persuasion or in mainstream book publishing – no great loss there.

I do, however, confess to being savagely disappointed with the establishment GOP. Whereas I had most usually felt a kind of fond exasperation with them, mostly for being submissive saps when it came to responding to Democrat Party abuse and insult, for treating the Tea Party generally as an inconvenient embarrassment once they realized that Tea Partiers were not going to be obedient little subordinates and money spigots, and GOP presidential noms John McCain and Mitt Romney for being two-faced and cowardly creatures of the political swamp when it came to straight-up defending the interests of the greater nation against Dem corruption. And this time around, sitting on their hands in response to a flagrantly stolen election – that’s disappointing. Not entirely unexpected, but still disappointing. I guess that the swamp is just too rewarding for our incompetent, corrupted so-called elite.

Discuss as you feel moved. Who were you newly disappointed by, in 2020?

 

 

 

128 thoughts on “Whom Do You Trust?”

  1. NEWLY disappointed by. The Supreme Court appointments. They have happily collaborated in the gutting of the Constitution we all [except for foreigners here] swear to preserve, protect, and defend. The explicit words in it are now void, and no one even has standing to protest in court.

    Combine that with the destruction of voting, and there is no peaceful way to remain free or regain freedom. Those new Justices were our last chance to non-violently preserve a social contract, and they sided with the enemy.

    Subotai Bahadur

  2. I lost faith in the MSM in the 90s. Lost faith in the FBI and CIA in 2016/7, as it became clear to anyone who wanted to know that they had spied on Trump and were trying to ruin him, and absolutely no one was going to do anything about it (after things like Waco, Elian, etc., one could argue that the DOJ was just corrupt at the top, not all the way through, but that argument is long since over). Lost faith in the GOPe when they helped destroy the Tea Party. Didn’t vote for Mitt, first GOP candidate I couldn’t bring myself to vote for.
    For this year, I have to say my biggest disappointments are with Trump and team, I guess. They were content to be found not guilty in the impeachment farce, without hitting back hard enough to demonstrate that Biden and his whole family are a bunch of filthy corrupt trash. And am never going to understand how they allowed the election to be stolen, without having a plan to counteract it. You’d think that after all these years he’d understand what we was up against, but it seems like he never did. His rhetoric about “they don’t hate me, they hate you, I’m just in their way”, etc., was never matched by action.

  3. Here’s another one–public health professionals. “Stay home, for my sake, while I’m working on the front lines against covid” became “Yay for BLM protests!” overnight, then switched just as fast to “How dare you be so selfish to do with covid raging!”

  4. I wouldn’t have believed that an entire presidential election could be brazenly and quite openly stolen.

    If nothing else, this requires de facto collusion between not only the entire democrat party, but also the entire legacy media complex, the national republican party establishment, multiple republican state parties, the various tech monopolies, various federal law enforcement agencies including the FBI, and the federal judiciary up to and including including the Supreme court, and the Post Office. If any one of these supposedly worthy institutions had done their job, the theft would have likely been stopped, or at the very least stopping it would been much easier.

    But I’ve long figured our institutions were failing. So it isn’t that I’m newly disappointed by anything, it’s that I’m surprised at how thoroughly all our institutions have rotted away, and how quickly.

  5. You’d think that after all these years he’d understand what we was up against, but it seems like he never did.

    Maybe. But I also think that if he’d been more proactive than he was, the Senate GOP would have eagerly lept at the chance to impeach him and remove him from office.

    I’m a bit surprised he managed to avoid that, actually.

  6. The one thing that I’ve had confirmed (and, oh boy, but how…) this year has been my long-held suspicion that the so-called “Republicans” in DC are merely the opposite Janus-face from the Democrats. It’s a farcical fraud they’ve been perpetrating for years and years, that they’re somehow not a part of the filthy “system” establishment, or that they have our best interests at heart. The other fraud is who they purport to represent, which ain’t “us”. They’re actually in the pockets of the Democrats, and have been since at least the 1930s. Well, effectively, at least. FDR’s three-term obscenity of an administration merely cemented the work that Wilson started, and we now have ensconced in Washington, District of Columbia what amounts to an all-American mandarin class that our academic masters have created and perpetuated.

    Getting rid of them? LOL… The plan is for all the independent small business owners and so forth that are the backbone of the Republican party outside DC will be bankrupt and on welfare, while the corporate master race reaps all the profits. The parasites ain’t leaving this bloated carcass until the bones are picked clean. Not sure what’s going to happen, but I’m reaching a point of bemused wonder at the sheer brazenness of it all. Just goes to show you what capturing the media class can do, and why successful revolutions always seize the organs of communication first. We lost that battle back in the classrooms of the late 20th Century.

  7. Wrt health professionals–several of their big organizations have been highly political for a very long time. I suppose it is inevitable–organizations tend to move left with time anyway, and doctors have long had the reputation of knowing best, and I suspect that deference could really go to the head of those in administration who aren’t actually trying to treat patients.

    And we all remember the Lancet’s way of estimating.

    We hear from elites who profess to represent their whole groups. No other voices.

    We get to hear from BLM, but not the battered wives who called the cops in the first place. We get to hear what the news brass think needs investigating, not what we do.

  8. “Who were you newly disappointed by, in 2020?”

    This is tough to say — but I look in the mirror and look out the window and I am disappointed in almost everyone I see. I am disappointed in us!

    The Swamp creatures have long been enemies of the American people. It is not surprising that Establishment Democrats would steal an election. But I am shocked that so few ordinary Democrats care, or ordinary Republicans for that matter. I thought that Americans would mostly have a deep sense of fairness — we want to win the game, but win the game honestly. It is amazing that most of us look at blatant electoral fraud and simply shrug.

    We are not who we thought we were.

  9. Indeed, Gavin – it’s the sheer, obvious blatancy of it all, while the Establishment Media and the GOPe stand aside, shrug and say “Nothing to see here, silly peasants, move on. And bow and tug your forelock in the presence of your overlords.”

  10. It all is rooted in the corruption of our educational system- especially the acceleration of corruption over the last 60 years of all the remaining key institutions, especially the family.

    Death6

  11. I”m disappointed in just about everything on this side of the pond.

    But I’m impressed with Communist China. By unleashing c19, they effectively staged a global coup on which they had apparently been working for years. They took out the last US politician willing to stand up to them, and got their puppet elected.

  12. didn’t we see this coming? Add the upper echelons of the military to your list of destructors of the Republic. Remember sometime in 2017 when Trump complained (and fired someone) that the military chiefs who were supposed to advise him were attempting to make sure that he THE PRESIDENT of the US would only get the information and options that would lead to his choosing their policies. (Vindeman came later). Totally without honor or adherence to their oaths to support the Constitution. There are very good reasons that the Commander in Chief is a civilian and that the military should be subordinate to an ELECTED OFFICIAL. Like our very purchasable politicians, the military brass needs those post – retirement lucrative Board positions to make ends meet.

  13. And am never going to understand how they allowed the election to be stolen, without having a plan to counteract it. You’d think that after all these years he’d understand what we was up against, but it seems like he never did. His rhetoric about “they don’t hate me, they hate you, I’m just in their way”, etc., was never matched by action.

    I think we all need to remember that Trump is one man. Perot, who I would have voted for in 1992 if he hadn’t had his meltdown, would have faced similar problems. The Democrats might not have been as evil then but I am not so sure.

    By unleashing c19, they effectively staged a global coup on which they had apparently been working for years. They took out the last US politician willing to stand up to them, and got their puppet elected.

    I am not convinced that it was biowar but it sure looks that way.

    “Corruption” of our education system, I blame on a couple of things. At the college level, I blame the Viet Nam War. Leftist college students avoided the draft by staying in grad school and became the next generation of professor. Lyndon Johnson made the decision to allow sequential deferments but his crimes were more serious than just that.

    Elementary and high school education is the result of two things. One is that young women had all sorts of new opportunities and fewer of the intelligent went into Education. Teachers’ colleges had done a good job preparing teachers for 100 years. The California State Colleges in the Master Plan were intended to train teachers and to offer no graduate degrees. Empire building created the State U system with Phds in such things as “early childhood education.”

    As for the politics of doctors, until about 1980, doctors were independent businessmen (and a few women) who paid their own bills and paid their employees. Anyone who signs the front of paychecks, and does not work for an international corporation, is a Republican. Doctors are now employees of corporate medicine, just as Ted Kennedy desired. They vote like employees.

  14. Not as many as I once did. One by one by one, the people and institutions which I once assumed to be competent, honest, and worthy of my trust and respect have revealed themselves to be corrupt, shallow, incompetent, partisan and cynical users of those ordinary American citizens like me.

    My advice to my sons, from long before 2020: assume everybody you encounter is stupid, incompetent, bungling, shallow, partisan, cynical, and/or venal. Occasionally you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Most often, you’ll be correct. When you’re pleasantly surprised, cleave unto those people as though your life depends on it. Otherwise, trust and respect no one until they’ve proven themselves worthy of it.

    This perspective has served me well for lo these *cough* years.

  15. @MikeK,

    I don’t know that it was the Vietnam War that did in the academy. Personally, I think it goes back a long ways, a lot further back.

    Wilson is where we see the first outward signs of the corruption. He was an out-and-out Southern revanchist, and if he could have managed it, I’m pretty sure we’d have seen him putting blacks back onto the plantations in chains. As it was, he just started the process that ended in corrupting the entire Federal bureaucracy, which reached a head under his spiritual successor, FDR. Who was, we should not forget, a man who never met an academic theory that he didn’t immediately fall in love with.

