#culture wars–brought to you by the democrat party

[usarmytrooper]

[eugenedebs1920]

One of the beautiful things about how our representative democratic constitutional republic works is the varying opinions. The array of views and theories, the proposals and approaches, from the patchwork of ideology America has attracted, gives us the opportunity to select the peak ideas of so many backgrounds and cultures. Many of the founders, Washington in particular, were against the formation of political parties. Because of such contrasting views this was unavoidable.

There used to be a dozen or more political parties in the U.S. Wigs, federalist, socialists, labor and others brought their perspectives and that of their constituency to Congress. This enabled a more zoomed in viewpoint of the issues across the nation.

Our Population in this country, and the planet as a whole, has BOOMED! With it, so have perspectives, concerns and opinions. It becomes harder and harder to address everyone’s needs when the diversity and size of those you’re representing is so vast. This becomes even more burdensome when there’s red and blue to choose from. The puppet on the left or the puppet on the right.

I’ll have to do more research into why exactly but some time between the beginning on the twentieth century and 1940’s the cluster of political parties that had existed before pretty much consolidated in the two that dominate now. Sure, there are other parties out there, but not with much influence, or power as there was before the Second World War.

From a business perspective this makes sense, you buy out your rival for less competition so you can set market value to your liking. But this is not a business, some will argue the federal government is the largest business on earth. It goes beyond the financial side to the personal level. These are policies and practices that have real world implications. That affect real people lives in droves.

This “big tent” approach sounds wonderful in theory, but when you start looking at the details it becomes much more complicated. The extremes of both sides tend to be the loudest voices while representing the smallest fraction of the party.

It has proven to be detrimental to the functioning or our democracy! With just the two sides, when one side is unhealthy, unhappy and unwilling to compromise the system bogs. This last House term being an excellent example. These MAGA obstructionist sinking the ship. Making an ass out of themselves and the entire Republican Party. A party that used to be a proud, noble group, resorted to lacking leadership for months, failed vote counts and the title as the least productive Congress in this century. The “big tent” approach for the Republican Party has the loudest voices being heard while the mature, responsible, more centered Republicans are lumped in with them.

The same can be true of the left to an extent. Dems will kick those with unacceptable behavior words or conduct to the curb though, which is a huge difference. Yet there are extremes on the left that don’t necessarily reflect the views of most Democrats.

This, winner take all grasp for power has lessened the effectiveness and stature of the political spheres in this country. So it’s down to the puppet on the left or the puppet in the right. A brown paper bag with a name on it.

So we have the two parties with the two extremes. One party despite its downfalls wants to govern. Wants to see progress. Wants to enact change.

The other is fighting culture wars, denying science, and tiptoeing a line on bigotry that is stepped over habitually. Their method as the “party of no” which they labeled themselves during the Obama years does NOTHING for the citizens of this country. The obstructionist approach of saying no because the other side proposed it is not helpful, if you’d call it governing at all! The “war on woke” and this owning the libs thing is some childish, useless sh*t! Cutting off your nose to spite your face. Can we have representatives who actually work together and find compromise to accomplish SOMETHING!!!?

Anyway… There’s only one healthy party in America right now. And it sure ain’t the Republican MAGA Party…

[definitely-not-the-kgb]

I had to log in to my computer for this. Let's go.

I. Hate. Nationalists.

I. Hate. Conservatives.

I hate self-proclaimed "Marxists" who are both Conservative and Nationalistic.

Marxism, Socialism, Communism, and all Leftist ideologies are incompatible with Conservatism and Nationalism. There is no compatibility between them, and the adoption of Conservatism and Nationalism by economically Socialist people and parties is not only revisionist, it is a total and complete betrayal of Marxism in all its forms, including Leninism and Stalinism, ideologies behind which many of these bastards hide behind.

The LGBT community benefitted thoroughly from Socialism in Eastern Europe, that is undeniable. Countries like the German Democratic Republic, the Polish People's Republic, the Republic of Cuba, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and the Lao People's Democratic Republic have brought freedom, in large part, to LGBT people, within the frameset of their times. The Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the People's Republic of Bulgaria made enormous scientific steps to understand LGBT people. Lenin had liberated LGBT people in the early Soviet Union before Stalin undid that in one of the worst mistakes of his premiership.

For self-proclaimed "Socialists" and "Marxists" to deny this is to deny historical fact and give into the lies of Liberal propaganda, based mainly on a purposeful misunderstanding of history and on survivorship bias. Am I saying that LGBT people were entirely free? Of course not. Persecution was still common in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Macedonia, Romania, Albania, and -of course- the Post-Stalinist USSR, and even in countries where it was wholly legalised, often the governments didn't go further to ensure protection, but this happened at a time where in the Capitalist Bloc tens of thousands of LGBT people were executed and imprisoned compared to a few thousand in all of the Eastern Bloc in the same time.

The liberation of LGBT people is inherent to Marxism, and anybody who claims that not to be the case is not only a revisionist and a reactionary but a traitor to the revolution and the cause: Do not let their pitiful attempts at Identity Politics get to you. No war other than the class war means no war based on gender, no war based on ethnicity, race, nation, or anything. The only fight that Socialism must embark upon is that of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie war whose intrinsic goal is overthrowing the established order and liberating the proletariat, be they a woman, a man, neither, both, in between, or someone else entirely. Regardless of who they do or do not love.

Nationalism is against all the values of Marx and Engels, Lenin and even Stalin. Do not let them hide behind their excuses from Kim Il Sung and Stalin. Stalin never supported Nationalism. He explained in Marxism and the National Question that each nation has different material conditions, and thus they each have varying procedures to be taken to achieve the revolution. This is one of the few beliefs he shared with the Left Opposition of Trotsky.

The belief that the primary division of humanity is the nation is revisionist, not just revisionist but one of the main rhetorics of fascists and nazis, according to which the superiority of one nation over every other separates "Good" from "Bad". There is no "National Communism"; there is a "National Way to Communism", no Socialist Nationalism, no Left-Wing Nationalism. Any ideology that puts the nation before the people and culture before the workers, that ideology is not leftist, socialist, or Marxist, but rather some type of Falangism more or less moderate.

Be warned of these reactionaries and fascists pretending to be Socialists: do not fall for their rhetoric and stand your ground. The liberation of the proletariat includes everyone, all people of all nations, everywhere on Earth. No tolerance for the intolerants, no war but the class war, no enemy but the bourgeoisie. Remember, comrades, the revolution is red, rainbow, black, pink, blue, and every colour because the only struggle that unites us is against the oppression of Capitalism. The only things we have to lose from this liberation are our chains.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Greg Owen at LGBTQ Nation:

The newly elected chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus said a combination of factors led to electoral losses for the party in November’s election, not least of which was being “seen as preachy” and “disconnected.” Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, 35, is replacing outgoing chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), who is term-limited in the post. The Texas native and son of immigrants from Mexico was a labor organizer and Austin City Council member before winning a second term in the House last month.

Casar called Democrats’ losses in the election “avoidable.” “The progressive movement needs to change,” he told NBC News in an interview on Wednesday before his election to chair the influential caucus. “We need to re-emphasize core economic issues every time some of these cultural war issues are brought up.” “So when we hear Republicans attacking queer Americans again, I think the progressive response needs to be that a trans person didn’t deny your health insurance claim, a big corporation did — with Republican help,” Casar said. “We need to connect the dots for people that the Republican Party obsession with these culture war issues is driven by Republicans’ desire to distract voters and have them look away while Republicans pick their pocket.” And he asserted Democrats can do it “without throwing vulnerable people under the bus.”

[...] Casar maintained part of his party’s strategy to reconnect with the working class would mean an effort to “shed off some of its more corporate elements” that have blurred the distinction between Democrats and Republicans. “The core of the Republican Party is about helping Wall Street and billionaires. And I think we have to call out the game,” Casar said. “The Democratic Party, at its best, can hold people or can have inside of its tent people across geography, across race, and across ideology. Because we’re all in the same boat when it comes to making sure that you can retire with dignity, that your kids can go to school, that you can buy a house.”

Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX), the newly elected Congressional Progressive Caucus chair, rightly states that Democrats should not throw trans folks overboard in order to reconnect to the working class.

[antoine-roquentin]

The previous part of this series, Part 2, is available here.

In the world of internal Democratic Party politics, the chosen party of the professional-managerial class, fighting for a role in the party hierarchy is done by resume-padding. You have to have worked the correct jobs under the right managers with subsequent letters of recommendation from your patrons, showing both that you care but your primary commitment is to the job itself, not to the cause you were purportedly fighting for in that position. In that sense, Allard Lowenstein fits the bill as a typical upwardly mobile member of the party in the same way Pete Buttigieg does today. If America knows Lowenstein at all, it's from his role in the popular PBS documentary series on the civil rights movement Eyes on the Prize, especially episode 5. The emotional climax of the episode comes over the party machinations to keep the alternative slate of black voters from being seated at the 1964 Democratic convention, which LBJ, Hubert Humphrey, and his protege Walter Mondale succeeded in because of their superior knowledge of debate club tactics. A series of copyright claims by rightsholders for whom licenses had expired kept this show off the air in the 90s, but early filesharing advocates got to work promoting the show across the internet. After all, if they were trying to ban it, it must be important. The clip here is from that episode.

