Thank you Matt for reassuring us we were not all insane and for pointing out the hypocrisy and injustice of the past 4 years. May you and your family enjoy a Merry Christmas!
Without the real resistance- the journalists, the comedians, the novelists who bucked this scourge, everyone else would have had no place to go, to focus, to feel part of pushing back. I did notice that the Taibbis, Kirns, Murrays, Greenwalds,-- were invariably smarter and wittier than their one- note, scold counterparts. It was,and still is, a difference of day and night.
I think we're in for some more junk-- they're promising "street" action, read mobs, in a "crisis" -- likely enforcement of the law, crime and illegal migrants. I think they're just waiting for that. We're at the beginning of the end, but universities and AGs have yet to get a colonic. Happy Christmas.
Thanks for the feminine in "her destroyed". Few employ that...how many take Latin these days and would know "patria," meaning country and homeland, is feminine and the root of patriot and patriotism?
How do we deprogram our children and young adults and stop the lunatic indoctrination they're receiving and will keep receiving from fellow travelers who've embedded themselves in our school and university system like chiggers?
Chelsea Clinton criticized Substack two years ago , for basically allowing free speech... I went on a rampage saying."Keep your hands OFF my Substack"... I understand it being a refuge.
Like Harry, she is an irrelevant member of the "lucky sperm club" who thinks that because she was born into a certain position and has sunshine blown up her backside for her entire life, her derivative commentary of rehashed talking points on whatever is the hot-button issue du jour is of interest to anyone but herself.
Joe Rogan has brought up more than once a statement by Marc Andreesen re two recent and major forks in the road that resulted in the positive changes we wittness today, one being Elon buying Twitter and the resulting Twitter Files (thanks to Matt’s outstanding work there), and the other being Trump turning his head at his rally in Butler, PA. Elon buying Twitter swung the direction of history in an extremely significant way.
I remember zero curiosity about the real Obama. He got a hall pass. And all because he says he is “black,” whatever that means. A massive American error.
I do wish he would stop yelling at his audience. His message is great, and I understand his rage but the people listening do not need to hear the rage constantly in my opinion.
I use to worry that I was putting myself into a confirmation bias feedback loop by repeatedly turning to people like Matt and Glenn G and Joe R and Bret W and Jordan P for information and insight. But then I realized that many of those that I have found and have followed have found and follow each other.
Confirmation bias is much less of a worry when REAL journalism is afoot. I think the aforementioned are just as likely to point out flaws in all directions as they are to point out the flaws in that with which they most ardently agree.
Alas, David Samuels's prose has the fluid viscosity of fudge. But thanks for the advice, which is always appreciated. And to Matt and Walter and everyone else, a Merry Christmas and a Happy Hanukah!
And for those whose interest in Montana perhaps has been piqued by Walter's tales, grab a copy of the amazing, perhaps long-forgotten "Montana: High, Wide and Handsome," by Joseph Kinsey Howard [1906-1951]; Yale University Press (1943 hardcover "Seventh printing January 1945"), an edition of which was bought last week on a whim.
After reading ten pages of it, I scampered back to the keyboard and ordered another used hardcover copy of "Montana," which, if the advertising can be believed, has physically fared better in the decades since its creation.
A Christmas miracle --- a readable book published by a University Press!
"If you subscribe to this site it’s likely because, like me, you felt the world slipping off its axis and were looking for someone to reassure you you weren’t crazy. We lived through a difficult time together, but the fever finally broke this fall, and the world is now allowed to remark on the Emperor’s lack of clothes. It feels like good news" YEP! Thanks, Matt
Matt? Why do you think the spell has been broken? Your lips to God’s ear, but I suspect we are just in the storm’s eye. The next wave of shock doctrine tsunamis is just arriving.
I don’t think it has to do with politics, except in the sense that the ability to sell the public on anything collapsed with this Biden/Harris debacle. The suspension of disbelief is broken. The whole panic con depended on the fear of offending a ruling majority, which is now no longer ruling. I think it will have to regroup for a while…
Should say, it depended on making people afraid of offending a ruling unanimous majority. It’s why people were afraid to push back against simple things… and now there’s nothing up there to fear. Other things, but not that
The idea of the Israeli apartheid state is an ignorant myth. Nearly 20% of Israelis are Muslim and they have all the same rights as Israeli Jews, including the right to run for office, be gay without risk of punishment or death, and—if you are a woman— wearing whatever or going wherever the fuck you want. List the Muslim countries where the inverse is true for Jews or Muslim women. Wait, I'll help you. Here's the list:
Explain how Israel is an apartheid state? Unless you think a state keeping terrorists from killing its citizens is an apartheid state. By the way, Hamas likes what you say, you’re a helpful tool for the proxies of Iran.
Israel has lost whatever rights it had to cross its borders with any of its neighbors. Israel is a rogue state, its leaders wanted for war crimes, and its legacy to be that of a genocide against the rightful owners of its occupied land.
No country has right to exterminate a people, destroy its hospitals, Universities, and all infrastructure, (no matter who they pretend is hiding in them). I ashamed of the human race, though of course Mark Twain got there long before me.
Israel is the one country in the Middle East where all people are free. They have a large Muslim population. They value women's rights. They protect gays.
Iran is indeed trying to exterminate the people in Israel.
Yeah, I'm not finding people afraid to speak out on Gaza. Just set foot on a college campus. Far too few say this is an incredibly complex, historical situation requiring people to think more and emote less.
I am being doxxed, stalked, and professionally threatened for relatively mild posts about Gaza. I am VERY afraid, not for me, but for the people who work for me. I know for sure that you are underestimating this.
Israel IS the terrorist. Genocidal, sociopathic political entity. Not fighting a war for me, or the vast majority of the world's population. Put Ben-Gvir and Smotrich in Hugo Boss uniforms, they'd fit right in with the SS. And it's them who show the real face of Israel. You support that, you're a lost soul.
Yeah, yeah. But the fact remains if Palestinians laid down their weapons there would be peace. if Israel laid down its weapons they would all be dead. Murderers got to murder. Israelis are not beheading innocents nor ramming cars into markets filled with children. Islamists are.
What do you have to say about the Muslims that rape and kill citizens in the countries in which they are immigrants? What do you have to say about the Muslims that drive cars into crowds in Germany? Europe is REPLETE with examples of Muslim acts of terror that MUSLIMS say are in service of their religion as stated in the Koran. What do you say to the Shiite and Sunni Muslims that have their own genocidal aims against one another and have been offing each other in record numbers for time in memorial in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, etc. You throw around these words "genocidal" and "sociopathic" as if they don't and have never applied to the demographic that YOU and other half-measure zealots defined as a victimhood class. Your hypocrisy is blatant.
Our fellow commenters above, who dared to wish Matt Merry Christmas, will no doubt hear from those who will claim it continues to show a disrespect of Jews. Some dumbass will equate 'Merry Christmas' with support of Hamas.
Just look at all the people wearing MAGA hats and doing the Trump dance. Cancel culture’s , like Obama’s, time has passed. Here’s to a prosperous New Year!
You alluded to it, but I haven’t read very much about this election ending Obama’s third presidential term, given that his disciples were pretty much telling zombie Joe what to do. I so enjoyed Barry and Michelle’s exasperation at having diluted influence, shrilly scolding lesser mortals to no avail. As you say, good riddance to their influence (though their smugness will ever remain).
I've looked it as his 16-year reign of power ending, as he was calling all the Russia!Russia!Russia! shots, fucking Bernie multiple times, propping up Biden until he knifed him in the back, and generally reminding us how disappointing he was as president.