    Most of this is all of our own faults. We never held these pricks responsible for their performance, or threw any of them out of office when their bullshit didn’t walk the way they promised it would. And, we (as an electorate) keep falling for the bullshit artists like Soros and his various “projects”. I can’t even begin to comprehend how people can be so stupid as to believe the bullshit spewed by his chosen State Attorney candidates, let alone vote for them. Seattle and San Francisco are about to get it good and hard, just like Minneapolis.

    The only hope is that enough of us learn the lessons necessary, and there’s a counter-reaction to all this crap. I actually fear that more than I do what the idiots in the establishment are going to do–The pendulum is going to swing back, and swing back hard. I could easily see vagrancy and so forth becoming capital crimes, informally if not judicially. The vigilante reaction is the one we need to be worried about, because an awful lot of people are going to get caught up in the gears as the natural counterreaction to all this takes place. You think that “young black male” in Georgia got killed because “racists”, you need to consider why the hell those “racists” didn’t just call the cops to deal with someone like him wandering through their neighborhood. Fact is, the decriminalization and non-response by the authorities are the two main factors why that happened–People get fed up with minor crime and having their things taken. What happens next? Vigilantism. Don’t look for an era of peace and brotherly love after this idiocy in Seattle–Instead, look for people putting up with it for awhile, and then either getting the hell out or taking up the mob solution.

    I don’t think the Seattle City Council really has a clue what they’ve unleashed or where it will end. It won’t be pretty, wherever that is.

  16. didn’t we see this coming? Add the upper echelons of the military to your list of destructors of the Republic.

    We can thank the Magic Negro for that one, or rather, his handlers, since my guess is that he was merely a spokesmodel for them.

    If this wondrous Republic is to endure, we MUST move beyond the communist-promoted perspective that victimhood status – as black, Hispanic, female, homosexual, transgender, having two heads, or whatever – somehow confers some mystical moral authority that cannot be gainsaid. A person can be a black Hispanic lesbian or transgender with two heads and STILL be full of shit. Yes! (In fact, empirically, this is considerably more likely than not.) His/her/its opinions should prevail or fall solely on their own merit.

    There. I said it. I denounce myself, of course.

    Just to be clear, I’ve already called “top bunk” for the re-education camps.

  17. I pretty much reached all the above conclusions after Trump beat Ted Cruz. Ted was of course an uber smart real conservative who understands and supports our founding principles. Never a never Truper I have supported Trump since because the was better than the other choices and sometimes gave us a little hope. In the end though he lived up to my low expectations. What could have any intelligent conservative expected from this life long Democrat raised in the semi corrupt world of the NYC real estate game. Trump showed glimpses of learning with his too late appointments of real conservatives like Ratcliffe, Meadows, Grenell and a few similar young conservatives. Sadly it was too few too late. He of course spent his first three and a half years appointing his enemies to staff his administration. Also sadly all his pro business stuff was overshadowd by his always present unrestrained trillion dollar deficit spending. Then this exploded with his failure to know who to trust with the fake pandemic resulting in its sealing of his downfall and multiple more trillions in spending. Trump will go down in history likely as the good intended mostly honest fool that he was. Not sure his well intended but economically ignorant and politically naive blue collar rabid supporters who put him in power will ever realize their mistake of putting a “tv genius” in power over the most powerful nation on earth.

    I told a friend tonight that I feel like late Roman Empire average joe that opened the gate for the Barbarians from the north because he knew they could not be worse than the corrupt status quo. I am almost ready to open the gate to Xi Jinping. He could not be any more corrupt than our current crew in DC and is likely a lot smarter. He managed to oversee building multiple New York Cities each year for decades while our current New York “leaders” took ten incompetent years to replace only one of the Twin Towers. Similarly I am not sure Xi’s treatment of the Uighurs is any worse than our steady annihilation of our cities youth in nightly gunfire year after year after year with no solution in sight.

    Come on in Xi, assuming you had not already had your take over scheduled with your complete capture of corrupt Joe Biden and the Democrat party. How much worse could you be?

  18. I am not convinced that it was biowar but it sure looks that way..

    Pace Occam’s Razor, I think the Chinese released this crap through a Chernobyl-type screw-up, to which all communist countries are peculiarly prone, and then realized how to minimize its impact on them, and maximize its impact on their competitors.

    “Corruption” of our education system, I blame on a couple of things. At the college level, I blame the Viet Nam War. Leftist college students avoided the draft by staying in grad school and became the next generation of professor. Lyndon Johnson made the decision to allow sequential deferments but his crimes were more serious than just that.

    It worse than that. The Vietnam era directly led to grade inflation. Give someone a “C” and he – never she, of course – was off to the jungles to risk life and limb. So everybody became above average.

    The nex step was lowering the voting age to 18. The logic being that if a person (read: man) could be drafted to fight and die for his country, then he should have a say in his country’s policies.

    OK, so far, so good. Then why were women granted the vote? (I still have my draft card, btw.) What was the rationale there? They weren’t subject to the draft. They weren’t subject to risking life and limb. So why were THEY granted the vote at the same time? Logically, following the leftist argument, only men should have been allowed to vote at 18. Yeah, like that was going to happen.

    Elementary and high school education is the result of two things. One is that young women had all sorts of new opportunities and fewer of the intelligent went into Education. Teachers’ colleges had done a good job preparing teachers for 100 years. The California State Colleges in the Master Plan were intended to train teachers and to offer no graduate degrees. Empire building created the State U system with Phds in such things as “early childhood education.”

    Good point. What is the need for a Ph.D. in elementary education? Does anyone really need advance graduate work to stay ahead of tykes? If so, that’s a sorry lookout. Or the tykes are geniuses.

    Another driver for this problem is child molestation hysteria. Yeah, it exists, and is reprehensible beyond measure. But … realistically, it places every adult male in the crosshairs – the mere allegation is enough to lead to a lynch mob that is not inclined to hear any defense whatsoever.

    Anecdata: I helped coach a youth football team, one member of which became injured. Would I take him to the ER? Would I, hell. Have one of the moms take him, I replied. I’d be happy to do it, in principle, but I’d potentially be risking my reputation, my income, my family, and my life as currently constituted, in doing so. It’d be crazy for me to do that. I’m just helping out out of civic-mindedness. Similarly, if I saw a young child alone crying in a public place, would I approach him? No way. I’d approach a woman – i.e., one of the anointed demographics – to do so. A friend of mine is an elementary school teacher, and in discussing this, he said he hoped being black would shield him from this problem.

    I replied that I hoped for his sake, that he was right.

  19. In their desire to remain above-it-all, our judges and justices stand by as America sinks into a quagmire.

    But my biggest disappointment? Our neighbors who kept this election within the margin of fraud, by putting a higher priority on their feelz and media-painted appearances and expectations of “Presidential” demeanor, than they did on actual policies and their implementation.

    But this is neither surprising, nor new. It’s been a long time coming … coming in forms so benign, it took me 50 years to see this banality of decline for what it is.

    Starting before Wilson, but especially in the seventy-five years since the end of WWII, our society has replaced respect for and reliance upon individual insight, diligence, compassion, and initiative – in my view the secret sauce of all human advancement, short of Divine intervention – in favor of outsourcing the exercise of those attributes to an elite few whose credentials, positions, popularity, and/or presentation skills give them the appearance of being smarter and wiser than the rest of us.

    In the dominant societal paradigm, ordinary people are expected to simply live out our lives, going to school or work day after day, expecting that elite to solve our problems – at all levels, ranging from the national right down to the individual – FOR us. Trusting that elite as though they are deities, able to somehow transubstantiate one-size-fits-all policies into solutions that meet our individual needs while not creating more problems than they solve, as though they can tell us apart from a statistic as they view us from their cushy sinecures in a far-distant capital.

    And coming to believe that our own common sense, and proximity-informed insights, are irrelevant in the face of these notables … that we are not “qualified” to be the decision-makers in our own lives … making us more easily led by mere appearances and induced expectations, from the idea that a piece of porous cloth indicates the difference between caring and callousness, to the idea that coarse criticism of the stuck-on-stupid is a greater offense than the promotion of stuck-on-stupid. (Read I Kings chapter 18, Matthew chapter 23, and Galatians chapter 5 sometime, and you will see how some of the most righteous people in history – including the Most Righteous Man who ever lived – were willing to use coarse language to make valid points in the face of those who so wanted to ignore those points.)

    As a result, elite status has become such a valuable asset that people are willing to go all-in to invest in it … from spending a fortune to get a credential from the “right” institutions, to engaging in political prostitution and/or becoming a crony john to build it up … to destroying the reputations and ability to function of anyone who threatens the elite facade that theirs is The One and Only True Way All Good People Think. A facade that is defended with fundamentalist zeal, complete with mobs of minions who will cancel you virtually and burn down your neighborhood physically in the name of “social justice”.

    Donald Trump has exhibited more respect for individual liberty and the responsible exercise of individual initiative than any President in my lifetime, save – perhaps – Ronald Reagan, who was also denigrated as an outsider. His refusal to join in the facade, made him a threat to the elite, and drove them to seek his destruction by any means available to them.

    Intellectual honesty be damned. Even if it means America sinks into a quagmire.