Lowenstein got his law degree at Yale, did his stint in the military like an honorable American, and then got a job from Eleanor Roosevelt directly, always the most powerful player in the party from her husband's death to 1960. However, Lowenstein also cared to an extent. He wanted the black people of the American south to have a chance to vote, based to a large extent on what he witnessed on a fact-finding tour of Namibia, then an internal colony of Apartheid South Africa. His passion was such that he was a major player in the movement to prevent LBJ from being renominated in 1968, recruiting Eugene McCarthy to run against him. This was because they were both politics nerds in the West Wing sense. Young guns, they believed they knew better than the Democratic machine politicians what voters wanted. They knew the people wanted an anti-war candidate who satisfied liberal pieties and who thumbed his nose at the old hierarchies. The result was three unsuccessful campaigns for presidential nomination and Lowenstein himself becoming a one-term congressman. As Gus Tyler, president of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (himself a young rebel against an old guard at one point, now an old man leading younger women) said, Lowenstein was leading politics "away from economics to ethics and aesthetics, to morality and culture", and ultimately "to the Republican Wolves".

The problem here wasn't that Lowenstein cared too much, as most of his contemporaries wrote. Rather, he'd performed like a racer trying to slipstream/draft who had spun out of control. This was because of Lowenstein's background and training. As the consummate liberal striver, he'd managed to become president of the National Student Association in 1951 (note this in particular for future posts). This was a union of students' unions, which was basically the debate club to end all debate clubs because that's all student unions are. Even today, but especially so in the 40s and 50s, the only reason to get involved in student politics was because it was a training ground for how parliaments and congresses work. All they do is argue over arcane resolutions on mundane subject matter, until one manages to land a blow strong enough to gain a majority in favour. It's a weirdo politics junkie's dream.

Lowenstein brought that energy to organizing black people in the American South. Even before his role in organizing 1964's Freedom Summer in Mississippi, the project for which Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were murdered, he was already getting on the nerves of more radical black people. James Forman, right of MLK in the pic below, ended up on the wrong side of Lowenstein at the 1956 NSA convention. Lowenstein didn't want passage of a more progressive civil rights platform than the one the Democratic Party had adopted. At one point, he literally shoved a black man to the microphone to speak on his behalf, according to Forman. He won, of course, because he knew his debate club tactics better.

7 years later, Lowenstein and Forman butted heads over the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's work in Mississippi and Alabama. Forman notes that he arrived almost unannounced, and yet many of the white volunteers suddenly claimed that they were under his orders to do what they were doing, including going to towns that were centres of white violence and had no organizing done. As a Yale alumni, Lowenstein probably had links to major white supremacist orgs to protect these people given that Yale was the university of choice for white southerners in the Ivy Leagues. On the other hand, Lowenstein's line was against black radical politics and towards conciliation. Forman found that Lowenstein often worked hand-in-hand with Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, and John Lewis (far right in the pic above), and were close to Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington's Socialist Party (eventually Democratic Socialists of America), bankrolled by Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers union. He was particularly piqued when they went to the Dominican Republic as supposedly independent observers and certified the election of the pro-American candidate not long after an American invasion, despite the well-known popularity of his opponent Juan Bosch.

This rankled Forman because the struggle in America for the civil rights of black people was part and parcel of the decolonization struggle abroad, or so he thought. To have America going around and imposing governments on nations through its military industrial complex and arcane intelligence apparatus reeked of what South Africa was doing in Namibia. After all, there was a reason the SNCC had adopted the phrase "one man, one vote" for its 1964 Freedom Summer campaign: it had been a slogan of the 1958 All African Peoples' Conference, the first meeting of black revolutionaries from all of Africa in history.

This conference was convened by the newly independent Ghana, the eighth independent nation in Africa and the first of a long wave which gained independence between 1958 and 1994. The resounding waves of this action were felt in America. Martin Luther King Jr explained in an interview that year "This event will give impetus to oppressed peoples all over the world. I think it will have worldwide implications and repercussions—not only for Asia and Africa, but also for America… At bottom, both segregation in America and colonialism in Africa are based on the same thing—white supremacy and contempt for life". But "Our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent", incoming Ghanian prime minister Kwame Nkrumah declared, which is why the All African Peoples' Conference had to be held.

Nkrumah did not learn his debating skills from the NSA. As a student in America in the 30s, he'd given sermons in churches across New York City and Philadelphia, talking always about Africa. Yet it was his experience of American segregation that radicalized him. Being told he was only fit to drink from a spittoon was one of many insults he faced from white Americans. At times, he would buy a subway ticket so that he had a place to sleep. He knew the civil rights struggle was the same as his own, and this followed to the rest of his government. When Ghana became independent, it had virtually no skilled workers because universities in the country barred black students and everybody who had the ability travelled to America to learn. In 1958, Nkrumah spoke at an NAACP dinner in Harlem, telling black American dignitaries that the next step in their fight for civil rights was to send their well educated members back to Ghana, where they would receive a warm welcome and teach their fellow Africans to build a strong, independent nation that could one day bring together a united Africa to rival America.

The opening salvo in this project was the call for all freedom fighters of Africa to send representatives to the AAPC. Nkrumah welcomed them personally. First came Tom Mboya (keep your eyes on this guy) from Kenya, a trade unionist official and future Minister of Justice who one day soon would ensure a member of his tribe, Barack Obama Senior, made his way to America to attend university. Future successful and failed revolutionaries like Joshua Nkomo, George Padmore, Kenneth Kaunda, Hastings Banda, Frantz Fanon, Dr. Felix-Roland Moumie, and Holden Roberto, as well as notable black US Congressman Charles Diggs, were among 300 delegates. Perhaps the most important delegate was accidental. Joseph Kasavubu had initially been invited as the representative from the Congo. However, when the plane to Ghana stopped in Leopoldville/Kinshasa, Belgian authorities had stopped him from getting on, recognizing him from anti-colonial speeches earlier. However, they did allow Patrice Lumumba and two comrades who had impressed the plane's passengers with their rhetoric at a bar to join in. When Nkrumah met Lumumba, he was deeply impressed and called for a photographer to record the moment.

Also among them was Horace Mann Bond as a representative of the African American Institute, a group funded by western mining interests but staffed with academics from major American black universities like Howard and Lincoln. He brought along a reporter named Bob Keith, who was arrested during a closed session of the congress with bugging equipment. Bond was also president of the American Society of African Culture. AMSAC had deep pursestrings, bailing out a number of black groups soon after it was founded, and sponsored Bond as well as CUNY professor John Aubrey Davis, who reported on all the proceedings to former National Student Association president and current AMSAC leader James Theodore Harris Jr, according to AMSAC's archives. A third group that attended the conference was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, who sent white AFL-CIO leader Irving Brown. AFL-CIO in turn sponsored International Ladies' Garment Workers Union member Maida Springer, one of the few black women. One thing that AAI, AMSAC, AFL-CIO, and CCF shared was an explicit commitment to anticommunism in their charters, even as some claimed apoliticality otherwise. CCF sent its future president, South African poet Ezekiel Mphaphele. Some CCF funding came from the Fairfield Foundation, a charitable organization that sent its own observer Patrick Duncan, a white member of the South African Liberal Party. Other funding came from the Ford Foundation, which sent white University of California Santa Cruz professor John A. Marcum on its own. Marcum and Brown helpfully offered to translate ad hoc between French (spoken by Lumumba) and English (spoken by Nkrumah), and the two report an unknown American helping them with all their conversations.

I note these people because they or the organizations that sponsored them were all revealed to be CIA fronts or conduits by the magazine Ramparts in 1967 (Brown's one time boss at the CIA's International Organizations Division, Thomas Braden, wrote a response entitled "I'm glad the CIA is 'immoral'"). Many of them defended themselves by saying they were unaware of where the money was coming from or that they did not know the people they reported to were compromised. As Ramparts was drawing primarily on IRS information that had been leaked as well as corroborating testimony, they did not know the full extent of their integration into the intelligence apparatus. As many of these organizations folded in the 70s and 80s after these revelations their archives were given over to universities for preservation. They were rarely perused, two notable exceptions being by Frances Stonor Saunders and Hugh Wilford in the 90s and 2000s respectively. What they revealed was not wholesale domination or complete innocence, but rather a joy that the CIA was funding them to do what they knew was the right thing combined with strident insistence to the conduits for their funding that they not be forced to do anything that would contradict with their politics. When Farmer, of Forman's Lowenstein faction at CORE and SNCC, went on an AMSAC-sponsored tour of Africa, he criticized Malcolm X's beliefs as "apartheid and… worse", then got into arguments with diplomatic staff for his criticisms of American policies towards South Africa, Portugese Africa, and most of all the Congo. He later claimed that seeing apartheid abroad helped to calcify his opinion the American government. When Brown became harshly critical of Nkrumah, Springer, his subordinate and mentee at AFL-CIO, explained decades later that the 1958 conference gave her "goosebumps" and was more significant than the fall of the Berlin Wall in her opinion.

Evidently, many of these liberals, like the more radical leftists they battled, viewed the American civil rights struggle as an anti-colonial one. So too did the CIA, given the similar manner in which they infiltrated both through the liberals. However, portrayals of the struggle in popular culture like Eyes on the Prize show nothing of the sort. They tend to show a struggle from the streets right into the Democratic Party. This pattern also befits all of the above named associated with the CIA, albeit with the ones less inclined to support whoever the current president was also ending up becoming less powerful. Typically, they emerged in academia rather than politics, ie the other glorified debate club. In contrast, the radicals tended to find themselves sidelined or shot. Forman was an early supporter of the Black Panthers along with his associate at the SNCC Stokely Carmichael, but as the group descended into factional infighting, his former comrade stuffed a pistol in his mouth and threatened to shoot, giving him a nervous breakdown. He went into academia and helped ensure his son, now a Yale Law professor, could do the same. To co-author his autobiography, "The Making of Black Revolutionaries", Forman picked Julian Bond, son of Horace Mann Bond.