If all these elitists truly believed in Climate Armageddon, they'd buy smaller properties far from the oceans, & limit their travel by private jet, but nooooo.
I’m pondering why they were able to get away with so much more this time around compared to hoaxes that were of similar poor quality such as the Dan Rather George W. Bush memo in 2004.
And it’s amazing because if you compare Russia gate, for instance, to the Dan Rather, George W. Bush, National Guard memo…
The liberal media had to admit within a couple days of online sleuths debunking it that it was a fake memo that someone had created using modern word processing technology, not a 1960’s typewriter.
But Dan Rather got debunked that same week and had to step down from his post and then left CBS a few months later.
What happened in Russia gate showed how much power the Borg had accumulated because even though people were debunking it in real time (Greenwald, Taibbi , Dave smith) it just grew and grew and people won Pulitzer Prizes for their work on it (propping it up not showing the fraud), and it consumed our nation for three years
I think the stuff that Matt has brought up here is a valuable contribution to understanding the difference in level of control and power.
12/24/24: The best part of the Dan Rather story came along after Rather got thrown out of CBS. His ill-gotten millions were burning a hole in his kangaroo pouch, and he listened to and fell for his personal lawyers' spiel that he could take CBS to court and win. Which culminated in a prolonged, highly publicized and very expensive failure for America's Biggest Okie-Dokey BS Artist.
I’ve typed and back-spaced over three different replies , here. The enormity of the con, the corruption of those honor bound to secure our rights and tell us the truth and the delusional refusal to acknowledge any of it ever happened is staggering in the extreme. A big chunk of our electorate will dismiss all Matt et al truth bombs as far-right conspiracies. A this point, I’ll just drink and consider the damage.
Fear of losing one's job resulted in fake compliance to group think. Critical thinking hid underground, biding it's time until it was safe to come out.
I remember when if Tiger Woods was in contention on the Final Round, the Tournament was over. Then Tiger's wife chased him down with a golf club & the mystic was forever broken.
12/24/24: Depends on how many more people are set on fire and burned to death on subways by illegal immigrants emtering the country with the blessing and financial assistance given to them by the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA, and the suicidal major cities with "sanctuary" laws.
This issue is going to have a lot of resonance in 2025. So will Biden’s recent commutation of so many from death row to life terms. Law and order is going to come raging back into fashion in 2025. MMW.
Election day : OMG DEMOCRACY IS ON THE BALLOT, WE ARE IN REAL DIRE STRAITS HERE, FASCISM, RACISM AND MISOGYNY ARE WINNING!!!!!
Day after: Well, let's see what's on the docket for this morning. Oh, what's that? Nope, no plans to overthrow the currently elected fascist. Noting in the works to prevent the degradation of democracy, no revolutions being announced. Nothing to see here. Boy, those health care insurance plans sure are corrupt aren't they?
I have stumbled into "struggle sessions" where I witnessed the "regrouping". They were still in shock that there is anyone, anywhere that disagrees with them. They MUST be (re-)educated!! When? NOW!!
One of my favorite Peak Woke "deconstructions" of recent history argues that Disco Demolition Night was an orgy of racism and homophobia.
I lived through that period and the teenage stoners running wild through Comiskey were my people. "Disco sucked" because it was for pretty people with money who went to fancy places, as opposed to us long hairs in concert t-shirts.
(Then again, the kids at Comiskey Park that night were white working class, so even then our social and intellectual betters were looking for justification to shit on their inferiors.)
Remember the observation "Disco Sucks" hand sprayed in flat black on yellow brick on a building on the south side of 5th street between Washington and Bloomfield in Hoboken back in the late '80s before that city evolved (as many immediate NYC suburbs do) into some version of the upper east side. Graffiti was still there in when I moved out in '92. Man I wish I had a photo of that pure truth in the late afternoon light.
Funny. I lived on Hudson in Hoboken between 3rd and 4th during those years. I’m trying to remember that. For me, “Disco sucks” was more of a late 70’s phenomenon but maybe I just don’t remember so well any more.
The beat and underground spirit of disco continued on through the history of electronic music. The overbearing, popular shoving of disco down the general population’s throat burned on Disco Demolition Night. Kinda like corporate DEI bs!
Absolutely. I’m kind of shocked by this turn that Racket has taken. It almost feels like they have gone from critics of power to cheer leaders. Walter has gone fully into the idea that people have no agency and are only parroting the political narrative that ‘they’ are imposing on us. It’s rather dispiriting.
Not a chance. Matt is just celebrating winning freedom of speech. Without that, there is nothing. If you think these guys won't be critical, think agian.
With Elon’s purchase of Twitter and Trump’s election, the imposition of limits on free speech have been stopped for the time being. I view that as a huge win.
Those were indeed, good developments, but I'm not sure I would go so far as to say "stopped", even just for the time being. And things in Europe aren't improving much.
Feelin’ ya, but recent developments have brought fresh clarity to a situation familiar from time immemorial: the people who do actually value freedom of thought and speech will always have to play ball with the far greater number whose advocacy of those essentials is only really based on perceived status threats. So take it as a given that free thought and speech is always in a delicate position, vulnerable as much to our own character flaws as it is to outright suppression. What to do? Keep standing up for it. Keep listening to people with different experiences, perceptions and ideas. And keep a sharp attitude toward those who would have you forsake that habit. Here’s a prediction: the people who really do believe in free thought and expression will continue to have plenty of defense to play, no matter who holds the reins of power.
Also, I am encouraged by watching Elon Musk encourage all thought and by the fact that they are being transparent about these cuts and asking for input. Very unusual. Such an improvement from what we've lived through. That is a "win."
Right. He is largely responsible for Substack being here (since they planned to go after it before he bought Twitter), but hey, Bah Humbug, right? I'm sure you can find the worst in anyone.
Musk is a loose cannon, but that's what people elected Trump for. Musk is also powerless, with no official position. Trump just cheerfully pointed out that Musk can't be President, because he isn't a native citizen. So he's actually thinking about what he's unleashed.
Nobody said he was in charge OR that we wanted him to be president; however, calling him a "loose cannon" is ridiculous. You should be that "loose." Elon Musk almost single handedly rescued free speech in this country. Substack couldn't have done that alone.
Only if you are a total pessimist. That is not critical thinking. I agree it's difficult to tell good circumstances from bad or to know what is coming next that could be worse, but we are better off than we were the last four years. Count your blessings.
Let hope that he ends Ukraine but Pam Bondi has called for the FBI to investigate anyone who is protesting Israel’s ‘wars’. This is a guy who has been president for 4 years and has appointed a cabinet full of the same only neo cons we’ve known for decades. So sure, call me pessimistic.
Elbows, you won't get everything you want but you sound a little bit off when you write that Trump isn't a change of circumstance. It's a big change for many reasons, including the New York Times just published an article (3 years late) stating that illegal immigration under Biden was the highest in the history of our country. That was intentional, as you might know, and Trump will reinstitute his laws and finish building the wall which sends the message that the 1.2 million LEGAL immigrants we take in every year are enough for now, that will be a sea change. That's just one example, however large, and there are many more. Some of which he will have learned to navigate cuz of a first term of learning hard lessons about vile people on both sides of the aisle and within the entrenched bureaucracy, such as the CDC and NHIH, and a term filled with more varied political attacks than any president in my lifetime, and I'm 156 years old. Or so, but that's how old I feel after watching the ghastly past 4 years of "Biden".