  20. If you want a nation with white, western European values then you must have a nation of white, western European people. America worked when it was populated by Americans. Now that it isn’t populated by Americans, suddenly nothing works anymore. Suddenly it seems to operate more like a corrupt 3rd world nation. White men vote conservative every time. Always have. White women vote to the left of the men, every time. Non-whites vote far to the left of both. Demographics is destiny. You cannot have a conversation about the future without first stating who is going to own that future. And on this path, it isn’t white Americans.

  21. }}} widened when Dan Rather perpetuated a political hit with the TANG memo, crumbled substantially when the establishment media all but dragged the juggernaut of Barak Obama over the finish line

    To me, another major major factor was the nightly barking of the Iraq Death Counter. As usual, utterly bereft of context. There was just a count of all these dead soldiers. That the entire count at the end was less than a number of major BATTLES of other major wars (Civil, WWI, WWII) was never offered. Mention was made, for example, of Bush meeting the families of fallen men and women… never noting that the death toll, as horrific as it was for individual families, was sufficiently low that he actually was able to MEET with the families of something like ONE IN THREE (IIRC). Not much, for the loss of a son, but far more than most families got in prior wars, including Vietnam and Korea.

    I think we actually won in Iraq… but, as with Vietnam, which was also won, the merdia went out of its way to destroy that win, because… “Amerikkka AWful”. They deliberately set out to re-create Vietnam. Openly and intentionally. And succeeded, with all the misery and horror that meant for the Vietnamese, landed on the Iraqis.

    They are no less than a criminal organization. Most of their members should be lined up against a wall and shot. They have no honor, they have no decency, they have no humanity.

    Also note how, with the installation of Teh One, the Nightly Death Counter squalling ceased almost immediately. In fact, when the death toll in Afghanistan passed that of Iraq, it was barely a blip on the news. Go figure.

  22. Regarding the GOP’s failure to act with regards to the fraud leading up to the election…

    NeoNeoCon, on her blog, makes a case that we’ve all forgotten (or never knew about) many things the GOP DID do, but were continually blocked at every step… Personally, they needed to be more determined, more forceful, more proactive in getting these things brought to light and dealt with before the election, but she does make a decent case that they did more than many realize.

    How hard did the GOP try to stop the voting rule changes?
    https://www.thenewneo.com/2020/11/30/how-hard-did-the-gop-try-to-stop-the-voting-rule-changes/

    Neo does an impressive job, for a single blogger, of research for her blog. She is one of my first looks of the day, when I decide to wade into the quagmire of the internet political scene.

  23. }}} If nothing else, this requires de facto collusion between not only the entire democrat party, but also the entire legacy media complex, the national republican party establishment, multiple republican state parties, the various tech monopolies, various federal law enforcement agencies including the FBI, and the federal judiciary up to and including including the Supreme court, and the Post Office. If any one of these supposedly worthy institutions had done their job, the theft would have likely been stopped, or at the very least stopping it would been much easier.

    I dunno about collusion.

    I think there were some actors at the top (i.e., George Soros) and other ilk (including, say, Teh One and others of his political grouping), Biden (with Chinese assistance) who were offering advice and instructions to various parties, but I’m not sure “collusion” was open and active among most parties. Too hard to hide (even to the extent they did — you don’t have any DEMOCRAT operatives “spilling the beans”, which would happen if there were hundreds to thousands involved). I think the ringleaders (Soros, etal) just went, more, “you guys do this, that’ll help”, to a lot of different scumsucking bottom feeding lowlife liberals, and the result was an organic machine which “just growed” to do the election theft.

    This is something important to be aware of, the liberals have grasped the benefit of a decentralized network in action.

    You don’t need hierarchical control to accomplish a task, you just need a network of individuals that know what part they have to do in the scheme of things, and let them at it. Even if some fail, you can trust that enough will do their job to accomplish the task.

    This is pretty much how the private market works, folks. This is how evolution works, with organisms developing to fill a niche.

    No centralized control, just some innate goalsetting.

    “What we have heah, is ‘success to communicate’…”

  24. }}} As it was, he just started the process that ended in corrupting the entire Federal bureaucracy, which reached a head under his spiritual successor, FDR. Who was, we should not forget, a man who never met an academic theory that he didn’t immediately fall in love with.

    Nahhh. Wilson did not start the crap… TEDDY started the crap. Yes, his Republican “predecessor”. I like Teddy for a lot of his qualities, but his “Government is the solution to problem ‘x'” is most emphatically not one of them.

    Most of the modern alphabet agencies started under, or were conceived under, him. The SEC, the FDA, the Dept. of Commerce… even many later agencies had their existence encouraged by his “Government to fix problem ‘x'” position.

    In this, he fails to follow through on the last truly great PotUS the USA had, Grover Cleveland, who, more than once, expressed his belief in small government…

    (From the wiki):

    In 1887, Cleveland issued his most well-known veto, that of the Texas Seed Bill. After a drought had ruined crops in several Texas counties, Congress appropriated $10,000 to purchase seed grain for farmers there. Cleveland vetoed the expenditure. In his veto message, he espoused a theory of limited government:

    I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the general government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit. A prevalent tendency to disregard the limited mission of this power and duty should, I think, be steadfastly resisted, to the end that the lesson should be constantly enforced that, though the people support the government, the government should not support the people. The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow-citizens in misfortune. This has been repeatedly and quite lately demonstrated. Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character, while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthens the bonds of a common brotherhood.

    GC’s third SOTU speech echoes a similar sentiment.

    Q.E.D., it started with Teddy and went downhill from there.

  25. There are 75 million of us; that ain’t chopped liver.
    Lot’s of good comments, but we need ideas on how to be thorns in their sides. Yes, it’s an uphill battle, and bear in mind, I think the only thing that will get their attention is slowing down their revenue streams. I’ll bet we’ve all nibbled around the edges of doing this. I’m open to any ideas. I nay not have the physical stamina to march around, but I do push my grandchildren to master math, grammar, and reproducible science.

  26. Trump. He could have pulled it off. Less tweeting and more timely investigations and convictions of FBI and CIA swampers would have had him enjoying his reelection right now. I’m very disappointed in the guy who, on the policy level, was probably the most effective president since Silent Cal.

  27. @Roader,

    Say Trump did as you suggest. Where the hell were the honest investigators going to come from…? Fairy-tale land?

    It’s pretty damn obvious how thoroughly compromised the “system” is. He appointed judges from within, and look what that got us: Invested swamp creatures.

    You want to tell the FBI to investigate itself? How’s that work? Has it ever happened, in the history of governance, that some agency has been honest with itself and the public about its failings?

    No, about all Trump could do was serve to highlight the corruption. And, mark my words: After he leaves office, he either shuts up, or he gets destroyed. Watch. My expectation is that he’ll either give in and be co-opted, or he’ll be in prison by the end of ’21. The other option is that he’ll be quietly murdered or publicly assassinated whilst the Secret Service looks the other way.

    The Democrats and Republicans don’t realize it, but they’re recapping the same history that the Boni, the “Good Men” of Rome’s leader class, had with Caesar. By doing what they are, they’re making politics into a zero-sum game, and a game the players can’t afford to lose or they’ll lose their lives and the lives of their family/followers along with them. Where does this leave us? Eventually, the zero-sum game gets played out when one of the participants realizes he has to cross the Rubicon, and we then get Empire.

    They’re idiots, all of them.

  28. Nahhh. Wilson did not start the crap… TEDDY started the crap. Yes, his Republican “predecessor”. I like Teddy for a lot of his qualities, but his “Government is the solution to problem ‘x’” is most emphatically not one of them.

    I have mixed feelings about Teddy. The “Progressive” side was more in the way of hope and fantasy. Teddy was a rich kid who was fragile with asthma. Lots of emotional stuff there. His efforts to make himself an athlete in spite of his weakness may have fed his Progressive delusions. It was the era of the Fabian Socialists in Britain. The Fabians were pretty much rich kids, too.

    Trump. He could have pulled it off. Less tweeting and more timely investigations and convictions of FBI and CIA swampers would have had him enjoying his reelection right now. I’m very disappointed in the guy who, on the policy level, was probably the most effective president since Silent Cal.

    Again, we have this failure to understand that Trump is one man. He had zero aid in DC. That’s why he relied on his kids so much. There was NO ONE else he could trust.

    You don’t need hierarchical control to accomplish a task, you just need a network of individuals that know what part they have to do in the scheme of things, and let them at it. Even if some fail, you can trust that enough will do their job to accomplish the task.

    Somebody was paying the bills. It was revealing to get a glimpse of the money behind BLM in that case of the rental truck in Tennessee. New York hedge fund, Walton heiress.

  29. Kirk:

    Perhaps not accidentally, it looks like Trump, Ivanka and Jared will be FL residents after Trump leaves office. It’s probably safer than NY.

  30. “My expectation is that he’ll either give in and be co-opted, or he’ll be in prison by the end of ’21”
    I fully expected NY to indict him before the election, or at least say that they would if not for their inability to do so for sitting presidents, so I was wrong about that. At this point I don’t know the calculus of the players involved. Going after him now will blow up everything, they must know that, so they’ll probably tread very carefully. If he’d lost in a landslide he’d be far more vulnerable I think, but there’s no way to go after him without it being brazenly political–he’s been a nationally famous billionaire for 40+ years, and only when he became president did you realize he was a criminal? Get out of here with that garbage–and he’s not discredited enough in the eyes of the public like they were probably hoping. My guess is they’ll attempt to indict the Trump Org on some flimsy charge and pressure him to take a plea, then they can walk away saying they got him.