‘Irving Brown was never a CIA agent’, said Cord Meyer, the head of the International Organizations Division of the CIA. ‘The very notion is laughable. He was as independent as you could get, and very strong-willed. What the CIA did was to help him finance his major projects when they were crucial to the Western cause. But in his operations he was totally on his own’.

[mariacallous]

Every Briton of a certain age remembers where they were the night Tony Blair became prime minister. On the evening of May 1, 1997, drivers on the London Underground announced the exit polls to passengers. Revelers celebrated with bottles of sparkling wine on the streets. The party faithful assembled at the Southbank culture complex by the River Thames where the campaign anthem, D:Ream’s “Things Can Only Get Better,” was blared out.

Now the band, whose song was synonymous with Blair’s victory, says it doesn’t want it played this time around. Its members blame the legacy of Iraq, but it’s not just that. The song feels out of place; the overall mood is sour.

The naive mood of optimism that followed Blair into office disappeared with that war; yet the “New Labour” project proved technically resilient. Blair won his third electoral victory in 2005, only to hand over power, reluctantly, to his erstwhile friend and archrival, Gordon Brown, in 2007. Brown hung on for three years, but the project was exhausted after 13 years.

Everything is relative. It is salutary to remember that the Conservatives have lasted one year longer, from 2010 to 2024­—14 clownish, desultory, unproductive years. Five prime ministers, one Brexit nightmare, and endless corruption scandals, and yet they continue to plough on with their customary bluster.

The paradox of this moment is that Keir Starmer engenders almost none of the enthusiasm that accompanied Blair even though the present Labour leader has turned his party’s fortunes around and is on the cusp of sweeping the Tories out of power. According to opinion polls, Starmer could achieve a landslide even greater than Blair’s, consigning the Tories to the wilderness for a generation.

He has done so by promising as little as possible, focusing on six inoffensive and general pledges—such as cutting waiting times for doctors’ treatments, recruiting new teachers, and cracking down on antisocial behavior to which nobody could object. This is a direct copy from Blair in 1997, a decontamination strategy in which you give your rivals nothing to target. It has worked spectacularly well. The increasingly desperate outgoing prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has taken to warning voters not to “surrender”—alarmist talk that has invited mockery.

Starmer cruises on, repeating his mantras such as stability, responsibility, and the vague notion of change. To most voters, this will suffice—anything to kick the Conservatives out. Unlike the naive optimism of 1997, disappointment has already been factored in.

Is this a reflection of the almost complete loss of confidence by the political mainstream across the democratic world, or might this instead be later seen by historians as a masterful example of expectation management? In contrast to Blair, the showman, could the dourer Starmer achieve at least as much during his first term in office? And could he entrench Labour hegemony for at least as long a period as his predecessor did?

Starmer has brought some of Blair’s advisors of yesteryear into his core team. Others are consulted more informally. As for the man himself, Starmer noted recently: “I talk to Tony a lot about the period just before ’97, because obviously I’m very interested in talking to people who have won elections and taken a party from opposition into government.” Starmer reminded his TV interviewer caustically that Labour isn’t very good at winning—only three times since the war has it snatched power from the Tories, the other two occasions being in 1945 and 1964.

Each man’s thinking has been heavily influenced by that record. They share an assessment of Britain as a Conservative and conservative country. Labour has been the imposter. Starmer has pared back his manifesto proposals to the bare minimum—removing tax breaks on private schools to pay for the more underserved, a public energy company, and a minimal increase in workers’ rights.

Earlier, more radical ideas on the environment and on tackling child poverty were watered down. Little of any consequence is said about Brexit and the damage it has caused. The tactic is simple: Don’t rock the boat. Don’t challenge the political and economic fundamentals; instead, do what you can at the margins—if necessary, by stealth.

In the end, Blair did preside over radical improvements in public services—the fabled National Health Service (NHS), education, public transport, and social. But he rarely advertised the investments that had been made.

Perhaps a more accurate comparison would be with the first administration of Harold Wilson, one of only three previous Labour leaders to win elections since the war (the other being Clement Attlee in 1945). In his first six years in power, from 1964 to 1970, Wilson presided over a government that was technocratic but also radical.

More than his predecessors, Blair stood out most of all on the international stage. He presided triumphantly at European Union summits (even if he did little to tackle the intrinsic hostility engendered by the right-wing media). He was buddies with then-U.S. President Bill Clinton, going on to woo the likes of President Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan and Russian President Vladimir Putin to support the invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11 on behalf of his new friend, U.S. President George W. Bush.

Blair wrapped himself in the flag, but then it was a more optimistic union jack, the pre-millennium era of the Spice Girls and Cool Britannia. The legacy of 1989 and the collapse of communism still resonated a decade and more later. Into the early/mid-2000s, Blair-land was all about liberal democracy and free markets walking hand in hand, convincing recalcitrant autocrats of the errors of their ways. Globalization and free trade would deliver wealth. In the U.K., U.S., and across the EU, such thinking has been largely repudiated.

Two decades on, in these darker post-pandemic times, with war stalking Europe and the Middle East, with climate change targets being missed thanks to a popular backlash, with populists dominating public discourse and accreting power, Starmer ensures that the British flag accompanies every video or photograph of him. The word accompanying these pictures is “change,” but the subliminal message is “security.”

Who can blame him? Starmer has been dealt a miserable deck of cards. Unlike Blair, who was bequeathed a healthy exchequer by his Conservative predecessor, John Major—an underrated premier—the new man in 10 Downing Street inherits a moribund economy, the smallest military since Napoleonic times, an NHS on its knees, schools having to deal with leaking roofs, and post-Brexit bureaucratic obstacles that make trade infinitely harder. Thanks to Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, and to a (slightly) lesser degree Theresa May and Sunak, Britain’s role is largely trashed around the world.

Starmer struggles to smile in the way Blair did. He doesn’t gladden the hearts, and he certainly isn’t promising the world. He is a man for his times, one of the few grown-up mainstream politicians still standing. With expectations so low, it will be hard for him to disappoint. Might that present him with an opportunity?

[sedoretu]

Holy shit I need everyone to listen to the first half of this 15-minute podcast and the absolutely depraved, horrific things that Republican convention-goers say into a microphone with a smile on their face.

RAMEY: You know, I believe in some aid to other countries, but, you know, we need to support our allies. Ukraine is not really our ally. So - Israel's our ally and always has been. And when you turn your back on Israel, you're turning your back on God. So that's just the way I was always brought up. Israel's God's chosen people. The Jews are God's chosen people. And, you know, they need to be taken care of. They didn't ask to be assaulted. They didn't ask for people to come in and steal their women and children out of their homes. So I know, in West Virginia, if that would have happened, it would have been a war. So - right there in my own backyard. You're not stealing somebody's child or their sister or their brother or their grandma and torturing people without getting some repercussions. So I just believe people need to love each other more and more, you know? They need to read the Bible or whatever faith you belong to and figure out that, you know, we're all in this world together, struggling every day, trying to make it. Be kind to people, you know? Give the kindness, and the kindness will come back to you. I believe Donald Trump loves our country. I believe he - I know he loves our veterans. I know he loves our military. I think he loves me, you know? To be honest, I think he truly cares about the American people. Joe and Kamala - I get no warm, fuzzy feelings at all from those two.

or

KHAN: Well, coming from India, culturally, I'm pro-life. India has 1.4 billion people. And secondly, you know, I support - see, our foundational values are - in America are freedom and liberty and free market enterprise structure - capitalistic structure. It's not the perfect model, but it's an optimal model. I didn't come here for socialism or communism. And out of - you know, I don't want to disrespect any gender thing, but I did not come here to support the LGBTQ rights, to be very honest. Culturally, we don't do that. So my values resonate more with the Republican Party, which happen to be our foundational values as well.

or

DONNA VAN AUSDALL: Aloha. I'm Donna Van Ausdall. I am a kupuna, which is senior in Hawaii. I'm 71 years old. Well, I've been involved with the Hawaii Republican Party since I became a Republican back in 2016. I'm just so thrilled to be here. To see President Trump in person is a huge honor. KHALID: You said that you've been involved with the Republican Party since you became a Republican in 2016. So were you not always a Republican? VAN AUSDALL: No. I was a hard-core Democrat. And JFK was my childhood hero, like many of my generation, right? But my husband and I are devout traditional Catholics, so we made a heartfelt choice to become conservatives because of the abortion issue, you know? President Biden is a Catholic, and I'm very disappointed at his pro-abortion stance, you know? So - and I love the conservativeness of Republicans. You know, we want our country to continue to have its constitutional freedoms with the Second Amendment rights. You know, a lot of states are enacting gun laws that I think are too stringent.

I know some of y'all have beef with Democrats but if we don't organize and turn out the vote in November the government will be run by and for these hateful people

[uboat53]

All right guys, we need to talk. Time for a LONG RANT (TM) about an important topic.

INTRODUCTION

Over the last few years, you may have noticed that Republicans and conservatives have made a lot of noise about protecting children. Some of it came as part of the QAnon conspiracy theory about pedophilia and child sacrifice and some of it came as part of culture war issues like the existence of LGTBQ-etc people.