Matt has been telling it like it is for over 20 years, calling our attention to stupid politics on both sides, police brutality and the fucked-up courts, Goldman Sachs and their fellow swine, all the way up to the present. He's made equal fun of Trump and Biden and Obama, etc.
Haha! Say like George Soros ruling the left for 50years? Musk joked about that recently. Now the right have their own billionaire. It seems the world has always been run by those with money and power. For now I’ll hitch my wagon to the free speech billionaire.
Just give him a chance to breathe and regroup. Tamp down the stress hormones and look into what America and families really are to each other. Hope and peace—it’s something to aspire for. Merry Christmas!🎁
I agree. Nothing has changed here in Northern Virginia, and I doubt much has changed in most blue enclaves with perhaps some exceptions. like pockets of tech. Trump is still Hitler, our democracy is in peril, Elon Musk is dangerous, gathering clouds of chaos are on the horizon, and there was no cover-up of Biden's unfitness for office. The ignorance and intellectual laziness of the left is undiminished and will fuel the next onslaught of craziness.
Yes, and we have to watch what the ruling classes are doing structurally. I'd like to think it will be harder to convince people that raw milk kills and traditional farming methods are bad for the planet, but in the meantime billionaires are buying up farmland from beleaguered family farmers to use for industrial ag.
Do you have equal disdain for the Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi terrorists, the former two groups which use their own civilian populations as human shields and cannon/sympathy fodder?
Actually I have sympathy for those muslims, especially the Palestinians. They have been under assault from the Zionists for generations, perhaps a century or more. The Zionists have stolen their land and killed off massive numbers of innocent men, women and children. I see the Israelites as doing the work of Moloch.
I simply do not understand this fashion-fad of Jew-hatred. I grew up in New York City in the 1960s and early 1970s - in the schools I went to, the Jewish kids were the majority, and I loved their cultural difference from my own, which I also loved.
New York City was a fine place to grow up - when I did it. I would no more raise a child there now than I would expose it naked to a pack of starving coyotes.
I’m with you on this, Ellen. I spent my time from the 5th grade through most of the 8th grade on Staten Island and in Jersey. I was a transient, being a military brat, and I learned so much about Jewish culture and customs from those schools I attended. I even lived in Leonardo, New Jersey for about a year and a half, small town that became known for movies by Kevin Smith, who grew up in Red Bank. Clerks was filmed in Leonardo. Course I was long gone by then but I loved that place! Learned a lot about Italian culture there.
If one grew up in that area, in that time, one has, I believe, honorary status as part Jewish, part Italian, part Irish, part Puerto Rican, and part black, so long as one had sufficient exposure and interaction with these cultures.
It was a time in which black women complimented my mother on the manners she had raised my sister and me to have. "They remind me of little black girls." And my mother acknowledged that black mothers raised their children with beautiful manners.
Ou sont les nieges d'antan? (I hope I got the spelling of the last word correctly.)
"If you subscribe to this site it’s likely because, like me, you felt the world slipping off its axis and were looking for someone to reassure you you weren’t crazy." For sure! That sentence is the best Christmas present I could have possibly received. Thanks, Matt!
Thanks Matt. Agreed and your relentless appetite for exposing the madness had at least some influence on arriving at this point. Maybe someday that influence will be recognized as extraordinary. It should.
Enjoy the holidays and catch your breath because this fight will never be over. It needs to be resisted and exposed daily.
Let us be hopeful that just as the media degenerated thanks to the class culture built by Columbia School of Journalism, that it can be rebuilt by those with the craftsmanship you have Matt. Merry Christmas to you, your family and all of us fools who follow you.
Christmas is a Christian holiday - just sayin. Great time to remember life is a lot easier living looking for the good in others, so here's to looking for the good in every person on the planet this holiday season. Merry Christmas and Happy holidays to everyone of every faith, and to those with no faith at all!
A "Christian" holiday grafted onto pagan winter solstice celebrations and traditions. Much of what is in the "Christian" winter holiday pre-date Christianity, e.g., the Cristmas Tree, the Yule Log, etc.
Matt- Thank you for your role in pushing back on the lies. You are one of a handful of journalists fought tenaciously for our right to free speech and expression.
I also thought that Samuels’ article was fascinating and insightful. But I agree with that “rapid political enlightenment” was not solely attributable to liberal psy-ops. I think that TDS played a large role. The need to believe the opposite of what Trump was saying pushed a lot of supposedly educated and rational people to take positions that they never would have otherwise taken. One example is the number of people I’ve talked to who, all of a sudden, believed that mass (illegal) immigration had no downside.
As for whether “normalcy” can endure: I remind you that 95% of university faculty, the teachers’ union, the federal workforce (outside the soldiers), and the press are still in the tank for the Dems. That will take GENERATIONS to undo.
Having suffered from it myself, I'm convinced TDS was a goal of the liberal psy-op. A really effective one — we all have friends who still experience it.
TDS as the ultimate Permission Structure, as laid out by David Samuels.
I need to think more about this.
There is no doubt that TDS enabled - nay, DROVE - so many supposedly reasonable people to adopt so many fringe beliefs, is a phenomenon that should be studied for decades.
Critical thinking skills have certainly taken a turn for the worse in our society. We have conflated subjective and sentimental thinking with moral thinking. People are starting to wake up (isn’t it ironic that people are waking up from woke?!!) from the mass delirium but how to re-inculcate objective, rational thinking skills in a populace addicted to the opiate of social media?
Valorizing Netanyahu as successful war hero at the cost of 41,000 people and the destruction of entire cities as if this is an attempt to blow out Iran is a lie.
Netanyahu has been planning to do this for decades. He was waiting for an excuse and compared to the scale of carnage since the Nakba, Oct. 7 is a drop in the bucket compared to 40 years of Israel destroying almost entirely innocent Palestinian lives.
The fact that you'd back this in a giddy letter about how it's all good shows me the extent to which you're as captured as all the rest. If you think this is a respite, fine. Time will show you something very different. So yeah, have a merry christmas. See you on the other side, when you realize you've been rooting for two sides of the same totalitarian coin.
Good job cheerleading. And calling out praise for a genocidal maniac.
I'm going to assume from your mindless blather that you're too young to remember the effect of the milai massacre on the consciousness of the American population during the Vietnam war.
Soldiers went into a town and slaughtered a couple of hundred people. When word finally got out, and I think it was the New York Times reporter that broke the original story, so many people's stomachs were turned by the unbelievable violence.
Up until October 7th I had sympathy for the Palestinian people.
That's sympathy for anything and everything that is Palestinian has been eradicated by the bloodthirstyness of those animals.
If I'm not mistaken, I think Netanyahu wanda the world to see what kind of Savage as they are.
Well, it sure worked as far as I'm concerned. Combining that with the fact, the fact Sunshine that not a single other Arab Nation will accept Palestinians shows you just what kind of pieces of shit living that section of the world
Nah, I'm not a Jim. I'm bronx Irish Catholic born. In the aftermath of October 7th trying to come to some understanding of how this could be tolerated in a society led me to look at the so-called religion of Islam.
It's not a religion asshole. It's a death cult and the sooner it is called that, and the sooner it is thrown into the dustbin of history. History the way that other Savage religions of the past have been thrown into the dustbin the better off this planet will be.