  31. re: corruption of the medical profession:
    https://twitter.com/surplustakes/status/1339574645180289026
    “The US CDC is going to recommend that ‘essential workers’ are vaccinated before the over-65s, despite their *own modelling* showing this will result in more deaths.
    Why? They say it is unethical to prioritise the elderly because they are not racially diverse enough. THREAD.”

    There’s no way we can survive to our tricentennial, absolutely no chance at all.

  32. I dunno about collusion.

    I’m not sure what else to call it. The was plainly collusion among some elements of my list- what exactly were those media people discussing when Jeffry Toobin got caught spanking his little monkey?- and if others weren’t in on the collusion, they may as well have been.

    At this point, if you aren’t aware of the tactics of the left, why the **** not?

    You don’t need hierarchical control to accomplish a task, you just need a network of individuals that know what part they have to do in the scheme of things, and let them at it.

    You know, this sort of thing. The GOP has absolutely no excuse for not developing a plan to deal with it.

    I can only conclude that the party establishment has decided to turn a blind eye to it all and do nothing. It isn’t good enough to list all the futile actions of the various state parties and say look how hard the gee ohhh peeee worked, but the forces of perfidy were just… tooo… strongggg!!!

    This is a national problem that requires national action, and I note the GOP has had control of all three branches of government as recently as 2019.

    Not good enough.

    What did they do with it?

    Flat nothing. I note Trump raised vote fraud as an issue and proposed a commission to (at least) highlight the problem- but the establishment fought against the idea until it was dropped.

  33. Brian, I understand that nurses in California are refusing the vaccine.

    Kirk, you might want to read this.

    Steve Hayward is a pretty heavy duty historian. If you haven’t read his “Age of Reagan” bio, you should.

  34. Less tweeting and more timely investigations and convictions of FBI and CIA swampers would have had him enjoying his reelection right now.

    I’ve seen a lot of people complain about the tweeting. But if Trump hadn’t been tweeting how many people would know about the fraud and lies at the heart of the Russiagate nonsense, to pick one example?

    I bet a lot fewer, which is why the usual suspects of the Deep State spent so much time bleating for him to stop tweeting. I suspect that if Trump hadn’t been able to bypass the various Deep State gatekeepers via tweeting they’d have been able to remove him from office, based on their endless nonsense and lies.

    And how exactly was Trump going to get convictions of the FBI and CIA, other than get their friends in the DOJ to go after them?

    I think to get more action on that front would require action from Congress.

    If only the GOP had managed to get control of Congress- oh. Never mind.

  35. “What did they do with it?”
    Judges and tax cuts. Which Mitt Romney would have done. Both are nice, but not sufficient. Everything else he had to do by EO. Were you aware that the Senate never went into recess during Trump’s entire term, to prevent him from making any recess appointments? Thanks, Mitch.

  36. I should add one more thing. Here is a quote from a leftist commenter at Althouse.


    Blogger roesch/voltaire said…

    More and more Republicans are waking up:
    Jennifer Horn, former chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party, writes in USA Today that she is leaving the party.

    “The GOP has become so destructive an institution — by embracing racism, accepting hatred and cruelty as the foundation for policy, and by advocating for and advancing the overthrow of democracy in America — that it has become wholly incompatible with the constitutional pillars of our country.”

    We will see more of this as the parties realign. The RINOs, like this woman, will switch to Democrats, with lots of noise and celebration.

    In 2010, she ran again and lost to Charles Bass in the Republican primary. She then served as chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party and co-founded The Lincoln Project.

    The “Lincoln Project” was a malignant NeverTrump outfit that was doxxing lawyers for representing Trump in the challenges to the election. She will love being a Democrat.

    Meanwhile, millions of former Democrats will quietly shift allegiance to the Trump GOP. From Steve Hayward,

    Let’s start today with just the single issue of China (or “Chy-nah,” as Trump likes to enunciate it). I was struck by some recent survey findings from Pew Research displayed in the chart below. You can see that public opinion toward China has turned sharply negative all around the world over the last few years. Trump did that. And it will leave a residue that Biden will have to deal with. Biden—and craven corporate America that doesn’t want to see its lucrative Chinese market shrink—may try to go back to business as usual. But it will come at a political cost. Trump forever shattered the complacency of the China-accommodationists of both parties over the last 20 years.

    That will last. Biden won’t.

  37. The GOP has become so destructive an institution — by embracing racism, accepting hatred and cruelty as the foundation for policy.

    As opposed to the party who tells some to “check your privilege” on the basis of skin color … and mislead those they deem “victims” about their responsibilities and capabilities in the name of “helping” them.

    Bigotry doesn’t just come dressed in white sheets or jackboots … these days, it more often comes in the royal robes of condescending arrogance, worn by those who Know Better™.

    Donald Trump, OTOH respects people as responsbile adults, and calls them out when their irresponsibility gets them stuck in stupid. That puts another crack in the elitists’ facade and diminishes its value as something to invest your life in pursuing. That is why the Left and NeverTrump right hate him … he leads us away from dependence upon them.

  38. “I understand that nurses in California are refusing the vaccine.”

    My perception is that California has been a hotbed of anti-vaccine agitation, especially among entertainment-industry Leftist types. I’d imagine that is a primary reason for the nurses refusing this one.

  39. “The GOP has become so destructive an institution — by embracing racism, accepting hatred and cruelty as the foundation for policy, and by advocating for and advancing the overthrow of democracy in America — that it has become wholly incompatible with the constitutional pillars of our country.”

    Meanwhile, back in reality, the left is demanding lists of Trump supporters so we can be purged from employment and Robert deNiro is telling Trump supporters to be afraid.

    No hatred there, right?

    Thanks, Mitch.

    Have you ever had the thought that the 2018 elections came out exactly as the gop establishment would want, with the House under demonrat control so Trump’s agenda could be stopped, but with the Senate under their control so it could still approve judges? I have.

    Meanwhile, millions of former Democrats will quietly shift allegiance to the Trump GOP. From Steve Hayward,

    I think that’s already happened. The new Trump-based GOP has the numbers, the demonrats have the wealthy. And the wealthy, which I’m pretty sure includes gopes like Jennifer Horn, really don’t like the lower orders and have nothing good to say about us. Hence the nonsense accusations of racism and hate, blah blah, because they have to have some sort of justification for their class hatred.

    Anyway, I’ll stand by my assertion from the other thread that they’ve given their regime a stab wound that will cause it to bleed out and die. Trump didn’t roll over and accept the fraud. The GOP base hasn’t rolled over, either. To the extent the establishment has, it’s destroying what remains of its credibility with said base. Would anyone want to say that the gope governor of Georgia has much of a future? Or the gope secretary of state?

    Worse for them, the left has been busy bankrupting the institutions it controls, such as pro sports and Hollywood. They aren’t dead yet, but they’re getting there. And how much longer will billionaires such as Mike Bloomberg be willing or able to spent vast sums fighting reform?

    And then there’s the prospect of civil war and secession. I have no trouble imaging Biden’s handlers issuing some sort of gun control decree causing (say) Governor Abbott of Texas to declare his state a 2nd Amendment sanctuary, causing the feds to attempt to enforce it, leading to gun battles between state and federal forces. Angelo Codevilla mentioned that sort of event a while ago, predicting fighting between competing police forces.

    That’s the spark. Interesting times…

  40. Subotai Bahadur:

    If your dissatisfaction with the new Supreme Court appointments stems from Texas v. Pennsylvania, cut them some slack.

    The ruling was based on standing, and I think they were unfortunately correct. As soon as I heard about the case, I wondered about standing. News accounts addressed it but not convincingly. I have not read the briefs submitted in the case, but I’m inclined to trust the new appointees on that.

    Standing can be an extremely frustrating doctrine, and people more erudite than I argue it needs revision. Probably so, but eliminating it would open the door to collusive litigation. The Democrats would be first in line with that.

    If we hold the Senate (a long shot since runoff votes will be counted by the same people as counted the general-election votes), our country may survive. If not, nothing the Supreme Court could have done would make much difference.

  41. If not, nothing the Supreme Court could have done would make much difference.

    The “Standing” issue concerns state vs state controversy. Where could Texas go? Plus the other 20 states, of course. The Court ducked. I don’t really blame them as the Democrats would no doubt have turned their Antifa/BLM wing loose on the justices.

    If the Biden controllers leave us normals alone the next four years, we will have peace. I just don’t see how they can do this and keep their rickety coalition together. A good discussion of this coalition, although perhaps outdated, is “Spoiled Rotten” by Jay Cost.

    I see no way the crazies like “The Squad” will allow whoever is running Biden to leave us alone. The future is probably separation between the coastal crust and the rest. Chicago is a blue island but collapsing. Maybe China can annex California and OR and WA. New York seems to be draining out into Florida. The blue states complain they support red states with their taxes. I have a solution. Let us go.

    Maybe Canada can take Chicago.

  42. No, the crazies can have the metro areas of the west coast. The rest of those states are staunchly conservative, and entirely against what those idiots are doing.

    I see Washington state seceding from the Puget Sound metroplex, not the entire state seceding from the rest of the US. Seattle is about to get exactly what it wants, good and hard–You talk to anybody over there, outside the bubble surrounding the city council and the rest of the luvvies running the show, and it is quite clear how people feel about having their once-beautiful city taken over by the homeless dopers and the socialists.