But one thing that's kind of gone under the radar is all the ways that these same people who claim to be protecting child welfare with every fiber of their being have actually made things far more dangerous for children. Let's run through the list.

INFECTIOUS DISEASES

Honestly, the most important thing that's been done for child welfare in the history of humankind is the massive decrease in child mortality that's been achieved in the past century. Seriously, until the mid 20th century, it was perfectly normal for about half of all children to die before the age of 5. We've come so far on this that now it's a rare tragedy when this occurs.

Part of this mortality was due to malnutrition, we've overcome Malthus (see the Malthusianism Wikipedia article if you're interested), but a huge amount of it is the power of modern medicine to deal with diseases that used to ravage children. Measles, Mumps, Smallpox, Influenza, and a huge amount of other diseases used to sweep through the population regularly either killing children or weakening them for another disease or condition to do the job.

Vaccines have been a huge part of this progress and are a major reason why viral illnesses no longer ravage the population on a regular basis (antibiotics have been similarly effective for bacterial illnesses) and yet there remains a disturbingly large and well-funded movement to advocate against vaccines and particularly childhood vaccinations, largely based on fraudulent claims that have been debunked more than a decade ago.

While it is true that this vaccine skepticism has strains across the ideological spectrum, it is only in the Republican Party where the idea has been given power by elected and appointed officials. No Democratic Surgeon General, for example, has recommended against the (exceedingly safe!) Covid or Measles vaccines, but that's exactly what the Surgeon General of Florida, Joseph Lapado, has done.

This is, of course, far from an isolated incident. A quick search will find dozens, even hundreds, of cases of GOP elected and appointed officials inveighing against vaccines, pushing to remove vaccine requirements, pushing to limit funding to vaccination programs, and generally echoing the most extreme and unproven claims against one of the most powerful public health tools for the protection of children that has ever been developed.

GUN VIOLENCE

Time to talk about guns. For a long time, this was a secondary issue, automobiles were the largest leading cause of death for children pretty much since we dealt with diseases (see the last section). However, over the last several decades, we've worked hard to implement all kinds of safety features that have dramatically brought down the number of children killed in car crashes. Guns, on the other hand…

Well, gun deaths among children have almost doubled in the last decade and, for the first time ever, they are now the leading cause of death for those under the age of 18 (otherwise known as children).

This increase seems to be largely driven by assaults rather than suicides or accidental deaths (though both of those have increased as well). Now, I'm not going to claim that there's a silver bullet for dealing with gun violence, but there are policies that are well supported by research and shown to reduce gun violence. It's also the case that, considered overall, states that lean more toward Democratic policies have significantly lower (and increasingly lower) levels of gun violence than states that lean toward Republican policies.

All the specifics aside, it speaks to priorities. If gun deaths are now the number one killer of children, anyone interested in protecting children would want to do something about that. My accusation of Republican/conservative officials is not that they don't want to implement my preferred policies to address this issue, it's that they consistently refuse to implement any policies that, even theoretically, would be aimed at addressing this issue.

CHILD LABOR

In the early 1900s, child labor was common and widespread, with children often working 12 hour shifts or more with very little in the way of safety and oversight. Over the course of the first four decades of the 20th century, numerous laws were passed to make it illegal to employ children in dangerous jobs or for long hours that would interfere with their education.

Now, despite an uptick in child labor violations and numerous stories of children killed while illegally working dangerous jobs, Republican governors and legislatures in states as disparate as Wisconsin, Iowa, Arkansas, Ohio, and Missouri have been pushing for and passing laws that weaken the protections in place for child workers as young as 14 and sometimes even younger.

RACISM

Racism isn't generally seen as a child issue because it's assumed to affect all ages about equally, but we have to take into account the demographics of this country before assuming that. In fact, children (those under 18) are actually the most racially diverse group in the United States with older groups being much more homogeneously white. In fact, because of this racial difference, racism has a far greater effect on the average child than it does on the average adult.

And, to be clear, there are numerous ways that ongoing racism is actively affecting the health and well-being of children in this country today. Republicans, though, overwhelmingly believe that enough has been done to combat racism and that nothing more should be done to address it.

ACTUAL CHILD ABUSE

Okay, QAnon definitely took this issue and ran off into the woods to do unspeakable things to it, but child abuse is definitely a real issue that impacts children. Unlike the QAnon caricature, though, child abuse tends not to be something carried out by shadowy strangers hidden from public view, but is overwhelmingly (over 90%) committed by someone the child knows personally.

The problem is, by spreading the idea that child abuse is a stranger-danger type of problem, this idea directly impacts efforts to protect children from abuse by draining resources from evidence-based policies and pushing them into nonsense.

Now, you may say "hey, that's QAnon, not Republicans" and, sure, but many elected Republicans are supporters of the QAnon conspiracy (among others) and even those who don't openly profess support are either silent or press for policies based on the conspiratorial worldview. In 2020, 97 open QAnon followers ran in political primaries with 22 Republicans and 2 Independents among them making it to the general election, numerous representatives and party officials have taken part in QAnon organized events, and even Donald Trump, the de facto head of the party and its likely presidential nominee, has repeatedly expressed support for it. It's also notable the only prominent Republicans who have spoken out against QAnon have either been out of office or have quickly either retired or been defeated for re-election.

So, yes, the source of the issue is QAnon, but QAnon is part of the Republican Party now.

LGBTQ-ETC YOUTH

One of the main dangers that Republicans and conservatives like to say they're protecting children from is LGBTQ-ect people, but this also ignores the fact that many children are or will turn out to be LGBTQ-etc themselves. The statistics are pretty clear that suicide rates among this group are twice as high or even higher than the general population but the research is also clear that LGBTQ-etc youth with supportive families and communities have suicide rates that are almost completely back in line with the general public.

There's also no evidence to support the idea that LGBTQ-etc people abuse children at any higher rates than any other group, so targeting them not only fails to deliver any particular gains in child protection, it also alienates LGBTQ-etc youth and drives them to suicide.

POLICIES VS OUTCOMES

So far I've only talked about specific policies, but what do the outcomes look like? There's numerous ways you can measure child well-being, but I figured I'd go with deaths. Specifically, I was able to find good data for both infant mortality and child (1-14) mortality. I then compared this with Ballotpedia's information about party control of state governments over the last 10 years (this link brings you to Colorado, but you can change the state name in the URL to get any state).

Crunch this data and what you find is that Republican control of state government is bad for infant mortality but is REALLY bad for child mortality. There are some outliers, but the pattern is pretty clear that, the longer Republicans had control in a state government and the more control they had, the worse the outcomes are.

Infant mortality is almost 25% higher and the mortality rate of children aged 1-14 is OVER 80% HIGHER in states fully controlled by Republicans than in states fully controlled by Democrats. These patterns also generally hold for the level of partial control as well.

A WORD TO REPUBLICANS/CONSERVATIVES

If you're a registered Republican, if you vote Republican, or if you consider yourself a conservative, you may look at some of this and think "that's not what I believe". And, yes, that's fair, this doesn't perfectly represent the views of every Republican or conservative everywhere.

What it does represent, however, is the view of a large number of people in the party and movement with power. Power that they're using to enact these very policies which, as I think I've shown, endanger children.

You may not identify with these, but your party and movement do.

CONCLUSION

Republicans and conservatives talk a really big game about protecting children but, when you look at what they're actually doing, their policies are one of the biggest threats to children. I don't need a longer conclusion than that.

As usual, if you disagree or have anything to add, please cite your sources appropriately. I think I've done a decent job of that, so I'll just ask that you do the same.

[quotesfrommyreading]

How did we get to this point? The origin story of Taiwan most familiar to Americans begins in 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist forces, locked for years in a civil war with Mao Zedong’s Communists, were defeated. Along with much of his remaining army, Chiang fled to Taiwan and set up a government-in-exile called the Republic of China. That government was recognized by the United States. But within a few years of Richard Nixon’s 1972 Cold War opening to Beijing, the U.S. formally switched diplomatic recognition to the People’s Republic. Ever since, Taiwan’s status has been cloaked in ambiguity. The U.S. acknowledges Beijing’s claim to Taiwan without recognizing its sovereignty over the island. To help deter a Chinese effort to seize Taiwan by force, the U.S. has pledged to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself.

That origin story explains Taiwan’s curious geopolitical status, but it leaves a lot out. When Chiang fled to Taiwan—with roughly 2 million Chinese from the mainland—there were some 6 million people already living on an island that was just emerging from 50 years of Japanese rule. Most of the people living on the island when Chiang arrived could claim roots in Taiwan going back hundreds of years. They had their own languages and culture. So too did the island’s many Indigenous groups, such as the Amis, the Atayal, and the Paiwan. To subjugate the island, Chiang killed and imprisoned tens of thousands over decades—a period known as the White Terror. He set up a military dictatorship under the leadership of his Chinese nationalist Kuomintang Party (KMT) and, from this offshore platform, vowed to reclaim mainland China.

Taiwan is different now. With its broad boulevards, glass towers, military monuments, narrow side streets, night markets, and ample signs in English, Taipei today presents an ambience of blended cultures: Chinese, Japanese, Western, and distinctly Taiwanese. Bubble tea, a Taiwanese invention, is everywhere. But consider what it was like to grow up in the shadow of Taiwan’s postwar history, and you can better understand the profound ways in which younger generations have been remaking the island’s politics and identity.