The elite spy agency on earth, Mossad, had no idea that Hamas was planning an attack! I call that B.S. Their plan was to help Hamas so they would have a reason to scorch earth Palestine to the ground. Many Christians and their churches are in Palestine. They too are being killed because the Zionists still hate Jesus and all his followers. They pay $$ millions to Protestant churches in the US to proclaim that Jesus plans to save the ‘Jews’ so congregants will back anything Israel does and send them money. AIPAC also pays millions each year to all the members of Congress to support the Zionist cause. The US fights wars on their behalf. My fear is Trump’s major donors are “Jews” and he will back whatever they want, as all prior presidents have done.
Thanks for some pure science fiction! Have you published a science fiction novel? You are very good at saying the opposite of the facts!
Zionists are very supportive of Christians. That is a fact.
And Christians are very supportive of human rights, which Israel is the strongest supporter of in the Middle East, by far. It is the only country where LGBTQ+ people can live openly. It is the only country where women have full rights.
Well said. Taibbi’s remark about Netanyahu is not only sickening but betrays a degree of ignorance, mental confusion and/or utter indifference to his government’s crimes that shocks me. That one remark alone should be sufficient to tarnish permanently Taibbi’s claims to be a critical thinker.
Thank you for not using the term 'Jew'. Only those that lived in Judea, settled by Judah as one of the twelve tribes of Israel (Jacob), were called a Jew. God dispersed the other eleven tribes, the Israelites, for their wicked ways.
Jacob’s brother Esau was renamed Edom by God for giving away his birthright and sent to live in the barren hills. His tribe, the Edomites were Hebrew, as was Abraham, and they wondered the then populated world, intermarrying with pagans, and much later called themselves Jews. They are the Zionist who are trying to reclaim Esau’s birthright.
Right? Shelley was spewing the same shit on October 8, before any response from Israel, and while the hostages were being located in strategic locations throughout Gaza.
Beautifully written Matt. Thank you for always being there when shit was nuts. Merry Christmas
Thank you Matt for reassuring us we were not all insane and for pointing out the hypocrisy and injustice of the past 4 years. May you and your family enjoy a Merry Christmas!
Just 4?
Without the real resistance- the journalists, the comedians, the novelists who bucked this scourge, everyone else would have had no place to go, to focus, to feel part of pushing back. I did notice that the Taibbis, Kirns, Murrays, Greenwalds,-- were invariably smarter and wittier than their one- note, scold counterparts. It was,and still is, a difference of day and night.
I think we're in for some more junk-- they're promising "street" action, read mobs, in a "crisis" -- likely enforcement of the law, crime and illegal migrants. I think they're just waiting for that. We're at the beginning of the end, but universities and AGs have yet to get a colonic. Happy Christmas.
Substack has been my refuge for the past four years. Only here did I find voices that made any sense - which helped me feel like I wasn’t alone.
I hope the current reprieve is not temporary, but a true paradigm shift. I love my country and don’t wish to see her destroyed by misguided zealots.
Merry Christmas. Wishing everyone all things merry and bright in 2025!🎄
Thanks for the feminine in "her destroyed". Few employ that...how many take Latin these days and would know "patria," meaning country and homeland, is feminine and the root of patriot and patriotism?
The motto of USARMY Signal Corps (I am a commo vet) is “Pro Patria Vigilans.” So, I have a passing acquaintance. Plus, liberty is also a lady.🗽
Libertas domina est! I have now exhausted my Latin!
Don't forget Virginia's motto: Sic Semper Tyrannus and the USMC motto Semper Fidelis.
Vivendo Dicsimus
Reading the comments on Substack from sane and intelligent people was a godsend since Covid broke.
Common sense always returns.
Otherwise we all die.
Yes. I knew reality would win out eventually. It’s just a matter of how much damage gets done first.
Reality always wins out in the end.
Thank you for your service, Lightwing!
Yes, and how long it takes to recover. With covid could be 4 or 5 generations.
How do we deprogram our children and young adults and stop the lunatic indoctrination they're receiving and will keep receiving from fellow travelers who've embedded themselves in our school and university system like chiggers?
Precisely! How insane is it that we were once cajoled into arguing for REALITY!?
We still are!!! I have school-aged children in Manhattan.
Chelsea Clinton criticized Substack two years ago , for basically allowing free speech... I went on a rampage saying."Keep your hands OFF my Substack"... I understand it being a refuge.
Chelsea Clinton is the Prince Harry of the US.
Like Harry, she is an irrelevant member of the "lucky sperm club" who thinks that because she was born into a certain position and has sunshine blown up her backside for her entire life, her derivative commentary of rehashed talking points on whatever is the hot-button issue du jour is of interest to anyone but herself.
From Chelsea the trust fund baby: "I was curious if I could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t."
Clueless.
Yet one more example of acceptance beating understanding.
Thanks for these reassuring thoughts, Matt. And, yes, the Samuels essay is illuminating.
You mean "mental" is subsiding? Perish the thought
Merry Christmas Matt, and thank you for publishing the Twitter files which helped expose th egiant con that David Samuels wrote about.
Joe Rogan has brought up more than once a statement by Marc Andreesen re two recent and major forks in the road that resulted in the positive changes we wittness today, one being Elon buying Twitter and the resulting Twitter Files (thanks to Matt’s outstanding work there), and the other being Trump turning his head at his rally in Butler, PA. Elon buying Twitter swung the direction of history in an extremely significant way.
Rogan’s recent interview with Mark Andreesson is amazing. Well worth a listen!
The Samuel's article and Racket are among the best things I've read this year
Read Samuels' interview with Angelo Codevilla. Outstanding. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/angelo-codevilla
Or his interview with David Garrow about Barack Obama.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/david-garrow-interview-obama
More articles in Tablet Magazine:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/david-garrow-interview-obama
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/whole-society-american-politics
I remember zero curiosity about the real Obama. He got a hall pass. And all because he says he is “black,” whatever that means. A massive American error.
If he were a bird he’d be a talking magpie
There was a PBS mystery with MAGPIE in the title. I won't say it here since the AI might construe it negatively.
Among other things to be thankful for in 2024…………..
Matt T
Walter K
Sasha S
Glenn G
Joe R
Ben S
PBD
Thank you alt media for being a source of honest and
Challenging media.
Happy 2025!
Vinay Prasad, Megyn Kelly, David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya
Michael Shellenberger too.
Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
I’d also add Mark levin on the list.
I do wish he would stop yelling at his audience. His message is great, and I understand his rage but the people listening do not need to hear the rage constantly in my opinion.
So true! Ironically, I listen to Mark on my way to and from YOGA! It's like an ice bath after a sauna!!
🤣
Caitlin Johnstone. Always on point.
She needs to learn economic theory. But I appreciate her antiwar positions.
Jeff Childers and Coffee & Covid
Freaking way toooooooo expensive.
Free subscription works fine for the big daily dose summary. 👍
And the list keeps growing.
I use to worry that I was putting myself into a confirmation bias feedback loop by repeatedly turning to people like Matt and Glenn G and Joe R and Bret W and Jordan P for information and insight. But then I realized that many of those that I have found and have followed have found and follow each other.
Confirmation bias is much less of a worry when REAL journalism is afoot. I think the aforementioned are just as likely to point out flaws in all directions as they are to point out the flaws in that with which they most ardently agree.
Nah, Christopher, it's not confirmation bias, it's just that great minds think alike.
Real journalists aren't afraid to question the BS, point out hypocrisy, and champion free speech.
Well said.
12/24/24: Amen to SCG's vote of thanks!
