I knew that this idea had been floated: President Joe Biden’s senior aides are conducting a vigorous internal debate over whether to issue preemptive pardons to a range of current and former public officials who could be targeted with President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House, according to senior Democrats familiar with …
Category: political dynamics
Nov 23 2024
Fears Of An Old Man
[A reprint from Liberty’s Torch V1.0. I wrote this on January 31, 2015, shortly before I retired. – FWP] Just in case you were blissfully unaware of it, you’re getting older at an unrelenting sixty seconds per minute. I’ve already endured nearly two billion seconds of aging. Many of those seconds were …
Oct 25 2024
Pathways
First and foremost, Happy Saint Crispin’s Day! It’s not a bad idea to reread Henry V, if you have the time. Henry’s Saint Crispin’s Day speech to his troops at Agincourt is the second most famous of all Shakespeare’s soliloquies. The rest of the play ain’t bad either. If you’d rather watch than read, …
Oct 19 2024
The Fallacy That Won’t Die
Our Gentle Readers may have noticed that one of the two major political parties has nominated socialists for president and vice-president of these United States. Kamala Harris’s socialism isn’t perfectly overt, though her inclinations and her totalitarian impulses are quite open. Still a comparison of her advocacies with the 1928 platform of the Socialist …
Oct 16 2024
Where There’s A Demand
…a supply will appear. Roger Kimball informs us: As one commentator noted, “Kamala Harris’s disastrous Univision town hall featured a ‘fake’ audience. 50% of the attendees were handpicked from across the country and flown to the town hall and were allowed to ask questions. The other 50% of the attendees were hired by …
Sep 29 2024
Why Do They Vote X?
There’s a gag from the 1912 campaign for president, when former president Theodore Roosevelt was campaigning on the Bull Moose (Progressive) ticket: While Teddy was giving a campaign speech, a man in the audience leaped to his feet and cried out: “I’m a Democrat! My father was a Democrat, his father was a …
Sep 14 2024
Riding
I’m currently ensconced in a hotel in north-western Washington state, not quite the prog-nazi hellhole of Seattle but close to it. I’m doing my Tour of Honor ride, and I have to hit Blaine and then ride down I-5 to continue the trips. Anyways, that’s why I’m here. The reason I’m posting is that because …
Aug 26 2024
Hypocrisy In Politics
Surely there’s a lot of it. Our usual impulse is to dismiss most of it with a plaintive “What can you do?” John Hinderaker reminds us that it’s electorally relevant: The Democrats are the party of the nomenklatura, including the most petty of the nomenklatura–Americans who have managed to graduate from college. Beyond …
Jul 24 2024
The Weapon
Much of what passes for political discourse today is essentially empty. What’s discussed has little bearing on how the American political system actually functions: the forces that drive it, the consequences the interactions of those forces produce, and the responses of private citizens desperate to protect themselves, their loved ones, and their property. …
Jul 20 2024
Sheila Jackson Lee is dead
CNN writes her hagiography. Unlike 99% of the congress critters out there, SJL is one of the congress critters I have actually met in person. She was as racist and stupid as she seemed. It wasn’t a matter of the cameras making her appear that dumb, She really was that dumb. I hate to say …
Jul 10 2024
Sides
‘Hoom, hm, I have not troubled about the Great Wars,’ said Treebeard; ‘they mostly concern Elves and Men. That is the business of Wizards: Wizards are always troubled about the future. I do not like worrying about the future. I am not altogether on anybody’s side, because nobody is altogether on my side, if …
Jun 29 2024
The call has gone out
Bathhouse Barry O’Bumblefuck has put forth the narrative, and the media lapdogs, being the worthless propaganda whores that they are, are falling in line. Once again, the Democrat-Media Complex is going to start telling you to ignore your lying eyes, Drooling Joe the Chinese Hand Puppet is fine, there’s no cognitive decline, he didn’t really …
Apr 09 2024
Why The Decent Must Counter The Screams
The Progressive movement has always known the importance of the scream. Conservatives have, for the most part, been identified as the base of the “Silent Majority.” Indeed, we’ve had it beaten into us as a matter of pride that “we are not like them” by high minded voices such as William F. Buckley Jr. Well, …
Apr 08 2024
Hope And Division Part 2
In our conversations about important topics, the C.S.O. often asks what I consider to be the critical kind of question: the kind that clarifies what the issue really is. A question of that sort, put to someone with a particular stand on the issue, can get him to reveal what he values most. …
Feb 23 2024
Public Schooling: The Grand Delusion
“The child is not the mere creature of the state.” — Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 1922 One of the more persistent debates in pro-freedom circles is whether children have the same rights as adults. In practice, they don’t: their parents can compel and restrain them against their wills, at least before they …
Oct 28 2023
Hate Scam Jamboree
In these days of trillion-dollar budgets, a mere $110 million looks like a rounding error. But it is not so; it’s a huge amount of money that someone, or some organization, would immediately put out its claws to snag. So any rationale under which a government could appropriate $110 million is something to be …
Oct 16 2023
Lessons Not Learned
One might think that after Kevin McCarthy worked a deal with the National Socialist Democrat Workers Party, and then was promptly bit in the ass by said National Socialist Democrat Workers Party, people in the GOP might step back from further deals with the National Socialist Democrat Workers Party. Sadly, the GOP establishment has far …
Oct 14 2023
Complexities And Human Capability
Today, over at Cold Fury, there’s an excellent and thought-provoking essay by co-contributor SteveF that explores one of the funnier fallacies commonly advanced as an aphorism: (NB: I have no idea who Hanlon is or was and bear him no ill will, but I will say that as a vendor of rose-colored glasses, …
Oct 14 2023
Why?
Some recent stories are enough to enrage a saint: Working out at the gym this morning and a follower came up to say hi He served in the Navy, is now 24 years old, and a very fit guy Told me they forced him to take Moderna – he resisted but didn’t want to …
Oct 04 2023
Tamed
Sundance at The Last Refuge lays it out straight for us: In 2009 72% of the country, and an even larger percentage of the Republican voters, did not want Obamacare. The govt takeover of healthcare was along purely ideological grounds. For the 2010 midterm election, the professional Republican apparatus campaigned on this single …
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