Emily Y. Wu is a professional podcaster who blends a focus on youth culture with an urgent concern for Taiwan’s political present. (One of her shows is called Metalhead Politics.) She is among dozens of Taiwanese I spoke with during the past year, first on Zoom, then in person in Taipei. Wu was born under KMT martial law in 1984. Her family did not come over with Chiang; they had lived in Taiwan for generations. “Chiang Kai-shek brought China over,” she told me. “I grew up always knowing that there was this alternate history: It was Taiwanese history, which was not taught in school.” Students were taught Chinese history and geography under the presumption that the KMT would one day govern China again. Mandarin was spoken in class, and speaking Taiwanese was discouraged. Wu recalled Lesson 9 of her childhood textbook: “ ‘Hello teachers, hello students, we are Chinese!’ ”

But a movement for democracy was building. “We grew up hearing these names, knowing that there was a group of activists, scholars, lawyers that tried to imagine a free Taiwan,” Wu explained. Many of those people were members of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which currently governs Taiwan. In 1987, the KMT lifted nearly 40 years of martial law. Wu’s political consciousness was shaped by the protests, marches, and hunger strikes that led to Taiwan’s first true presidential election, in 1996.

By the beginning of the 21st century, Taiwan was becoming ever more democratic—and ever more Taiwanese. The school curriculum changed: Taiwan’s distinct history was taught, as were Taiwanese languages. Taiwan also began to celebrate its Indigenous population. After the election of President Ma Ying-jeou, in 2008, links of trade, investment, and travel helped reduce tensions with China. Ma was from the KMT, and the party’s Chinese heritage and its ties to Taiwan’s business elite eased the way to détente with Beijing. But many Taiwanese, particularly the young, feared that forging too close a connection could ultimately give Beijing leverage over Taiwan. In 2014, in what became known as “the Sunflower Movement,” named for the flower that served as a symbol of hope, students occupied the Taiwan legislature to oppose a free-trade agreement with China. After a tense standoff, they succeeded in stopping the deal. They also helped propel a political wave that in 2016 brought the election of the DPP’s Tsai Ing-wen as president.

As Taiwan was becoming more democratic, China was becoming more autocratic. And as Taiwan was becoming more Taiwanese, China was becoming more fervently nationalist. After the ascent of Xi Jinping to the head of the Communist Party, in 2012, Beijing shifted from incentives to coercion. Xi’s government proved adept at bullying companies and entire countries to stop doing business in Taiwan and to recognize China’s narrative of sovereignty. Xi also began escalating crackdowns on China’s periphery—in Xinjiang province and in Hong Kong.

  —  Taiwan Wants China to Think Twice About an Invasion

[usarmytrooper]

More and more we don’t play it here anymore, either. People are starting to wake up (if you’ll pardon the expression) and speak out.

[mastomysowner]

On the essence of the Galactic Civil War

This is a translation of this text.

When talking about the Galactic Civil War, it is usually seen as a war of galactic dissidents/guerrillas against the galactic Reich. That is, the war of representatives of the interests of the people (or "representatives of the interests of the people") against a totalitarian state.

But this is far from being the case. And the question is not who is right and who is wrong, but what exactly were the opponents.

Let's start with the Galactic Empire. Both its supporters and opponents have the strong image of a totalitarian state, but the Empire was not totalitarian. After all, what is a totalitarian state? This is a state where everything is subject to one idea and all public life is controlled. Sorry, but was the Galactic Empire really like that? There, of course, was an ideology, and a kind of ruling party (COMPNOR), and state security... But the most important component, universality, was missing. The COMPNOR mentioned above was more of a support movement for the authorities than a ruling vanguard party.

Look at Tatooine. Is it a totalitarian society? No, bandits are in charge here. No totalitarianism would tolerate the likes of Jabba openly running the place. Of course, a totalitarian regime is not necessarily a rigid order, but there is not even the appearance of a totalitarian society on Tatooine.

Again, a totalitarian Empire would be unlikely to destroy Alderaan. And not because it would be kinder. It’s just that in this case, Bail Organa would have been sent to Kessel or some other galactic Auschwitz and replaced by an imperial commissar by the time of the 19th year after the founding of the Empire long ago. Alderaan would have been brought under complete control. The Empire may have been concerned about the Alderaanian guerrillas, but not the planetary government. Even if Alderaan were still destroyed, they would've done it either at the beginning of the existence of the Empire, or because of being tired of the guerillas, but not in the way it was in the film.

Maybe the situation is different on other planets? Far from it. The Expanded Universe states that during the entire period of Palpatine's reign, the Empire changed governments only on 1 of the 80 planets. Perhaps Palpatine was not against the totalitarian structure of the state as such, but for all his genius he could not "bring to a common denominator" millions of worlds with different cultures and different political traditions. It was all the more difficult to do this after the millennium of the post-Ruusan "democratic" Republic.

To understand what the Empire is, you need to look at what state it was created from. What is the Old Republic? Its supporters positioned it as a democracy. In a way, of course, they are right. That's just the democracy of the Old Republic resembles a feudal democracy, like the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Many (but not all) planets had their representatives in the Senate. I note that these representatives were appointed by the government of the planet, they were not necessarily elected at all. That is, if the planet had an absolute monarchy, then if its representative was in the Senate, they represented the interests of the absolute monarchy.

One could compare this to the UN, however, the Republic was once a more centralized state, and the Ruusan Reformation turned it into, in fact, a kind of galactic feudalism, moreover - the feudalism of the era of fragmentation. In almost all their internal matters, the planets could pursue whatever policy they wanted (there were certain prohibitions, for example, slavery was forbidden, but by the time of the Clone Wars, most of them no longer paid attention to these prohibitions). As for the foreign policy of the planets, Coruscant gradually lost all control over it. The Republic did not have its own armed forces, and, like the kings of the era of feudal fragmentation, it had to gather the forces of "vassals", which far from always gave their strength to pacify the presumptuous local Napoleons.

What does Palpatine do after coming to power? He creates nationwide armed forces independent of local governments, limits the capabilities of local governments, changes objectionable rulers, and creates special services to spy on them.Furthermore, in addition to the “feudal” management system, an official apparatus (moffs and grand moffs) is being created that is not connected with it in any way.

Palpatine is often compared to Hitler, but his activities are more like the actions of the kings of the era of pacification of the feudal freemen. No, of course, on some planets, the actions of the Empire are reminiscent of colonial conquerors with the driving of the local population into slavery (Kashyyyk), on others, society is reshaped to imperial standards and ideas, including through the education of young people in the Palpatine Youth - COMPNOR‘s SAGroup. But such actions were not carried out on a general galactic scale - neither Leia nor Luke were accepted into any Imperial "Palpatine boy scouts".

Now about the Alliance to Restore the Republic. It’s usually presented as a terrorist/guerrilla movement.

However, their actions are very different from the actions of both guerrillas and terrorists. Yes, they had guerrilla groups that attacked the imperial garrisons, and underground organizations engaged in local propaganda. But neither of them were the main resources of the Alliance. The basis of their forces is the fleet. The Alliance spent 35% of its budget on small aircraft alone (fighters and bombers). Ships can’t be homemade by underground workers. Some of the ships, of course, were hijacked, captured or bought from others (including the Empire), but the rebels produced some part of the equipment (X-wings, for example) themselves. You need either a planet that will host production, hide this from the Empire and spend a lot of money on it, or an uninhabited planet. Either way you have to spend a lot of money. These funds were clearly not collected from students‘ donations. It is known that, for example, the Mon Calamari cruisers were built on that planet, and therefore were ��hijacked” by the rebels.

And the leaders of the Alliance were by no means idealistic intellegentsia, disillusioned veterans, or even small businessmen. Organa was the ruler of his planet. Mothma is a toff of Chandrila. Iblis is by no means the last person on Corellia. The top of the Empire, of course, is not all "proletarians", but not of royal blood either. Palpatine is from a noble family, but for Coruscant he was a new man, a provincial. Vader is from the bottom of the society. Did the old aristocracy dislike the fact that the galaxy was ruled by people from the Outer Rim?

Perhaps the rebellion leaders were supported by the democratic forces of the interests of the people? But the Declaration of Rebellion bears no resemblance to a declaration of the rebellious masses. What are the slogans of the movements claiming to be "for the people"? Less taxes, fight against big business, support for small business. And what claims does the Alliance make against Palpatine in the declaration?

“You have disbanded the Senate, the voice of the people;

You have instituted a policy of blatant speciesism and genocide against the nonhuman peoples of the Galaxy;

You have overthrown the chosen leaders of planets, replacing them with Moffs and Governors of your choice;

You have raised taxes without the consent of those taxed;

You have murdered and imprisoned millions without benefit of trial;

You have unlawfully taken land and property;

You have expanded the military far beyond what is necessary and prudent, for the sole purpose of oppressing your subjects.”

Well, and which of the points of the declaration are addressed to the masses? The only paragraph that will really interest the common man is the question of taxes. And, interestingly, we are talking only about taxes, not social transformations. The rest of the paragraphs will affect only those who suffered from them. Seriously, is it even remotely interesting to some hard worker from Coruscant that the Empire enslaved the Wookiees, took away some king's planet and imprisoned those who supported this king? No, of course, this is relevant for the enslaved peoples and individuals who sympathize with them, but, as already noted, the guerrilla movement on the planets conquered by the Empire was not the main force of the Rebellion.