Alas, David Samuels's prose has the fluid viscosity of fudge. But thanks for the advice, which is always appreciated. And to Matt and Walter and everyone else, a Merry Christmas and a Happy Hanukah!
And for those whose interest in Montana perhaps has been piqued by Walter's tales, grab a copy of the amazing, perhaps long-forgotten "Montana: High, Wide and Handsome," by Joseph Kinsey Howard [1906-1951]; Yale University Press (1943 hardcover "Seventh printing January 1945"), an edition of which was bought last week on a whim.
After reading ten pages of it, I scampered back to the keyboard and ordered another used hardcover copy of "Montana," which, if the advertising can be believed, has physically fared better in the decades since its creation.
A Christmas miracle --- a readable book published by a University Press!
Lionel Shriver
Dr Jay. bringing the truth...
Add Shawn Ryan to the list…
Pretty sure Matt would add Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger to your list.
And I would add News Nation, the new cable news network that's like watching CNN in the 1990s. (when they were still reliable)
"If you subscribe to this site it’s likely because, like me, you felt the world slipping off its axis and were looking for someone to reassure you you weren’t crazy. We lived through a difficult time together, but the fever finally broke this fall, and the world is now allowed to remark on the Emperor’s lack of clothes. It feels like good news" YEP! Thanks, Matt
Matt? Why do you think the spell has been broken? Your lips to God’s ear, but I suspect we are just in the storm’s eye. The next wave of shock doctrine tsunamis is just arriving.
I don’t think it has to do with politics, except in the sense that the ability to sell the public on anything collapsed with this Biden/Harris debacle. The suspension of disbelief is broken. The whole panic con depended on the fear of offending a ruling majority, which is now no longer ruling. I think it will have to regroup for a while…
Should say, it depended on making people afraid of offending a ruling unanimous majority. It’s why people were afraid to push back against simple things… and now there’s nothing up there to fear. Other things, but not that
Disagree. People still fear speaking out on Gaza.
No fear here. Where are the fucking hostages?
Look in the mirror.
Is your implication that Israel is keeping hostages? You got issues, dude.
Israel has a right to exist un molested by those who hate them.
Not as an apartheid state, it doesn’t.
The idea of the Israeli apartheid state is an ignorant myth. Nearly 20% of Israelis are Muslim and they have all the same rights as Israeli Jews, including the right to run for office, be gay without risk of punishment or death, and—if you are a woman— wearing whatever or going wherever the fuck you want. List the Muslim countries where the inverse is true for Jews or Muslim women. Wait, I'll help you. Here's the list:
Explain how Israel is an apartheid state? Unless you think a state keeping terrorists from killing its citizens is an apartheid state. By the way, Hamas likes what you say, you’re a helpful tool for the proxies of Iran.
16 for 12 against.
Bet this pretty much sums up the makeup of Racket subscribers.
Wonder if that is right, left.
I considered myself right, how bout you?
Israel has lost whatever rights it had to cross its borders with any of its neighbors. Israel is a rogue state, its leaders wanted for war crimes, and its legacy to be that of a genocide against the rightful owners of its occupied land.
No country has right to exterminate a people, destroy its hospitals, Universities, and all infrastructure, (no matter who they pretend is hiding in them). I ashamed of the human race, though of course Mark Twain got there long before me.
Israel is the one country in the Middle East where all people are free. They have a large Muslim population. They value women's rights. They protect gays.
Iran is indeed trying to exterminate the people in Israel.
Wow! With that kind of looney logic, I bet you have a lot of subscribers on substack.
You should speak out right now, since you raised it. Plenty of people speak on Gaza, so actually it had nothing to do with these issues.
Yeah, I'm not finding people afraid to speak out on Gaza. Just set foot on a college campus. Far too few say this is an incredibly complex, historical situation requiring people to think more and emote less.
I *work* on a college campus and people are terrified of speaking about it
I am being doxxed, stalked, and professionally threatened for relatively mild posts about Gaza. I am VERY afraid, not for me, but for the people who work for me. I know for sure that you are underestimating this.
No fear here. Israel has to defend itself against terrorism, they are fighting the war for all of us.
Israel IS the terrorist. Genocidal, sociopathic political entity. Not fighting a war for me, or the vast majority of the world's population. Put Ben-Gvir and Smotrich in Hugo Boss uniforms, they'd fit right in with the SS. And it's them who show the real face of Israel. You support that, you're a lost soul.
Yeah, yeah. But the fact remains if Palestinians laid down their weapons there would be peace. if Israel laid down its weapons they would all be dead. Murderers got to murder. Israelis are not beheading innocents nor ramming cars into markets filled with children. Islamists are.
What do you have to say about the Muslims that rape and kill citizens in the countries in which they are immigrants? What do you have to say about the Muslims that drive cars into crowds in Germany? Europe is REPLETE with examples of Muslim acts of terror that MUSLIMS say are in service of their religion as stated in the Koran. What do you say to the Shiite and Sunni Muslims that have their own genocidal aims against one another and have been offing each other in record numbers for time in memorial in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, etc. You throw around these words "genocidal" and "sociopathic" as if they don't and have never applied to the demographic that YOU and other half-measure zealots defined as a victimhood class. Your hypocrisy is blatant.
And Syria, Lebanon, Russia etc
Really? They DO IT ALL THE TIME!!!
and, in my workplace, I would be vilified if I spoke out about the trans crisis!
Israel remains off-limits to all criticism in the US government and among the people.
Same to you…..where are the fucking hostages? How would you like it if your kid were held in a hostage tunnel for over a year?
Or in a J6 prison for three years?
Thomas Massie says chill……
Our fellow commenters above, who dared to wish Matt Merry Christmas, will no doubt hear from those who will claim it continues to show a disrespect of Jews. Some dumbass will equate 'Merry Christmas' with support of Hamas.
Nothing wrong with Christmas. Jesus was a Jew. Let’s celebrate his birthday.
Really?-- then why the push back against Merry Christmas for the innocuous Happy holidays?
I'd like to register as doubting it strongly.
Just look at all the people wearing MAGA hats and doing the Trump dance. Cancel culture’s , like Obama’s, time has passed. Here’s to a prosperous New Year!
You alluded to it, but I haven’t read very much about this election ending Obama’s third presidential term, given that his disciples were pretty much telling zombie Joe what to do. I so enjoyed Barry and Michelle’s exasperation at having diluted influence, shrilly scolding lesser mortals to no avail. As you say, good riddance to their influence (though their smugness will ever remain).
I've looked it as his 16-year reign of power ending, as he was calling all the Russia!Russia!Russia! shots, fucking Bernie multiple times, propping up Biden until he knifed him in the back, and generally reminding us how disappointing he was as president.
May they settle in peace in their water front mansions as the ocean swallows.?
Ha!
If all these elitists truly believed in Climate Armageddon, they'd buy smaller properties far from the oceans, & limit their travel by private jet, but nooooo.
Elon Musk is the shadow president. That's the new Russia, Russia, Russia. We'll see how that flies - it's their first shot.
I like it.. he casts a long shadow.....
So, has George Soros been the democrats’ shadow President?
Or their financier?
Simple things like actually saying "Merry Christmas" instead of "Happy Holidays." Or both, instead of only deemed-correct HH.
The "Merry Christmas"es have been at full deployment this year. What a welcome change and positive development.
2025. Something to look forward to, I think.
Merry Christmas to all, and --- Peace, on Earth +.
💗
I’m pondering why they were able to get away with so much more this time around compared to hoaxes that were of similar poor quality such as the Dan Rather George W. Bush memo in 2004.