    I actually think that the more likely outcome is that there is going to be a rather nasty and “unexpected” backlash once people get tired of scraping human feces off their shoes when they try to get into their place of business and homes. We’re already seeing a bunch of people who’ve just said “screw this”, and left for the hinterlands of the state. They’re not bringing the “big city” with them, either–I’ve heard more than a few recent arrivals say “This far, no further…” and express the desire to lynch the people that did this to Seattle.

    Don’t know where the hell that is going, but they have said it. My guess is that there’s going to be a bunch of people mugged by reality in short order, and that they’ll be reacting to what they fled very, very badly.

  43. Ah, standing. Here’s what Mark Levin- an actual honest-to-goodness lawyer- has to say about that:

    1. This election has exposed the complete collapse of the judiciary as a check on unconstitutional acts by state officials eviscerating legislative authority under our federal constitution (Art. II, Sec. 1, Cl. 2).

    2. It has also exposed the Supreme Court as a highly political, result-oriented, LIBERAL body that grants standing when it wants to rule on a case (Mass v. EPA) and denies standing when it wants to duck a case (Texas v. PA, et al).

    3. That Court intervenes relentlessly in state election processes, almost exclusively in support of leftwing activists and Democrat organizations that seek to weaken election security and fraud prevent.

    4. The Court and inferior federal and state courts have earned the contempt of tens of millions of Americans. While the media, Democrats, NeverTrumpers, and others, have celebrated the denial of substantive court proceedings to scores of petitioners raising fundamental federal

    5. and state constitutional issues, not to mention serious questions of fraud in states including, but not limited to Wisconsin and Georgia, these courts have disgraced themselves and severely damaged the electoral process.

    6. In effect, they have served as the Praetorian Guard for the planned, elaborate, and unlawful acts of the Democrat Party, its lawyers, and their state public officeholders throughout battleground states. Despite the media claiming that 6 of the justices are conservative, and…

    7. ..Chuck Schumer’s propaganda about his desire to pack the Court because it is supposedly too conservative, the FACT is the opposite.

    8. When the Court actually upholds the Constitution it is, more often than not, the EXCEPTION to the rule, which for the Court is activism with few limits.

    This is via Ace of Spaces HQ, by the way, yesterday. If the mostly GOP-appointed court actually wanted to do anything about about the recent massive fraud, they could have completely ignored any law or precedent and simply stated that “animus” was the only reason why democrats were stealing elections- and overturned them on that basis alone.

    This is how the country ended up with gay marriage everywhere, because Justice Kennedy decided animus against gay people was the only reason to oppose it. Leftist judges of course voted in lockstep, as always.

    I see no reason to pretend the court acted in any way other than how Levin describes it.

    And just in case it wasn’t obvious, I was the anonymous 12:04.

  44. I was newly disappointed by so many of my fellow citizens who seem to want to live in fear and to be told what to do.

  45. “I was newly disappointed by so many of my fellow citizens who seem to want to live in fear and to be told what to do.”
    The Venn diagram of people who think that cops are racists who murder black people regularly and with impunity, and who want everyone disarmed except for cops, and who think it is outrageous that so many sheriffs said that they would not enforce attendance limits in private homes for Thanksgiving, is a circle, as the kids say.

  46. The low expectations or lack of faith in the FBI goes back a long way. I remember watching ‘Die Hard’ in the theater in 1988, and the audience cheered when the FBI sniper and helicopter went down in flames. “Looks like we need a new FBI guy,” was the line in the movie.
    On living in fear, I know quite a few people, mostly on the left either by politics or just inclination, who have made themselves prisoners of their fears. I get the impression that they are like the cartoon, “I’m not coming out again until they cure death!”

  47. “The Venn diagram of people who think that cops are racists who murder black people regularly and with impunity, and who want everyone disarmed except for cops, and who think it is outrageous that so many sheriffs said that they would not enforce attendance limits in private homes for Thanksgiving, is a circle, as the kids say.”

    It is a wonder. It’s like there’s been a disease that wiped out much of the population’s ability to work out the causal relationship between things, and we’re now living with them.

    It’s like their inability to see the connection between the state of police/minority interactions and the fact that most of the urban areas where there are “issues” have been run by those same minorities and the Democratic Party since forever. Gee, ya think there might be a connection between the two?

    The worst racists I ever personally encountered in my life were black cops from Chicago. I heard things out of the mouths of those guys that would have had the Grand Dragon of the KKK going “Now, boys… I think you’re going a bit too far, there…”.

    Left up to those cops, I’m pretty sure there would have been a “final solution” to the Chicago gang problem implemented, one that involved a line of bulldozers pushing Southside Chicago and most of its inhabitants into Lake Michigan to drown, with any that tried to resist or escape being shot out of hand. It was really disturbing to realize that a lot of the white cops from Chicago were actually less racist than the black ones, and way more likely to be tolerant and understanding about the transgressions of civilian blacks. You really, really did not want to be a black gang-banger pulled over by black Chicago cops. At. All.

  48. Brian…”CA anti-vaxxers are Malibu hippy super rich white liberals. Not the nurse demographic lol.”

    People are more than their demographics, though…a nurse may have friends and family members in different circles of life. And the kind of nature-worship that is linked to anti-vaxxing is much broader than the Malibu super-rich.

    Average salary for RNs in California is $118K, btw…has to be higher in places like SF.

  49. 2. It has also exposed the Supreme Court as a highly political, result-oriented, LIBERAL body that grants standing when it wants to rule on a case (Mass v. EPA) and denies standing when it wants to duck a case (Texas v. PA, et al).

    I wonder if the current story about Roberts attacking Trump in a phone call last summer has any evidence?

    Wev have heard about the reasons why the Court refused the Texas case.

    During the amendment debate Texas Congressman Matt Patrick (CD-32) put into the ¹record a report from a claimed “Supreme Court staffer” about an internal debate taking place within the high court where justices were arguing the reasons for not allowing the Texas election challenge to take place. As outlined by Patrick Chief Justice Roberts was worried about riots in the streets if the court heard the Texas arguments and evidence.

    But we knew that.

  50. I see Washington state seceding from the Puget Sound metroplex, not the entire state seceding from the rest of the US.

    When I was spending time in Cour d’Alene, back in 1959, there was a semi-serious movement for all of WA state east of the Cascades to form a separate state called “Lincoln.” I knew guys who were involved. My daughter, who was a Bernie voter in 2016, bought 5 acres in the Idaho panhandle and wants to build a house there. I teased her that it was only a couple of miles from Ruby Ridge but she is serious.

    She also got married and had a baby since 2016. I will have a talk with her when we are in CA for Christmas.

  51. I would separate the FBI agents with the hierarchy – Yes, the hierarchy is corrupt and why haven’t any of them had a trial?

    I started to become disillusioned with the MSM during Vietnam.

    I’ve seen so many personal examples of their burying things that don’t fit into their weltanschauung

    Trump? He has had his faults – the main thing I think is that he could have been just as effective and win over millions had he had a conciliatory tone. He once said he was greater than Reagan – the Media despised Reagan and he just smiled at them. When he died years after office, a million turned out to see his funeral.

    But everything Trump has said about the swamp has been right.

    I have gotten emails from friends on how the election was “stolen” but proof is needed. And it is 4th down…

  52. Bill Brandt:

    I do not clear the FBI rank and file. Two reasons:

    1) I wore a badge for most of my life. Occasionally dealt with FBI. If you are a cop, you learn to read people. What I could read from them was “arrogant a–hole”, someone who felt they were above all laws and regulations, and a crook.

    2) The hierarchy has been crooked for generations. How many FBI line staff fought it?

    Subotai Bahadur

  53. Why was Swalwell put on intelligence after his Chinese babe had been sent packing? He has always seemed quite blankly and proudly stupid, but has the FBI really changed that much from Hoover’s time – wouldn’t it have been convenient to have something on someone who was on the committee that theoretically supervised your “work”? It does seem that he’s a pretty thin reed to expect much from – but somehow the Chinese thought that, why not the FBI? And that that was an early response on my part indicates how far they’ve fallen in my little pantheon that has been nurtured by far too many portraits of the good “FBI” from pop culture.

    Of course everyone has their own institutions that were important once upon a time and seem to have betrayed the love we had for them. Instapundit quoted Bauerlein a few days ago, who said that he was saddened that students today would never know the excitement of studying the liberal arts in the 60’s and 70’s, maybe even the 80’s. Perhaps we should have seen the beginning – irony was highly prized, and too highly prized it can lead to valuing cynicism over passion, the position of the decades following. And if our teachers were trained in critical approaches that grew out of the close reading of scriptures, it is true that we mostly valued texts about characters who were somewhat bourgeois, whose virtues were those of the middle classes. I do remember thinking that a truly brilliant researcher (in science) argued on C-span that “Dover Beach” was what he could hang his hat on. A wonderful poem, yes; an ironic but taut honeymoon poem apparently, but a bit of a thin reed next to religion it seemed to me, a not very religious person. But those were, after all, the kind of thinking that was part of that time. We though that interpreting literature was finding the thread in the carpet of each great writer’s opus and from that thread a truth – not merely that writer’s truth, though of course, each writer was presenting one part of the great pattern and not the whole. I’m beginning to suspect that the Gramscian vision I have only lately been introduced to became part of the problem – we loved the beauty of a line, a teacher would pause in a kind of awe that he/she (mostly he of course then) would expect us to share – and we did. Now, sometimes ugly lines and ugly ideas are sought out and focused on.