So the people would hardly be interested in listening to it. But the rulers of the planets... It is their representatives who will no longer represent their interests in the Senate. It is they who are forced to obey the Moffs. It is their property that the Emperor can appropriate. And it is their troops that are now being threatened by the Imperial military. Moreover, the democratic rebels, speaking out against the general galactic autocracy, had nothing against the monarchies on the planets. In their declaration there is not even a wish that something needs to be changed on the planets themselves, except for what was brought in by the Empire.

Of course, among the rebels there were many idealists who were attracted by beautiful words about freedom, those who were harmed in one way or another by the Empire, and simply patriots of those planets on which the Empire replaced the rulers (because for many, "our son of a bitch" is better). But at whose expense, as they say, is this banquet? Ideals are ideals, but spare parts for the X-wings must be produced. Armed forces on a galactic scale could be organized only with considerable funds. And if among ordinary people there are many who are ready to sacrifice something for the sake of bright ideals, there are very few altruists among governments, corporations, and just rich people. Such an audience will most likely allocate money only for the sake of what will benefit them.

The fact that the basis of the ideology of the rebels was to "revive the good old days", and not to build something original, also speaks in favor of the Alliance being a movement of discontented feudal lords.

So, Palpatine is not Hitler, but Louis XI or some other monarch who crushes the feudal freemen, and Mothma is not Rosa Luxemburg, she is Charles the Bold in a skirt. Accordingly, the Rebel Alliance can be compared to the League of the Public Weal - the organization of local feudal rulers who were not satisfied with the fact that the king centralized the state, raised taxes, and sought to put local rulers under control. By the way, when the Yuuzhan Vong (they’re from the old canon, but still) invade the New Republic, the latter behaves exactly like a state of the era of feudal fragmentation - everyone seeks to protect their world first of all, hoping that the Vong will fly by. Reminds of Rus' of the era of the Mongol invasion. Beware what you wish for?

Thus, the Galactic Civil War was not at all a war of the people (or terrorists) against the government, but a struggle of the local governments against the government of the entire galaxy.

[yourreddancer]

Steve Schmidt on the California fires

Steve Schmidt is a former Republican who became an anti-Trump warrior and was brilliant at it. I’ve met him many times and have immense respect for him. Here’s what he wrote. It’s well worth the read:

Like the Great Fire of London in 1666, the Great Fire of Los Angeles will be recalled for 500 years.

The scale of the conflagration is biblical. These epochal fires will join Chicago and San Francisco atop an infamous registry of American destruction. The fires are still spreading, still growing. There is no precedent, and no similar event by scale, cost or damage that has ever occurred in America. None.

The “Big One” came, but it wasn’t an earthquake that triggered the inferno, it was January winds that brought with it a storm surge of fire.

The worst case scenario has arrived, and don’t let anyone tell you that it was unforeseeable. The conflagration was entirely predictable, and ultimately, inevitable. In fact, it was destiny. I don’t say that lightly.

The winds have brought Armageddon, and a brutal judgement upon the genius and arrogance of mankind’s building on a Garden of Eden, tempting the wrath of creation.

There is an old saw about what starts in California ultimately spreads to every corner of the United States.

There is a lot of truth to the saying.

Consider the immense technological, cultural, and legislative invention that has come from the Golden State. The state is home to 39 million Americans. Its economy ranks fifth internationally, behind the US, China, Germany, and Japan. On a per capita basis, California's GDP is greater than that of all of these countries.

I love California, and have from the second I first set foot there more than 30 years ago.

Among the great good fortunes of my life is that I have lived in California for many years, and have explored every part of it.

There is no other place like California in the world.

Her beauty is as magnificent as her dangers are deadly.

It has become fashionable in recent years to bash California. The state’s governance has become a punchline, a caricature and a MAGA war cry. Among the great grotesqueries and stupidities of our time is the sheer number of MAGA politicians who openly disdain the nation’s economic, technological, social, cultural, and innovation furnace. There is no scenario in which America succeeds with a failing California. Only an imbecile would root for California to fail or burn, and tragically, there is no shortage of fools in America rooting for both.

California is a mythological land. It is a place of sublime beauty and deep complication. [For instance], the California Republican Party has long been a collection of cranks, conspiracy nuts, ideological clowns and oddballs who prefaced the rise of their federal brethren. California is a place where MAGA holds zero sway. There are 60 Democrats out of the 80-seat State Assembly, 30 out of the 40 State Senate seats. There are eight elected statewide officials, and every single one of them is a Democrat. These are epic supermajorities.

Sacramento isn’t Washington, DC, nor is it a proxy front in the MAGA drama produced by corporate media mandarins who ignore western state issues like fire, water, and drought with as much determination as they ignored the opioid crisis and fanned Trump’s rise.

[Nonetheless], the recriminations are just beginning in California. They will get much worse because what will become clear is that the failures were epic, systemic, plain as day, completely ignored, wished away, and left to build until the instant of catastrophe.

Everything will change in California after the fires, and everything will stay the same. This tension will upend the state’s political establishment, and destroy the line of succession that has taken root during the term limits era.

A succession of mediocrities — each a political careerist — has bounced from office to office for an entire generation doing nothing but ignore growing problems, while seeking elevation to the next office. The initiative and referendum process will be abused by political profiteers, while corrupt recovery deals proliferate like the deadly conflagration exploded. Recovery profiteers will seek fortunes, while politicians plot for attention and advancement.

The charred wasteland will become a battlefield on which competence and incompetence will meet in daily battle. Insurance companies will deny claims saying, “It was a wind event! Not a fire that burned down 10,000 structures!” The ordinary family devastated in a biblical fire is about to become a lonely pawn in a vicious game of musical chairs where paying out is the sucker’s move. There are devastating, brutal days ahead for so many people. Yet, this time there is a difference.

Southern California television news has long abhorred substance and seriousness. Politics and government were treated like genital sores by TV news executives for 40 years, as they covered freeway chases and all manner of stupidity, while the clock ticked down, while the fuse burned down. The story of the Great Inferno is the story of “The Looming Tower.”

This did not have to happen, but it also could not be stopped. It could not be stopped because nothing could stop people from building in the most beautiful places anyone had ever seen once the first structure was built there.

There has always been a precariousness about California, an impermanence.

When the ships came through the Golden Gate during the Gold Rush, there were so many of them they were abandoned. They became the ground fill on which the Marina district in San Francisco rose. It has crumbled, burned, and been rebuilt more than once.

There were 160,000 in California before the discovery of gold. Five years after the US Civil War there were 560,000 Americans, and by the beginning of the roaring 1920s there were 3.4 million. The count was 10.6 million in 1950, and 34 million in 2000.

The people kept coming. They kept coming and coming and coming until there were more than 39 million by 2025 when it all burned down.

The scale of the environmental disaster will dwarf the damage caused by the 9/11 clean-up. The pollution is toxic, cancerous and deadly. The magnitude of the environmental crisis is almost impossible to comprehend.

It is hard watching people who have lost everything appear on television demonstrating unbelievable perseverance and grit, and declare that they will rebuild. Some will, but the truth is that many will not, and should not.

This is going to be the most expensive disaster in the history of the United States. The costs will beggar imagination and become multiples of the initial estimates of $160 billion in damage, but it is beyond that. The scale of the disaster and the nature of fire as a destructive force has reduced vast swaths of the second largest metro area in the United States to ashes.

The age of hyperbole has finally yielded to a reality for which there are truly no words.

What can be said? The California political class seems to be mostly going with, “Who me?” which is always the awful predicate to, “Why me?”

For the uninitiated, let me introduce you to the LA City Council. Though the story is old, the machine remains.

America’s cities were spared the type of destruction that rained down on European and Japanese cities like Tokyo 80 years ago. There is no modern frame of reference for an event like this occurring in a modern city anywhere in the world.

Vast parts of Los Angeles have been reduced by different means to what Tokyo was by firebombing.

When the smoke lifts and the full sweep of the destruction can be understood it will boggle the American mind.

Then things will change.

Dramatically.

Donald Trump has talked at length about his revenge.

It has begun. It is underway. It is happening. Right now. It’s not in my head, and not in my imagination.

During the greatest crisis in the history of California en route to becoming the costliest natural disaster in American history, Donald Trump has offered snarling insults, veiled threats, misinformation and unrestrained malice. He has used the disaster to attack the California governor, and has said nothing that matters of any consequence to the multitudes who are terrified and have lost everything. Instead, like always, he has debased, inflamed and manipulated when he should have done the exact opposite. He seeks to gain from suffering, and incredibly, he doesn’t even bother to hide it anymore. More than anything else, it is this revelation from his chaotic transition that is most bone-chilling. Deep down, our president-elect is Arthur Fleck [the vile, creepy Joker character that earned Joaquin Phoenix an Oscar]. Somehow he has concluded that a firestorm that has devoured a geography much larger than Manhattan, and is only six per cent contained, is good for him. Trump has decided it proves him right about something — if only any of us could know what that might be. It certainly has nothing to do with his idiocies around the Delta smelt, a small fish that is the subject of controversy hundreds of miles away, as it has been for more than 30 years.

The capitulant Wall Street media should cover the dishonesty and incoherence of Trump’s inanity and insanity like the evil it is. Have no doubt, malice masks predation, and it is premeditated and purposeful. Trump looks at this disaster, and he sees one thing, and one thing only. Opportunity. He sees an opportunity to attack and weaken the enemy, which in his sick mind, is California. The enemy is us.

Trump is happy today. Do you doubt it?