And it’s amazing because if you compare Russia gate, for instance, to the Dan Rather, George W. Bush, National Guard memo…
The liberal media had to admit within a couple days of online sleuths debunking it that it was a fake memo that someone had created using modern word processing technology, not a 1960’s typewriter.
But Dan Rather got debunked that same week and had to step down from his post and then left CBS a few months later.
What happened in Russia gate showed how much power the Borg had accumulated because even though people were debunking it in real time (Greenwald, Taibbi , Dave smith) it just grew and grew and people won Pulitzer Prizes for their work on it (propping it up not showing the fraud), and it consumed our nation for three years
I think the stuff that Matt has brought up here is a valuable contribution to understanding the difference in level of control and power.
12/24/24: The best part of the Dan Rather story came along after Rather got thrown out of CBS. His ill-gotten millions were burning a hole in his kangaroo pouch, and he listened to and fell for his personal lawyers' spiel that he could take CBS to court and win. Which culminated in a prolonged, highly publicized and very expensive failure for America's Biggest Okie-Dokey BS Artist.
I’ve typed and back-spaced over three different replies , here. The enormity of the con, the corruption of those honor bound to secure our rights and tell us the truth and the delusional refusal to acknowledge any of it ever happened is staggering in the extreme. A big chunk of our electorate will dismiss all Matt et al truth bombs as far-right conspiracies. A this point, I’ll just drink and consider the damage.
Seems like people have suddenly stopped calling it the Overton Window.
Just as I had figured out what it meant, natch.
I never did really get it. . .
I think it essentially means "acceptable to talk about".
LOL!
Yes, there will always be things to rein in, but for at least a time, we have free speech to do that.
People in charge never support free speech. It doesn't matter which party they're with.
We will soon test that allegation.
Tulsi Gabbard has just done an about-face on surveillance. Good enough?
Each hypocritical side in America forms a standing wave - cancelling each other out. By design or accident, that has been our luck.
Maybe not so much luck as human nature?
We don't have free speech only acceptable speech.
That changes.
I can prove it.
Gas the Nazis.
You go ahead and say the flipside, I wont.
The flipside? Nazis deserve love and respect, just like every other human being?
Fear of losing one's job resulted in fake compliance to group think. Critical thinking hid underground, biding it's time until it was safe to come out.
I remember when if Tiger Woods was in contention on the Final Round, the Tournament was over. Then Tiger's wife chased him down with a golf club & the mystic was forever broken.
12/24/24: Depends on how many more people are set on fire and burned to death on subways by illegal immigrants emtering the country with the blessing and financial assistance given to them by the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA, and the suicidal major cities with "sanctuary" laws.
I hope the Trump administration investigates all the NGO’s that assist these illegals.
You forgot the bystanders who did nothing to save her. The Penny Effect.
This issue is going to have a lot of resonance in 2025. So will Biden’s recent commutation of so many from death row to life terms. Law and order is going to come raging back into fashion in 2025. MMW.
Election day : OMG DEMOCRACY IS ON THE BALLOT, WE ARE IN REAL DIRE STRAITS HERE, FASCISM, RACISM AND MISOGYNY ARE WINNING!!!!!
Day after: Well, let's see what's on the docket for this morning. Oh, what's that? Nope, no plans to overthrow the currently elected fascist. Noting in the works to prevent the degradation of democracy, no revolutions being announced. Nothing to see here. Boy, those health care insurance plans sure are corrupt aren't they?
Whistling past a graveyard full of angry petulant undead vengeful and well-financed entities?
I have stumbled into "struggle sessions" where I witnessed the "regrouping". They were still in shock that there is anyone, anywhere that disagrees with them. They MUST be (re-)educated!! When? NOW!!
I don't know who said it, but someone remarked that Woke is Disco.
I think that captures it.
Donald Trump's victory was the equivalent of Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park
Except I remember disco as being a lot more fun! 🤩
I was a metalhead in the age of Barry Manilow.
It is totally possible to love both Metallica and Manilow.
One of my favorite Peak Woke "deconstructions" of recent history argues that Disco Demolition Night was an orgy of racism and homophobia.
I lived through that period and the teenage stoners running wild through Comiskey were my people. "Disco sucked" because it was for pretty people with money who went to fancy places, as opposed to us long hairs in concert t-shirts.
(Then again, the kids at Comiskey Park that night were white working class, so even then our social and intellectual betters were looking for justification to shit on their inferiors.)
My brother had a shirt, on front, Disco Sucks, on back, Village People Started It.
Thats offensive to Disco!!! Those were my formative highschool years-- joyful. Nothing about woke was joyful
Many clothing styles come and go.
But what the hell, when do get to wear my 3 inch platforms again.?
Remember the observation "Disco Sucks" hand sprayed in flat black on yellow brick on a building on the south side of 5th street between Washington and Bloomfield in Hoboken back in the late '80s before that city evolved (as many immediate NYC suburbs do) into some version of the upper east side. Graffiti was still there in when I moved out in '92. Man I wish I had a photo of that pure truth in the late afternoon light.
Funny. I lived on Hudson in Hoboken between 3rd and 4th during those years. I’m trying to remember that. For me, “Disco sucks” was more of a late 70’s phenomenon but maybe I just don’t remember so well any more.
some graffiti lives forever. Philly's "4ever boner" is about as good as disco sux
🤔 Or, You'll could just 'Burn Books" 😵💫
The beat and underground spirit of disco continued on through the history of electronic music. The overbearing, popular shoving of disco down the general population’s throat burned on Disco Demolition Night. Kinda like corporate DEI bs!
“Donald Trump's victory was the equivalent of Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park.” Holy smokes, I’d forgotten about that!
Absolutely. I’m kind of shocked by this turn that Racket has taken. It almost feels like they have gone from critics of power to cheer leaders. Walter has gone fully into the idea that people have no agency and are only parroting the political narrative that ‘they’ are imposing on us. It’s rather dispiriting.
Not a chance. Matt is just celebrating winning freedom of speech. Without that, there is nothing. If you think these guys won't be critical, think agian.
I hope and expect that is right but even thinking something has been won is a disturbing lack of critical thinking.
With Elon’s purchase of Twitter and Trump’s election, the imposition of limits on free speech have been stopped for the time being. I view that as a huge win.
Those were indeed, good developments, but I'm not sure I would go so far as to say "stopped", even just for the time being. And things in Europe aren't improving much.
Europe doesn’t have the 1st Amendment. We still do. That’s a win.
Feelin’ ya, but recent developments have brought fresh clarity to a situation familiar from time immemorial: the people who do actually value freedom of thought and speech will always have to play ball with the far greater number whose advocacy of those essentials is only really based on perceived status threats. So take it as a given that free thought and speech is always in a delicate position, vulnerable as much to our own character flaws as it is to outright suppression. What to do? Keep standing up for it. Keep listening to people with different experiences, perceptions and ideas. And keep a sharp attitude toward those who would have you forsake that habit. Here’s a prediction: the people who really do believe in free thought and expression will continue to have plenty of defense to play, no matter who holds the reins of power.
Also, I am encouraged by watching Elon Musk encourage all thought and by the fact that they are being transparent about these cuts and asking for input. Very unusual. Such an improvement from what we've lived through. That is a "win."
When Musk calls for dramatic ‘transparent’ cuts to the military budget, get back to me. Until then, he’s just another dildo with a fat wallet.