    We learned to love the complexity of human nature and to understand it better from the wealth of characters the great writers presented. It was a worthwhile use of our time and energy; no, we shouldn’t expect our way to be paid for a skill that can, of course, be passed on but is no in itself that useful to our society. But we didn’t mind typing away at Kelly Girls for a chance to sit in a class and feel that awe. Now. . . well, it’s hard to feel awe when the approach is what it is, when the canon has been watered down, when the amount of reading and the number of papers required are a fraction of what they were fifty years ago. But most of all, I really hate the condescension that the critical establishment has toward great literature, toward students, toward, well, the discipline itself. It has rotted within – and at least when I was a student in the mid-sixties it was really ripe and terribly sweet.

  54. Sorry – miss the automatic name. Was it more invasive of our privacy or was there some other reason to get rid of it. I’ll admit it isn’t asking lot of us to merely type in our names.

    [Jonathan replies: The problem is caused by our obsolete WP theme which I hope to upgrade soon.]

  55. Ginny…”Perhaps we should have seen the beginning – irony was highly prized, and too highly prized it can lead to valuing cynicism over passion, the position of the decades following.”

    Field Marshal Lord Wavell wrote about the harm done by *sarcasm*…not the same as irony or cynicism, but closely related. He asserted that a general (or presumably, any other leader) hould never indulge in “sarcasm, which is being clever at someone else’s expense, and always offends.”

    and

    “Explosions of temper do not necessarily ruin a general’s reputation or influence with his troops; it is almost expected of them (“the privileged irascibility of senior officers,” someone has written), and it is not always resented, sometimes even admired, except by those immediately concerned. But sarcasm is always resented and seldom forgiven. In the Peninsula the bitter sarcastic tongue of Craufurd, the brilliant but erratic leader of the Light Division, was much more wounding and feared than the more violent outbursts of Picton, a rough, hot-tempered man.”

  56. When I went back to college to do pre-med, I could not get a student loan if I was a pre-med major. This was January 1960 and the “National Defense Student Loan” program had just become active. I was told pre-med was not a worthwhile major simnce most pre-meds never did get into medical school. Interesting concept.

    So, I majored in English Literature. I did the pre-med classes as electives. I enjoyed the English classes I took and could not detect any political sentiments in my professors. One of them, who I enjoyed knowing, told us that, to get through Spenser’s “The Fairie Queen,” he booked a summer cruise on a freighter and took only that book to read. He said it was the only way he would ever get through it.

    Shortly after I was accepted to medical school, I got an offer of a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for graduate school in English.

    My youngest daughter, who graduated from U of Arizona about 10 years ago, told me that her review session for English Composition consisted of a lecture by the grad student instructor about how Reagan was just an actor reading lines written for him by others.

    50 years and it was destroyed.

  57. “I would separate the FBI agents with the hierarchy”
    Show me one single FBI agent who resigned in protest or even just spoke out about spying on and sabotaging the Trump campaign and administration? Just one, and the organization might be worth saving. But there’s not. The number was zero.

  58. Show me one single FBI agent who resigned in protest or even just spoke out about spying on and sabotaging the Trump campaign and administration?

    I thought that Comey’s July 2016 speech about Hillary was to prevent an agent revolt that could have involved those agents who knew. I have seen a couple of retired agents speaking out but, of course, the Media minimizes that. My FBI agent daughter is a leftist and Trump hater, so maybe that is common now. I was thinking of talking to her about it at Christmas but she is not coming to the annual family gathering. I may have a chance later but I don’t know where. All restaurants closed by Gruesome.

  59. “I thought that Comey’s July 2016 speech about Hillary was to prevent an agent revolt that could have involved those agents who knew.”
    I thought that was the theory about his later speech about the Weiner laptop. At any rate, that was perhaps plausible in 2016, but not anymore. It’s obvious he was just trying to help Hillary so that she could say she was cleared. Similarly every single investigation into the Spygate plotters, and into the Biden crime family, is going to be a total whitewash, to allow them to say they’ve been fully exonerated.
    It’s absolutely disgusting that there’s a huge building named after J Edgar Hoover sitting in the heart of DC, right between the White House and the Capitol. What’s the message that’s intended to send? It’s that these blackmailing scumbags are the ones really in charge, that’s what.

  60. late, as usual. the military is probably the most recent disappointment, though given a) the need to be a politician to make it to a senior generalship and b) the example of colin powell i shouldn’t be.

    as far as the beginning of all this, i still think it was the creation of the civil service from all the goo-goos in the late 1800’s. it was probably needed, but clearly the nature of the metastasis of bureaucracies wasn’t well understood.

  61. Mike K I thought that Comey’s July 2016 speech about Hillary was to prevent an agent revolt that could have involved those agents who knew.

    Brian’s answer is probably closer to the mark. Comey was maneuvered into giving the July 2016 speech by Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch’s tarmac tete-a-tete. Lynch didn’t want to be the one announcing that Hillary wasn’t being prosecuted for clear violations of security laws that had resulted in jail time for less well connected people guilty of truly trivial violations. He seems to have been willingly lead but I suspect he would have preferred to be in the role of supplying supporting information, hence his stumbling ‘no harm, no foul’ reliance on a ‘no intent’ standard for a rule that didn’t require it.

  62. As far as whom I trust; I don’t know, the list has become so short as to hardly qualify as a list.

    Now that the Democrats have established the fact that all offices are for sale to whoever will pay the most for it, they seem to believe that the people with the money will always be on their side. With things so closely divided, a Republican is probably worth more than a Democrat. This would be most apparent in the Senate where the red states have a large lead. I’m not so naive as to believe that Republicans have some sort of immunity. Once someone is willing to be bought, the only remaining question is who will pay most and for what.

  63. David, That seems to me a thoughtful observation.
    I think close novel reading would reinforce that position about sarcasm. The anti-father image is always Mr. Bennett, who is witty and whose daughter loves him dearly. But taking pleasure in commenting sarcastically on your wife and your more witless daughters is not a good approach to life – and I think we come to understand that as Elizabeth does (and as she comes to see in both her husband and the more feckless but still good mate Jane has chosen a better approach.) In the fifties we saw a real fear of sentimentality – perhaps a disproportionate one but contemporary literature could use some of that corrective (figure out who the victim is in an early chapter and you can pretty much figure out the plot- though I may not fairly treat modern works since I’ve read so few of them). And it cojuld become sarcastically nihilistic.

  64. NEWLY disappointed with in 2020? Every citizen in our country. I am older so I think I was raised with a better understanding of civics and a deeper distrust of government than subsequent generations. However I never would have believed that we as a society would be lead so peaceably to the surrendering of our inalienable rights protected by our constitution. When the “Two weeks to slow the spread” rolled out and I confronted my younger friends and coworkers about how we would never get all our freedoms back, I was told that I was being a conspiracist.

    Since before Reagan I’ve deeply distrusted all unaccountable federal bureaucrats but the last four years have taught me no one but the middle class is ever held accountable for misdeeds. I have reached a point of disgust when it comes to all people in government employ. Right down to teachers.

  65. It boils down to the fact that morally corrupt people take advantage of a situation if they believe or understand there will be little or no consequences for their actions.

    That’s how career politicians pass budgets that do not balance and authorize accounting techniques to ensure the true magnitude of the debt can’t be determined. It’s why election officials openly and brazenly violate state and federal election laws. It’s how Hillary could use a home brew server while Secretary of State allowing foreign entities to capture every message, including exchanges with Obama. It’s why the FBI willingly participated in a coup against the President. It’s why academia created doctorate degrees in women’s studies and overcharged students for tuition. It’s why critical race theory and white privilege are being shoved down the throats of teachers and instructors at every level in addition to the mandatory reconditioning being imposed by corporate HR departments and woke boards of directors.

    Not one single member of the ruling class that broke any law has been arrested or charged (Some would argue Epstein and Weinstein are exceptions but they were not members of the ruling class, they simply facilitated their abhorrent behavior and were quickly tossed aside when they became a threat to the powerful people they served).

    It takes real courage to stand up to these abuses, knowing you and your family will be ridiculed, threatened, and likely lose your job if you speak up in defense of justice. Most people are averse to conflict and will behave like our cowardly Supreme Court that refused to even hear legitimate lawsuits between the states.

    We lose our jobs, get fined, go to prison or become political prisoners like General Flynn if we disobey the ruling class. As for the elite, they are immune to accountability and every cog on every gear in every system designed to discourage and punish these abuses has been smashed. The gap between the ruling class and the rest of us is as wide as the gap between the woke liberal racist crybullies and the rest of us that still value what it means to be a decent human being. I’m afraid our Republic is doomed and will not be recognizable in another 4 or 5 years.

  66. 2020 Disappointments:

    Adults who force a child to cover their face.

    Any adult who thinks wearing a piece of paper or cloth over the face removes microscopic particulates.

    Churches who bow to coercion. They are nothing but tax shelters.

    Baby Boomers who put their greed ahead of their progeny. Although that’s been evident for 50 years, I suppose.

    Michiganders caving so easily.

    The realization that “The Greatest Generation” in America was in reality the weakest generation.

  67. “The realization that “The Greatest Generation” in America was in reality the weakest generation.”

    Not remotely true. Those are people that fought and won world war II. They’re all but gone. In fact, if you can assume that the left, and otherwise incompetent, corrupt politicians / bureaucrats are only doing what comes naturally, the Greatest Generation was the only thing standing between us and those people destroying everything in sight.