Over and over again, he has made clear what he wants to happen. Trump despises California. He has made that clear enough. Nine days from now, he will take command. What better way to pay back “Shifty Schiff” than by making his constituents suffer? Why would anyone think anything else would happen?

In fact, just when California needs a mass deportation least, it’s going to get one.

It’s going to get it because common sense is in short supply around Donald Trump. Up in the thin air, where the stupid never takes a break, there will be no let up.

Delivering on this promise — long discounted by the media, which constantly asserts that “he doesn’t really mean it” and “can’t possibly do it” — he has been playing like Lucy does Charlie Brown for the last 10 years. Nothing ever goes back. Nothing burned to nothingness can be restored. Nothing.

The highrises built in Miami on the edge of the ocean are sinking into the sand. The waters are rising. The temperatures are becoming more extreme. The hour long predicted has arrived. It doesn’t make it any easier to watch.

2025 is off to a brutal beginning in these United States, and it is going to get worse.

Defiance will be required, and more than anything, the faith to maintain it.

Pray for California and her people.

From MM: Thank you, Steve Schmidt, for this moving essay.

[misfitwashere]

The Great Fire

ROBERT REICH

JAN 11

Friends,

The following is the best account I’ve read of the fire that’s consuming Los Angeles. It’s from Steve Schmidt’s substack, The Warning. (steveschmidt.substack.com.Getty Images

Like the Great Fire of London in 1666, the Great Fire of Los Angeles will be recalled for 500 years.

The scale of the conflagration is biblical. These epochal fires will join Chicago and San Francisco atop an infamous registry of American destruction.

The fires are still spreading, still growing. There is no precedent, and no similar event by scale, cost or damage that has ever occurred in America. None.

The “Big One” came, but it wasn’t an earthquake that triggered the inferno, it was January winds that brought with it a storm surge of fire.

The worst case scenario has arrived, and don’t let anyone tell you that it was unforeseeable.

The conflagration was entirely predictable, and ultimately, inevitable. In fact, it was destiny. I don’t say that lightly.

The winds have brought Armageddon, and a brutal judgement upon the genius and arrogance of mankind’s building on a Garden of Eden, tempting the wrath of creation.

This is why I have written about Titanic so often. The lessons are enduring — even if the learnings have been fleeting.

There is an old saw about what starts in California ultimately spreads to every corner of the United States.

There is a lot of truth to the saying.

Consider the immense technological, cultural, and legislative invention that has come from the Golden State. The state is home to 39 million Americans. Its economy ranks fifth internationally, behind the US, China, Germany, and Japan. On a per capita basis, California's GDP is greater than that of all of these countries.

I love California, and have from the second I first set foot there more than 30 years ago.

Among the great good fortunes of my life is that I have lived in California for many years, and have explored every part of it. My political career has brought me to nearly every town and ghost town in the state. I ran Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2006 re-election campaign for governor — the last time time a Republican was elected to that office. That was almost 20 years ago.

There is no other place like California in the world.

Her beauty is as magnificent as her dangers are deadly.

It has become fashionable in recent years to bash California. The state’s governance has become a punchline, a caricature and a MAGA war cry. Among the great grotesqueries and stupidities of our time is the sheer number of MAGA politicians who openly disdain the nation’s economic, technological, social, cultural, and innovation furnace. There is no scenario in which America succeeds with a failing California. Only an imbecile would root for California to fail or burn, and tragically, there is no shortage of fools in America rooting for both.

California is a mythological land. It is a place of sublime beauty and deep complication. It is the most complex state in the most complex nation in the history of the world. It is a place where one political party rules.

One party rule breeds corruption, incompetence, mediocrity, arrogance, entitlement and delusion. Of course, the California Republican Party has long been a collection of cranks, conspiracy nuts, ideological clowns and oddballs who prefaced the rise of their federal brethren.

California is a place where MAGA holds zero sway. There are 60 Democrats out of the 80-seat State Assembly, 30 out of the 40 State Senate seats. There are eight elected statewide officials, and every single one of them is a Democrat. These are epic supermajorities.

Sacramento isn’t Washington, DC, nor is it a proxy front in the MAGA drama produced by corporate media mandarins who ignore western state issues like fire, water, and drought with as much determination as they ignored the opioid crisis and fanned Trump’s rise.

The recriminations are just beginning in California. They will get much worse because what will become clear is that the failures were epic, systemic, plain as day, completely ignored, wished away, and left to build until the instant of catastrophe.

Everything will change in California after the fires, and everything will stay the same. This tension will upend the state’s political establishment, and destroy the line of succession that has taken root during the term limits era.

A succession of mediocrities — each a political careerist — has bounced from office to office for an entire generation doing nothing but ignore growing problems, while seeking elevation to the next office.

The initiative and referendum process will be abused by political profiteers, while corrupt recovery deals proliferate like the deadly conflagration exploded.

Recovery profiteers will seek fortunes, while politicians plot for attention and advancement.

The charred wasteland will become a battlefield on which competence and incompetence will meet in daily battle. Insurance companies will deny claims saying that it was a wind event, not fire, that burned down 10,000 structures. The ordinary family devastated in a biblical fire is about to become a lonely pawn in a vicious game of musical chairs where paying out is the sucker’s move.

There are devastating, brutal days ahead for so many people.

Yet, this time there is a difference.

Southern California television news has long abhorred substance and seriousness. Politics and government were treated like genital sores by TV news executives for 40 years, as they covered freeway chases and all manner of stupidity, while the clock ticked down, while the fuse burned down. The story of the Great Inferno is the story of “The Looming Tower.”

This did not have to happen, but it also could not be stopped. It could not be stopped because nothing could stop people from building in the most beautiful places anyone had ever seen once the first thing structure was built there.

There has always been a precariousness about California, an impermanence.

When the ships came through the Golden Gate during the Gold Rush, there were so many of them they were abandoned. They became the ground fill on which the Marina district in San Francisco rose. It has crumbled, burned, and been rebuilt more than once.

There were 160,000 in California before the discovery of gold. Five years after the US Civil War there were 560,000 Americans, and by the beginning of the roaring 1920s there were 3.4 million. The count was 10.6 million in 1950, and 34 million in 2000.

The people kept coming. They kept coming and coming and coming until there were more than 39 million by 2025 when it all burned down.

The scale of the environmental disaster will dwarf the damage caused by the 9/11 clean-up. The pollution is toxic, cancerous and deadly. The magnitude of the environmental crisis is almost impossible to comprehend.

It is hard watching people who have lost everything appear on television demonstrating unbelievable perseverance and grit, and declare that they will rebuild. Some will, but the truth is that many will not, and should not.

This is going to be the most expensive disaster in the history of the United States. The costs will beggar imagination and become multiples of the initial estimates of $160 billion in damage, but it is beyond that.

The scale of the disaster and the nature of fire as a destructive force has reduced vast swaths of the second largest metro area in the United States to ashes.

The age of hyperbole has finally yielded to a reality for which there are truly no words.

What can be said?

The California political class seems to be mostly going with, “Who me?” which is always the awful predicate to, “Why me?”

For the uninitiated, let me introduce you to the LA City Council. Though the story is old, the machine remains.

America’s cities were spared the type of destruction that reigned down on European and Japanese cities like Tokyo 80 years ago. There is no modern frame of reference for an event like this occurring in a modern city anywhere in the world.

Vast parts of Los Angeles have been reduced by different means to what Tokyo was by firebombing.

Tokyo after the 1945 firebombing (USAF)

When the smoke lifts and the full sweep of the destruction can be understood it will boggle the American mind.

Then things will change.

Dramatically.

Donald Trump has talked at length about his revenge.

It has begun. It is underway. It is happening. Right now. It’s not in my head, and not in my imagination.

During the greatest crisis in the history of California en route to becoming the costliest natural disaster in American history, Donald Trump has offered snarling insults, veiled threats, misinformation and unrestrained malice.

He has used the disaster to attack the California governor, and has said nothing that matters of any consequence to the multitudes who are terrified and have lost everything.

Instead, like always, he has debased, inflamed and manipulated when he should have done the exact opposite. He seeks to gain from suffering, and incredibly, he doesn’t even bother to hide it anymore. More than anything else, it is this revelation from his chaotic transition that is most bone-chilling.

Our president is Arthur Fleck deep down.

Somehow he has concluded that a firestorm that has devoured a geography larger than Manhattan, and is only six per cent contained, is good for him. Donald has decided it proves him right about something — if only any of us could know what that might be. It certainly has nothing to do with his idiocies around the Delta smelt, a small fish that is the subject of controversy hundreds of miles away, as it has been for more than 30 years.

The capitulant Wall Street media should cover the dishonesty and incoherence of Trump’s inanity and insanity like the evil it is. Have no doubt, malice masks predation, and it is premeditated and purposeful. Trump looks at this disaster, and he sees one thing, and one thing only.

Opportunity.

He sees an opportunity to attack and weaken the enemy, which in his sick mind, is California.

The enemy is us.

Trump is happy today. Do you doubt it?

Over and over again, he has made clear what he wants to happen.

Trump despises California. He has made that clear enough.

Ten days from now, he will take command. What better way to pay back “Shifty Schiff” than by making his constituents suffer?

Why would anyone think anything else would happen?

In fact, just when California needs a mass deportation least, it’s going to get one.

It’s going to get it because common sense is in short supply around Donald Trump. Up in the thin air, where the stupid never takes a break, there will be no let up.