Right. He is largely responsible for Substack being here (since they planned to go after it before he bought Twitter), but hey, Bah Humbug, right? I'm sure you can find the worst in anyone.
Musk is a loose cannon, but that's what people elected Trump for. Musk is also powerless, with no official position. Trump just cheerfully pointed out that Musk can't be President, because he isn't a native citizen. So he's actually thinking about what he's unleashed.
Nobody said he was in charge OR that we wanted him to be president; however, calling him a "loose cannon" is ridiculous. You should be that "loose." Elon Musk almost single handedly rescued free speech in this country. Substack couldn't have done that alone.
Only if you are a total pessimist. That is not critical thinking. I agree it's difficult to tell good circumstances from bad or to know what is coming next that could be worse, but we are better off than we were the last four years. Count your blessings.
Thinking that Trump is a substantial change in circumstances is the lack of criticality that I find so disturbing.
Let hope that he ends Ukraine but Pam Bondi has called for the FBI to investigate anyone who is protesting Israel’s ‘wars’. This is a guy who has been president for 4 years and has appointed a cabinet full of the same only neo cons we’ve known for decades. So sure, call me pessimistic.
Elbows, you won't get everything you want but you sound a little bit off when you write that Trump isn't a change of circumstance. It's a big change for many reasons, including the New York Times just published an article (3 years late) stating that illegal immigration under Biden was the highest in the history of our country. That was intentional, as you might know, and Trump will reinstitute his laws and finish building the wall which sends the message that the 1.2 million LEGAL immigrants we take in every year are enough for now, that will be a sea change. That's just one example, however large, and there are many more. Some of which he will have learned to navigate cuz of a first term of learning hard lessons about vile people on both sides of the aisle and within the entrenched bureaucracy, such as the CDC and NHIH, and a term filled with more varied political attacks than any president in my lifetime, and I'm 156 years old. Or so, but that's how old I feel after watching the ghastly past 4 years of "Biden".
It’s a huge change, but maybe not in the issues you are interested in.
Matt has been telling it like it is for over 20 years, calling our attention to stupid politics on both sides, police brutality and the fucked-up courts, Goldman Sachs and their fellow swine, all the way up to the present. He's made equal fun of Trump and Biden and Obama, etc.
No worries, it will all be ok.
Are you kidding? The State Department's Global Engagement Center will be ending. This is a huge win for free speech, and against censorship.
Are you kidding? A tiny, 8 year old organization with a budget of $75 million is shutting down. Hardly world history being made.
Yes. Elon was for the Twitter Files. But now we have a multi billionaire in bed with the incoming president. What could go wrong, quoth MT and GG?
Haha! Say like George Soros ruling the left for 50years? Musk joked about that recently. Now the right have their own billionaire. It seems the world has always been run by those with money and power. For now I’ll hitch my wagon to the free speech billionaire.
Just give him a chance to breathe and regroup. Tamp down the stress hormones and look into what America and families really are to each other. Hope and peace—it’s something to aspire for. Merry Christmas!🎁
Lovely post! Merry Christmas to you too!
Try kissing your unique elbow.
I agree. Nothing has changed here in Northern Virginia, and I doubt much has changed in most blue enclaves with perhaps some exceptions. like pockets of tech. Trump is still Hitler, our democracy is in peril, Elon Musk is dangerous, gathering clouds of chaos are on the horizon, and there was no cover-up of Biden's unfitness for office. The ignorance and intellectual laziness of the left is undiminished and will fuel the next onslaught of craziness.
I hate that you are calling liberals “the left.” I am a leftist. These people have nothing in common with me.
Some things in Nova have changed I think…
Yes, and we have to watch what the ruling classes are doing structurally. I'd like to think it will be harder to convince people that raw milk kills and traditional farming methods are bad for the planet, but in the meantime billionaires are buying up farmland from beleaguered family farmers to use for industrial ag.
Because our Lord and Savior Trump was Elected
Jesus is coming
😇 If true; He would be or already was Murdered by Nazi Israel Zionists! 👹
He was a Palestinian after all.
Correction: your sentence actually ends "Nazi Iranian Terrorists".
You are welcome.
GFE?
Matt, I subscribe to you because you care about the truth, no matter where it comes from. Please don't ever stop. Happy Holidays to you.
Yes!
Thank you Matt. And thank you to Benjamin Netanyahu, who ignored Biden and Blinken.
Yes, we should celebrate the Butchers amongst us here at Christmas.
Like the Guatemalan illegal who set fire to a sleeping woman on an NYC subway and watched her burn to death?
Not sure of your point Ellen, but I celebrate neither Bibi Butcher nor the person who set fire to the woman.
apparently if you hate genocide you hate jews. Sounds legit...
Do you have equal disdain for the Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi terrorists, the former two groups which use their own civilian populations as human shields and cannon/sympathy fodder?
Actually I have sympathy for those muslims, especially the Palestinians. They have been under assault from the Zionists for generations, perhaps a century or more. The Zionists have stolen their land and killed off massive numbers of innocent men, women and children. I see the Israelites as doing the work of Moloch.
Richard is so deep in Jew hatred he won't understand your reply.
I simply do not understand this fashion-fad of Jew-hatred. I grew up in New York City in the 1960s and early 1970s - in the schools I went to, the Jewish kids were the majority, and I loved their cultural difference from my own, which I also loved.
New York City was a fine place to grow up - when I did it. I would no more raise a child there now than I would expose it naked to a pack of starving coyotes.
I’m with you on this, Ellen. I spent my time from the 5th grade through most of the 8th grade on Staten Island and in Jersey. I was a transient, being a military brat, and I learned so much about Jewish culture and customs from those schools I attended. I even lived in Leonardo, New Jersey for about a year and a half, small town that became known for movies by Kevin Smith, who grew up in Red Bank. Clerks was filmed in Leonardo. Course I was long gone by then but I loved that place! Learned a lot about Italian culture there.
If one grew up in that area, in that time, one has, I believe, honorary status as part Jewish, part Italian, part Irish, part Puerto Rican, and part black, so long as one had sufficient exposure and interaction with these cultures.
It was a time in which black women complimented my mother on the manners she had raised my sister and me to have. "They remind me of little black girls." And my mother acknowledged that black mothers raised their children with beautiful manners.
Ou sont les nieges d'antan? (I hope I got the spelling of the last word correctly.)
Ok! I'll raise a glass to Hamas. And to the remnants of Hezbollah and the Cretins of Iran. Yay butchers. You? Have shitty Christmas.
No, I don't think celebrate him. The animals that call themselves Palestinians deserve any sort of celebration
thanks for revealing your genocidal hatred.
What a horrible person you are.
You must be an Israelite?
Have fun at the encampment.
Ignored?! More like led by the nose..
Thank you so much, Matt. I look forward to your essays. Have a very merry Christmas and may we all have much to rejoice in the new year.
"If you subscribe to this site it’s likely because, like me, you felt the world slipping off its axis and were looking for someone to reassure you you weren’t crazy." For sure! That sentence is the best Christmas present I could have possibly received. Thanks, Matt!
Thanks Matt. Agreed and your relentless appetite for exposing the madness had at least some influence on arriving at this point. Maybe someday that influence will be recognized as extraordinary. It should.
Enjoy the holidays and catch your breath because this fight will never be over. It needs to be resisted and exposed daily.
Merry Christmas Matt and Walter to you and your families. 🎄🎉
Let us be hopeful that just as the media degenerated thanks to the class culture built by Columbia School of Journalism, that it can be rebuilt by those with the craftsmanship you have Matt. Merry Christmas to you, your family and all of us fools who follow you.