  68. LOL… “Greatest Generation” my ass.

    They were the ones who raised the Boomers, remember? They were the ones who got the nation started on its addiction to that fat government cheese, in the form of innumerable entitlement programs that they’ll be the only ones benefiting from. None of the rest of us are going to see squat out of Social Security, because the “Greatest” and their immediate descendants will have blown every dime they could get their grubbies on. There is, for example, no such thing as a Social Security “trust fund” that pays the benefits. It’s all out of current receipts, and whatever surplus there has been over the decades, the “Greatest” and their witting co-conspirators have already robbed the lock-box, leaving behind a bunch of IOUs that their descendants will have to pay off.

    No, don’t talk trash to me about any such thing as a “Greatest Generation”. They largely got screwed, it is true, by their immediate predecessors, but the epic screwing they have performed on their successors more than makes up for that. The overly-indulgent manner in which they raised their kids is what killed our nation, more than anything else.

    So… Yeah. Good on them for fighting tyranny and all that, but let us be even-handed, and acknowledge the fact that they likely killed this country, between them and their Boomer kids. Exceptions to those generational stereotypes to be acknowledged, as well–Not all the Boom generation was messed-up, but enough of them were so as to constitute a vast majority that’s pretty much done for the rest of us. By the time we get done paying off the bills for these sorry bastards, generations with vastly lowered quality of life will have lived and died, all so these self-indulgent spoiled bastards could have their self-congratulatory “good times”.

    It’s just like ’em, too–The WWII generation came back, neglected the defenses, and screwed over the next in line, the Korean War generation that went to war drastically unprepared and poorly equipped. ‘Cos the WWII brats didn’t like military discipline, so they held the Doolittle Board and destroyed what there was of it.

  69. Yep, the Greatest Generation survived the Depression and WWII and then basically made a deal with their kids to let them abandon the nation’s history and heritage in exchange for social security checks.

  70. Previous comments are great! The first step in solving any problem is to diagnose the problem accurately. More & more of us are coming round to the recognition that the problem is not that Biden is in the pocket of the Chinese, nor that Hillary! is corrupt & evil, nor that Chief Justice Roberts has skeletons in his closet — the root of the problem is “us”. We the People have tolerated this. We have no-one to blame but ourselves.

    We deplore the travesty of today’s mis-education system — but we won’t run for election to the local school board. Most of us won’t vote in primaries, and many of us are reluctant even to do jury service. We have met the enemy, and he is us.

    So, what are we going to do about it? Most of us feel like ants in front of a bulldozer — all we can do is try to dig ourselves in and hope for the best. We know that any individual who does try to do anything will get the Ruby Ridge/Waco response from our Political Class. Nothing can change until a critical mass of us are prepared to stand up and mutually pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor — and live with the personally unpleasant consequences.

    When will that happen? Curiously, the answer depends on the people driving the bulldozer.

    Looking back at the events leading up to the American Revolution, the striking thing is the stupidity & arrogance of the English rulers — they had a self-absorbed idiocy which is matched today only in the depths of the DC Swamp. If the English had been prepared to be slightly flexible, they could have held on to their American colonies for generations, just as they held on to their Canadian colonies. But English pride prevented them from being smart, just as DC pride will some day doom our current Political Class. There is nothing we can do as individuals to influence the timing of the Political Class’s over-reach. All we can do is prepare ourselves to stand up with that critical mass of our fellow citizens when the day comes.

  71. @Old Codger Says:
    December 19th, 2020 at 11:55 am
    NEWLY disappointed with in 2020? Every citizen in our country … I never would have believed that we as a society would be lead so peaceably to the surrendering of our inalienable rights protected by our constitution.

    Absolutely this. I’m baffled and shocked at how easily people have simply rolled over, and are utterly unconcerned about the loss of those rights. The stories I’ve seen about vaccine passports required for travel have chilled me, but my sister is utterly blasé (she’s more concerned that I have no intention of getting the “vaccine”).

  72. To be newly disappointed assumes that there was once faith in any institution run by homo sapiens. I guess I’m ahead of the game as that has never been an issue for me.
    Probably why I knew from an early age I’d be working with animals.

  73. Nothing can change until a critical mass of us are prepared to stand up and mutually pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor — and live with the personally unpleasant consequences.

    We apparently aren’t even willing, in order to change our governance for the better, to risk the availability of a pet tax deduction, “guaranteed” student loan, government grant, or a “free” education where we can just drop off our kids to get it. Even many who consider themselves conservative or libertarian can’t think outside the box of the Blue Social Model status quo that produces these alleged benefits … they simply accept this condition as The Way Things Are, with no need to fundamentally question that. At most, they seek to nibble around the edges of this roadkill sandwich.

    To see this, simply ask your neighbors if they would consider going to a much simpler tax system – the Americans for Fair Taxation paradigm known as the Fair Tax (not to be confused with the Pritzker swindle by the same name), or a Steve Forbes style flat tax. Listen to the first thing that they say in response.

    There is a reason for this: from the first time we were told to “listen to the teacher”, we have been conditioned to think that our own common sense and proximity-informed insight is inherently inferior to that of the “qualified”, on the basis of their mere appearances, to service, er, serve us as the Powers That Be … and that our best choice to get through life is to SUBMIT to their interventions and diktats. As though they are omniscient, infallible, and impervious to corruption … and beyond our worthiness to challenge.

    That is what produces this banality of decline, that keeps us thinking in the box as though the inside is the best of all possible worlds and that we shouldn’t look outside it.

  74. Trump knows where the bodies are buried. Yes, he could be assassinated, but beyond that the Swamp has to be very careful about going after him. My guess is that he’ll spend the next four years dropping evidence of criminality of the Democratic Party and the deep state, evidence that he’s amassed over four years of holding the highest security clearance in the land.

    To do so he’ll need to build an effective media empire. He’s up to that challenge.

  75. I disagree about the “Greatest Generation.” They survived the Depression and won WWII and then they spoiled their kids by giving them everything they wished they had had.

    My parents were a bit older than that generation but I had cousins and they did a lot of that. Not all, thank God, but there was a temptation.

    I did a bit of it with my own kids who are now in their 40s and 50s. Three of five are leftists. My father was an alcoholic SOB and that probably saved me.

  76. What’s new is 2020 is less who or what I distrust than that the distrust has turned to deep disaffection, disaffection from media, high tech, and virtually all aspects of government. I’m a retired lawyer who believed in the system my entire career. Now I’m coming to believe the system is irretrievably corrupted.

  77. Most disappointed in the judicial branch as a whole. They have collectively washed their hands of the biggest heist in history by hiding behind the one-two punch of “standing” and “laches,” making sure that no evidence gets to see the light of day.

  78. I spent the last 2 days watching HBO’s Chernobyl series. It was a stark reminder of the way socialists and their leaders behave. The cause of the explosion was a lie told by the central committee. The type of reactor used in Chernobyl had a design flaw. If you hit the scram button, it would actually explode. The Party never told anyone this, especially the workers at plant. You can see the same type of behavior coming out of our News Agencies and out of Washington. Leftist never seem to learn. Lies can kill.

  79. Nice of you all to join the party.
    Been complaining about all those folks since Clinton’s time.

    It’s been about building the technocracy for a long time – building an aristocracy to rule the serfs, based not on strict bloodlines, but on where you went to school (Ivy) and which firms for which you’ve worked (usually lobbyists) and which religion you espouse (Progressivism) and your allegiance (to the globalist elites).

  80. Not the GOP, and NO WAY IN HELL the Dems and their media minions (or masters). (I don’t know if the media is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Dem Party, or if it’s the other way round, but it’s OBVIOUS they’re in cahoots.)

  81. Everyone mistakes the Greatest Generation as those who fought WWII. In my opinion the greatest generation was actually their parents. The parents fought WWI, raised their kids right, got their families intact through the great depression, and willingly sent their sons to fight the worlds enemies during WWII.

  82. …so does anyone have a sane explanation for the Nashville bombing, because I certainly don’t trust the FBI to be competent or honest enough to tell me?

  83. I don’t — not at this point. My worst fear is that it is one of those things like the Los Vegas/Harvest Festival shooting; a hideously violent incident never explained to anyone’s satisfaction. But – 48 hour rule.

  84. Apparently, it disrupted phone, especially, 911 for a wide area on Christmas Day. Probably not a happy accident.

    I immediately remembered a couple of bank robberies that took place in Amarillo a good many years ago. They both took place during bad snow storms that had been forecast ahead a couple of days. The robbers had taken the precaution of stealing 4×4’s for the getaway and for the second vehicles cached at a parking lot. The robberies took place in the middle of the morning, just when the cops were neck deep in traffic accidents, either investigating or involved themselves. They weren’t any better at driving through snow than the civilians and it was the era of the Crown Vic cop car.

    It might be Monday before someone discovers some high value target that’s been knocked over.

  85. Human remains have supposedly been found. With all the warning time pre-explosion, perhaps an elaborate suicide with a message yet to be determined?

  86. The one thing that is clear is it was designed not to kill anyone. Christmas morning, with the warning recording?
    Suicide makes no sense–someone with the ability to build a functioning car bomb, and is suicidal, and wants to get attention for the act, but also remain completely anonymous?
    There’s no explanation right now that can’t be countered with, come on this isn’t a movie, that doesn’t happen in real life.
    Looks to me like someone sending a message that they can do this. Imagine a couple dozen of these on Friday night in cities across the country. We’d be shut down completely, immediately.
    But who? Like I said, this ain’t a movie, the only possibilities seem crazy.
    Besides the fact that they were trying not to kill anyone, the other thing we know for sure is the FBI can’t be trusted to find and/or tell the truth.