Delivering on this promise — long discounted by the media, which constantly asserts that he doesn’t really mean it and can’t possibly do it — he has been playing like Lucy does Charlie Brown for the last 10 years.

Nothing ever goes back.

Nothing burned to nothingness can be restored. Nothing.

The highrises built in Miami on the edge of the ocean are sinking into the sand. The waters are rising. The temperatures are becoming more extreme.

The hour long predicted has arrived.

It doesn’t make it any easier to watch.

2025 is off to a brutal beginning in these United States, and it is going to get worse.

Defiance will be required, and more than anything, the faith to maintain it.

Pray for California and her people.

[simplicius-simplicissimus]

Disbelief and Sadness!

My wife's aunt is an US citizen (her husband was an US Army helicopter pilot) and has lived in the USA for decades. Before the US election she visited Germany and we also talked about the situation in the USA - and of course compared it with recent German history. It's hard to bear when a people runs after a fool and just throws their identity and centuries of heritage into the gutter. Thinking and talking about this fact in our history was very emotional for me. I guess that a similar emotion flashed through Jimmy Kimmel's head as well and brought tears to his eyes:

I watch a lot of US news (thanks to YouTube) because I have learned to love the country, culture and people on many trips - and because developments there also have an impact on Europe. It was often annoying when American journalists, politicians or even comedians (also Jimmy Kimmel!) spoke condescendingly about Germany out of a feeling of “moral superiority” - whose history they often only know parts of (mostly just the last 120 years) and even then don’t really understand it. We (at least I am) probably know their history better than they ours🤓. But that's just how Americans are: like a carefree, immaculate, self-centered, almost naive child….that faces now adulthood! Maybe they understand now - because it can happen that overnight you start to live in a different country. I made the following comment on the video above:

„Welcome to the club - Germany's last dictator was not elected with a majority👏🥳! “Project 2025” is the plan of the now open “fascist GOP” to “bring the country into line” at the federal level. The „technical term“ from the „one o one“ for dictators is called „Gleichschaltung“ (synchronization). Germans know this term very well because it’s taught in school - not to apply it, but not to fall for it again! Some idiots over here vote for them (AFD) anyway. Churchill once said: „The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.“

By they way, the GOP has been doing this „synchronization thing“ openly and shamelessly through gerrymandering and voter suppression at the state level for years. These boys and girls are no longer interested in “democracy” - they have long been switched to play another game called “autocracy”. The “Democrats” on the other side want to continue to stick to the “rules of the game”🤦🏼‍♂️.

The good news is: you can also get rid of autocrats - giving up is not the order of the day! Sometimes even bloodless - like the Poles with their PIS party government recently (by the way, the PIS party introduced a nationwide abortion ban!). But sometimes (and that is the bad news) it can cost destroyed cities, destroyed cultural treasures, destroyed identity, destroyed international reputation (Germany used to be known as the country of poets and thinkers - today as the country that killed 6 million Jews) or 6.6 million own deaths (5.5 million soldiers who fought for the wrong ideals and 1.1 million civilian deaths).

I hope that „this dilemma“ ends for you the “Polish way” - and that one day you will not be asked: “Why didn’t you prevent this?” or “What did you do about it?” All the best for your future from over the Atlantic - but I fear it’s going to be a rough ride 👋🏻.“

Moderate Americans must do their homework now - and we Europeans ours!

-Simplicius Simplicissimus

„It happened so slowly. Yeah, kind of overnight. We woke up one morning and Europe was at war.“

-Lee Miller in movie „Lee“

[mckitterick]

revolutionaries who think in authoritarian ways (of which using violence to create political change often indicates) are likely to simply build a mirror of the authoritarian regime they tear down

however, we do occasionally see alternative routes to revolutionary change - even where violence is necessary - such as in the Star Wars universe

what makes the Resistance resistant to simply installing a new fascist dictatorship is that it's not only a loose affiliation of parties rather than a single unit, but their end goal is to restore representative democracy rather than simply kill off all the Empire-minded types and hope a new dictator doesn't step into the power vacuum

Iain M Banks' Culture novels are a great example of a galaxy-spanning utopian society brought about not through violent revolution, but through incremental, peaceful changes - all evaluated by a democratic process to weed out potential authoritarianism or other freedom-stifling or rights-infringing aspects. imbalanced power cannot accrue in the Culture

fear of revolutionaries comes not only from those holding power in the status quo who hope to instill fear of change (propaganda), but also from fear of revenge by those who've been mistreated under the status quo (self-centered POV of people who cannot imagine peaceful ways of living)

if you want a revolution to be successful - that is, if you want the outcome to not just be a rebranded authoritarian regime - you need the revolutionaries to not be the first to use violence to bring about their political ends, because those willing to use violence first cannot be trusted to not continue using violence to enforce their ideology

this is why status-quo lovers and conservatives so often brand simple protest and change as "violence," because we've seen what those going first to violence do with newly gained power

yet peaceful protest seldom brings change - except in egalitarian, democratic cultures

by definition, authoritarian dictatorships are already violent, so using violence to overthrow them need not result in just a fresh take on authoritarianism. revolutionaries seeking to change dictatorial authoritarian structures have no other routes to enact change, except from within, and even then others in power are almost certain to immediately quash hints of change-seeking (also, what's the likelihood of someone attaining power in such a structure not being authoritarian themselves?)

what's necessary is that the revolutionaries must have a plan to build true representational democracy afterward, after the violence and revolution

and they must not install their own new status-quo enforcers, because that easily leads to the emergence of more authoritarian structures

“When we see violent characters who kill for primarily political reasons, they are often anti-heroes at best, outright villains at worst. The idea of the full circle revolution - of the secret dictator hiding in the throat of every rebel leader, waiting to leap out and betray the non-ideological hero - is utterly pervasive. It appears in videogames, where good old-fashioned all-American heroes like Jim Raynor of Starcraft or Booker DeWitt of Bioshock Infinite are betrayed by villainous revolutionaries Arcturus Mengsk and Daisy Fitzroy (and after all they’ve done for them!). It is common in films, from supervillains like Magneto and Killmonger, liberationists written as would-be conquerors, to the rebels of The Hunger Games, who vote to continue the games as soon as they’re in power, except with the children of the dethroned elite rather than the children of the poor. The same reversal is mentioned in A Song of Ice and Fire, where rebel slaves, once liberated, enslave their former masters; in the TV version, an evil fundamentalist visits the kind of cruelty on the King’s Landing nobility that they visited on others. In all these examples we see an echo of the primal fear of every oppressive class, the nightmare at the heart of modern white supremacy: what if someone did to us what we’ve done to them? Liberation is re-imagined as the world turned not so much upside-down but mirrored.”

— Alister MacQuarrie, Outlaw Kings and Rebellion Chic

[bllsbailey]

Comedian Jim Gaffigan Kills It at Charity Dinner, Smokes Kamala for Being MIA

Remember when British comedian Ricky Gervais absolutely destroyed the Hollywood elite at the 2020 Golden Globe Awards? It was a beautiful moment worth revisiting—multiple times. Gervais eviscerated Tinseltown progressives for being so stunningly out of touch with the struggles of real people, and it is a thrill to watch even after all these years.

He laid into the vapid nature of all too many “celebrities":

So if you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.

— Theodora 🇬🇧🇮🇱🇺🇦 (@EmpressThea527) January 6, 2020

On Thursday night, however, it was time for the annual Al Smith charity dinner in New York City, where dignitaries from the entertainment, politics, and business worlds all showed up to raise money for Catholic charities. Well, everyone except for Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who evidently had more important things to do (what, exactly?). She sent in one of the most cringe-worthy videos of all time to make up for her non-appearance, but it failed to mask the fact that she’s the first candidate since Walter Mondale in 1984 who didn’t have the guts to make an appearance. 

Now I know that not everyone thought Jim Gaffigan was funny, but I have been loving his Saturday Night Live impressions of goofy Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. I thought he brought the heat to the evening and dropped some vicious—though fair—hits on Biden, Harris, Schumer, the Democrat party, and even Trump himself.

Here we go:

Jim Gaffigan: "The Democrats have been telling us Trump's reelection is a threat to democracy. In fact, they were so concerned of this threat, they staged a coup, ousted their democratically elected incumbent, and installed Kamala Harris." pic.twitter.com/ZVgqMbT2p5— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 18, 2024

While there was an extremely serious point behind that joke, it also made me laugh. But wait, there's more.

This one had me guffawing. "They're called the Biden Family":

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 18, 2024

But he really nailed it when he called out Harris for inexplicably failing to appear. Gaffigan: “She did find time to appear on 'The View,' Howard Stern, Colbert, and the longtime staple of campaigning, the 'Call Her Daddy podcast,'” he joked. It’s funny, but it’s also gonna leave a mark because it’s 100 percent true. 

"Twenty-two percent of Americans identify as Catholic. Catholics will be a key demographic in every battleground state."

"I'm sorry... Why is Vice President Kamal Harris not here?" he wondered. A helluva question:

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 18, 2024

Here’s a nice wrap-up of his best moments:

— Overton (@overton_news) October 18, 2024

I have often argued that comedy and satire are some of the best ways to expose the extremism on the left, and it’s something conservatives must continue to do as we fight back against misinformation warfare, censorship, and cancel culture.

I thought Gaffigan was great.

See more--> Harris Snubs, Trump Headlines New York's Al Smith Dinner for Catholic Charities

HOT TAKES: Al Smith Dinner Featured Trump at His Funniest Despite the Elephant (Not) in the Room