DITTO!
Christmas is a Christian holiday - just sayin. Great time to remember life is a lot easier living looking for the good in others, so here's to looking for the good in every person on the planet this holiday season. Merry Christmas and Happy holidays to everyone of every faith, and to those with no faith at all!
"Christmas is a Christian holiday - just sayin."
Yes, it is. A celebration of light in the darkness.
A "Christian" holiday grafted onto pagan winter solstice celebrations and traditions. Much of what is in the "Christian" winter holiday pre-date Christianity, e.g., the Cristmas Tree, the Yule Log, etc.
Interesting piece--https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CwnOuiOSjY
Matt- Thank you for your role in pushing back on the lies. You are one of a handful of journalists fought tenaciously for our right to free speech and expression.
I also thought that Samuels’ article was fascinating and insightful. But I agree with that “rapid political enlightenment” was not solely attributable to liberal psy-ops. I think that TDS played a large role. The need to believe the opposite of what Trump was saying pushed a lot of supposedly educated and rational people to take positions that they never would have otherwise taken. One example is the number of people I’ve talked to who, all of a sudden, believed that mass (illegal) immigration had no downside.
As for whether “normalcy” can endure: I remind you that 95% of university faculty, the teachers’ union, the federal workforce (outside the soldiers), and the press are still in the tank for the Dems. That will take GENERATIONS to undo.
Having suffered from it myself, I'm convinced TDS was a goal of the liberal psy-op. A really effective one — we all have friends who still experience it.
This is very interesting.
TDS as the ultimate Permission Structure, as laid out by David Samuels.
I need to think more about this.
There is no doubt that TDS enabled - nay, DROVE - so many supposedly reasonable people to adopt so many fringe beliefs, is a phenomenon that should be studied for decades.
It's essentially brainwashing.
Do you mean the effort to elevate Trump as the candidate, in 2016, as the psy-op?
And did you just hate Trump, or did you feel compelled to believe the opposite of everything he said? For me, full TDS is the latter.
I mean the TDS. Hating Trump *and* believing the opposite of everything he said. Turning him into literally Satan.
TDS was a Psyop, was it not?
Critical thinking skills have certainly taken a turn for the worse in our society. We have conflated subjective and sentimental thinking with moral thinking. People are starting to wake up (isn’t it ironic that people are waking up from woke?!!) from the mass delirium but how to re-inculcate objective, rational thinking skills in a populace addicted to the opiate of social media?
When Musk shows up all those Federal employees gna be Republicans all of a sudden.
Lol
Valorizing Netanyahu as successful war hero at the cost of 41,000 people and the destruction of entire cities as if this is an attempt to blow out Iran is a lie.
Netanyahu has been planning to do this for decades. He was waiting for an excuse and compared to the scale of carnage since the Nakba, Oct. 7 is a drop in the bucket compared to 40 years of Israel destroying almost entirely innocent Palestinian lives.
The fact that you'd back this in a giddy letter about how it's all good shows me the extent to which you're as captured as all the rest. If you think this is a respite, fine. Time will show you something very different. So yeah, have a merry christmas. See you on the other side, when you realize you've been rooting for two sides of the same totalitarian coin.
Good job cheerleading. And calling out praise for a genocidal maniac.
Netanyahu sure got the job done, didn't he?
Reprehensible.
Okay sunshine. Let's go
I'm going to assume from your mindless blather that you're too young to remember the effect of the milai massacre on the consciousness of the American population during the Vietnam war.
Soldiers went into a town and slaughtered a couple of hundred people. When word finally got out, and I think it was the New York Times reporter that broke the original story, so many people's stomachs were turned by the unbelievable violence.
Up until October 7th I had sympathy for the Palestinian people.
That's sympathy for anything and everything that is Palestinian has been eradicated by the bloodthirstyness of those animals.
If I'm not mistaken, I think Netanyahu wanda the world to see what kind of Savage as they are.
Well, it sure worked as far as I'm concerned. Combining that with the fact, the fact Sunshine that not a single other Arab Nation will accept Palestinians shows you just what kind of pieces of shit living that section of the world
Nah, I'm not a Jim. I'm bronx Irish Catholic born. In the aftermath of October 7th trying to come to some understanding of how this could be tolerated in a society led me to look at the so-called religion of Islam.
It's not a religion asshole. It's a death cult and the sooner it is called that, and the sooner it is thrown into the dustbin of history. History the way that other Savage religions of the past have been thrown into the dustbin the better off this planet will be.
The elite spy agency on earth, Mossad, had no idea that Hamas was planning an attack! I call that B.S. Their plan was to help Hamas so they would have a reason to scorch earth Palestine to the ground. Many Christians and their churches are in Palestine. They too are being killed because the Zionists still hate Jesus and all his followers. They pay $$ millions to Protestant churches in the US to proclaim that Jesus plans to save the ‘Jews’ so congregants will back anything Israel does and send them money. AIPAC also pays millions each year to all the members of Congress to support the Zionist cause. The US fights wars on their behalf. My fear is Trump’s major donors are “Jews” and he will back whatever they want, as all prior presidents have done.
https://x.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1799124990643626065
Thanks for some pure science fiction! Have you published a science fiction novel? You are very good at saying the opposite of the facts!
Zionists are very supportive of Christians. That is a fact.
And Christians are very supportive of human rights, which Israel is the strongest supporter of in the Middle East, by far. It is the only country where LGBTQ+ people can live openly. It is the only country where women have full rights.
'human rights' lingo of tyrants. They decide was is a right and how far that right goes.
God gave us individual rights. Many more than the tyrants do.
Lets hope Trump like with so many things is taking a strident position on Israel to lull Bibby and then negotiate him to some sense.
Take your ritalin, Garth.
Apparently you missed the "(!)".
Yeah . ... What *did* Matt mean by the ! if he is cheering the pro-Bibi propaganda piece?
Bibi is the strongest supporter of human rights in the Middle East, and Matt is a strong supporter of human rights. Makes complete sense!
I understood it.
You have a valid point, but I don't think Matt is cheering on Netanyahu.
Then why is he plugging the piece?
How is "mentioning" the same as plugging?
Well said. Taibbi’s remark about Netanyahu is not only sickening but betrays a degree of ignorance, mental confusion and/or utter indifference to his government’s crimes that shocks me. That one remark alone should be sufficient to tarnish permanently Taibbi’s claims to be a critical thinker.
Too bad Arafat was such a bad negotiator.
Israel's crimes include:
Full support for women's rights
Full support for LGBTQ+ people's rights
Full support for the rights of Muslims, who have more freedom in Israel than in any other country in the Middle East.
Thank you for not using the term 'Jew'. Only those that lived in Judea, settled by Judah as one of the twelve tribes of Israel (Jacob), were called a Jew. God dispersed the other eleven tribes, the Israelites, for their wicked ways.
Jacob’s brother Esau was renamed Edom by God for giving away his birthright and sent to live in the barren hills. His tribe, the Edomites were Hebrew, as was Abraham, and they wondered the then populated world, intermarrying with pagans, and much later called themselves Jews. They are the Zionist who are trying to reclaim Esau’s birthright.
Is the encampment catering lunch today?
Right? Shelley was spewing the same shit on October 8, before any response from Israel, and while the hostages were being located in strategic locations throughout Gaza.
Nicely done Matt. And thanks for being crazy enough to help us all maintain our sanity (interesting thought - 'crazy enough to maintain sanity" ;)