  87. Brian: “the FBI can’t be trusted to … tell the truth”

    That is for sure. The FBI can be trusted to lie as required by their masters.

    Cui bono? Just a random thought — the Media & the Democrats (I know, the same) need distractions from the Democrat theft of the election. So make a big deal about a random virus mutation in the UK. If that is not occupying enough column inches, how about an explosion in the American heartland? Keep it clean — no -one need die. But make sure there is video to fill the TV news.

    The tell would be if other videos surprisingly crop up in the next few days, to keep the story alive.

    To emphasize — this is pure speculation.

  88. Big protests planned in DC and across the country in coming weeks.
    Imagine something like this there.
    Imagine a “righty” James Hodgkinson.
    The country’s a tinderbox right now, and no person or organization can be trusted.

  89. well here are some crumbs the previous owner of the building was cerberus, which is tied into dominion, nearby there is the cogent-telia relay which has a mirror in frankfurt, where the scytl facility is located,

  90. The dog that didn’t bark–the Dems and MSM aren’t running around screaming that MAGA did this. Seems significant…

  91. “… the Dems and MSM aren’t running around screaming that MAGA did this.”

    Seems consistent with the hypothesis that the aim of the Dems & MSM is to keep any discussion about the giant election fraud off the news channels until after Jan 20. Hence they certainly don’t want to mention the MAGA crowd. Probably not the Chinese either.

    Of course, Democrat silence about their usual whipping boys could simply be coincidence. There is a lot of coincidence going around these days.

  92. Signs are clear that the FBI is going to say this guy blew himself up, so no need to worry, go back to sleep, everything is under control.
    What a joke.

  93. There are some theories that make sense. South Front, a Russian news outlet, specializing in both war and espionage says it was the CIA trying to set off a bomb at the Trump rally, not far away. The broadcast of the evacuation message is a huge give away, and its likely the guy who died was trying to shut it off, as it was not where it was supposed to be, at the Trump rally. A false flag to massively boost security, and defeat any Trump efforts to take the election.

    I dunno. That at least makes some kind of sense.

  94. Good ol’ FBI. They’re gonna go with the classic “disgruntled old white guy” approach. And the DOWG who was crazy enough to blow himself up, for whatever reason, also has zero internet presence, at all, cuz that’s what DOWGs do in 2020, they absolutely do NOT spend all their time ranting on Facebook. Riiiiiight. (How interesting that the Las Vegas shooter was also a non-internet using DOWG, no?)
    It’s impossible to stay sane these days.
    My not-crazy-but-sounds-totally-crazy theory is this was a message to Trump to knock it off and go quietly, or else people are going to get hurt.
    Like I said, sounds crazy, but I haven’t heard any sane explanation yet, and the BS the FBI is dribbling out is nonsense.

  95. There was a Trump rally 6:30 AM on Christmas Morning? Funny, I hadn’t heard of that. How many people were there? That’s pretty stupid, even for Russian propaganda, And doesn’t reflect well on the intelligence of anyone that would bother to read it, let alone repeat it.

  96. If this Nashville bombing was committed by a Trump supporter, the would FBI be leaking furiously and demonrat media would be shrieking about white supremacists and demanding prison camps NOW.

    Dribbling out nonsense means the FBI either doesn’t know or it’s some leftist-beloved group like anitifa- and they want to hide that fact.

    Along those lines, I still recall reading that the Las Vegas shooter was a Trump-hating radical and was motivated by a desire to kill Trump supporters. This was right after it happened and while the investigation was ongoing, but it was only in a comment made by a certain blogger who said he had a source in the LV police department. He wrote that he expected that news to come out soon, but it never did.

    Now maybe he was told later it was false and I missed a retraction, yet having since watched the FBI reveal itself to be nothing more than the personal police force of the democrat party, I figure it’s at least as likely they covered up the truth to protect their friends.

  97. Recall ISIS claimed the Las Vegas shooter as theirs, which we were immediately told they do for every mass shooter, even though no one can point to an example before or since where they did so falsely.

  98. The house is sure strange, especially the recipient being ignorant of the gift. Let’s not forget Richard Jewell. The FBI likes a closed case.

    I await finding the connection between Warner and Ms. Swing. I have a hunch but nothing more.

    Anthony Quinn Warner is literally a cinematic name.

  99. Daughter. And the guy is an intel asset who’s been given a new identity, with his old one used as the cover story for whatever this op is all about.
    That’s how it’d clearly go in a thriller novel.

  100. So much for my hunch. He worked as a sort of a freelance computer repairman, so not a Luddite like Kaczynski. Also means he knew how to sanitize a computer. Somebody is supposed to have turned him in for building bombs last year. He must not have bought his bomb from the FBI, that’s what threw them off.

    I don’t see a direct connection between a data center and 5G more than to any other phone technology. Not that sense has to be involved, but you would think there would be more direct ways to make the point. I won’t believe this was some sort of statement without a manifesto.

    I can’t help remembering the guy that robbed a bank with a bomb locked around his neck. It went off and killed him but it turned out he was involved in the conspiracy as well.
    https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna39953168

    Seems like a lot of trouble to go to if he wanted to commit suicide, especially if he was worried about injuring bystanders. It may have been his co-conspirator’s way of tying up a loose end. The letter says exactly what you would expect if he was planning on being out of communication for a few days. Just seems too pat.

    Since I’ve already invested valuable pixels putting out my burglary distraction theory, I’ll let it ride for another day.

  101. Along those lines, I still recall reading that the Las Vegas shooter was a Trump-hating radical and was motivated by a desire to kill Trump supporters. This was right after it happened and while the investigation was ongoing, but it was only in a comment made by a certain blogger who said he had a source in the LV police department.

    I remember seeing a photo of him holding an anti-Trump sign. That vanished pretty quickly.

  102. I can’t help remembering the guy that robbed a bank with a bomb locked around his neck.

    Was that the case where the hostage had the bomb locked around his neck ? As I recall, he was killed.

  103. “He worked as a sort of a freelance computer repairman”
    How convenient. Didn’t have his own business, so no web presence for that. Didn’t work in a job that he’d have a linkedin or other presence.
    But absolutely zero facebook, reddit, blogs, etc.? Come on. This is a joke.

  104. Here’s a rather more exhaustive link about the case, Brian Wells was the patsy/victim/conspiritor depending on who tells the story:
    https://www.wired.com/2010/12/ff-collarbomb/

    The government decided he was in on it except for the real bomb. Seems to be one of those things with more loose ends than not but absolutely solved according to the USA.

    I remember one TV episode “based” on it.

    As far as Warner’s internet profile, there are a lot of people that don’t have much more than an email account. A little more surprising for someone running his own business but I know of several that I deal with that are the same way. If he did a reasonable job of blanking his drives, it will take more than few days to find what traces there are. There’s no law that says you have to leave your computers running and logged into your Facebook page when committing a felony yet.

    There’s even a chance that part of the data destroyed is the logs that could have pointed them in the right direction. Assuming he was using a VPN, those logs would tell them which one and let them start the process of trying to get information from them if there is any. Most of the good ones make a point of not retaining data.

  105. I’m not aware of one shred of evidence that this guy was a 5G nutter.
    We’re expected to believe that he functioned in society, never told his neighbors about his 5G obsession, never went online talking about it, then blew himself up without leaving any sort of statement that might convince others.
    Give me a break.

  106. But notice! No-one is talking about election fraud anymore.

    In someone’s view, that probably makes this operation a success.

  107. Um, so your claim that Story A that the MSM was ignoring has been pushed aside for Story B that the MSM is ignoring? What?

  108. There was a Trump rally 6:30 AM on Christmas Morning? Funny, I hadn’t heard of that. How many people were there? That’s pretty stupid, even for Russian propaganda, And doesn’t reflect well on the intelligence of anyone that would bother to read it, let alone repeat it.

    Maybe it was Canadian time. Our frozen troll does not make much sense.

  109. I may have been too hard on him, Russian propaganda is probably as reliable as the American Media. Although you need to be pretty stupid to pay attention to either.

    Distraction from the vote fraud is as good a reason as any I’ve heard. Flynn says that something is going to drop on the 6th; too little, too late. It didn’t take the Republicans long to start kissing Democrat butts. I figured vetoing the “stimulus” would at least make them go on record and maybe cause a little self preservation to kick in. Cornyn better figure out what he intends to do after the Senate, one way or another, a lot of Texans won’t be voting for him.

  110. With no convincing alternative being voiced, I still think “Hey Donald, knock it off or we’ll do something like this at your rally on Jan 6, or do things like this and pin it on MAGA” is as plausible as anything else…

  111. It didn’t take the Republicans long to start kissing Democrat butts.

    The modern Gee Ohh Peeee is a creation that exists to do nothing more than kiss demonrat ***

    It worked feverishly to get to a point where it could resume that whorey task, as it always does when- by some mischance- dissatisfaction with the democrats gives it some measure of responsibility.

    With no convincing alternative being voiced, I still think “Hey Donald, knock it off or we’ll do something like this at your rally on Jan 6, or do things like this and pin it on MAGA” is as plausible as anything else…

    And why would any Trump supporter care or believe if the Deep State does such a thing?

    I bet most would simply assume as you do, that it was a false flag event intended to discredit you-know.

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