Americans have been told a dangerous and uncertain world requires stronger managers and less freedom, but the decline of civil liberties is what started this mess
Look what they do in banking. My dad said it best - “This isn’t capitalism. In bailing out SVB, after first lying about it, they’ve cemented ensuring profits are private and losses are socialized.” It can’t surprise you they also think freedom of speech is whatever the Brandon administration says is ok and everyone who complains is a domestic terrorist.
It’s klepto-corporate multinational globalist technocracy. A caste system of two classes. The Uber-rich and powerful and the working poor. The middle class has been gutted and otherwise healthy, able bodied people are encouraged not to work. The endgame is to create a nation of government dependency and ownership. That’s when the fun begins. And freedom ends.
That's what Piketty said in CAPITAL a decade ago. Add the Victor Davis Hanson admonition that a healthy citizenship and a thriving middle class is necessary for a Republic to survive. Napoleon observed that financier's have no allegiance to country at all (though they love wrapping themselves in the flag). I'm finding that thinking of America as the Constitutional Republic it is rather than as a Democracy grounds my frame of reference, lessens my sense of vitriol and allows me a little objectivity.
They aren’t bailing out SVB, but it isn’t clear who is providing the money to cover deposits. It also isn’t clear who talked and set off the bank run before SVB could quietly raise the capital to cover its bond portfolio losses. Did someone make a nice profit shorting SVB stock? The share holders are now SOL, but that’s what happens when you gamble, I mean invest in the stock market.
They are bailing out SVB. They announced a special assessment on other banks - which is passed along to all of us in the form of higher fees and interest rates. SVB incompetence set off the run. Rather than normal bond ladders high schoolers can grasp, they invested their reserves in long term fed funds and mortgage backed securities in 2021 despite inflation and the feds making clear they’d raise rates to address it. SVB just held the damn things as they tanked. Then a funding round flopped and they had to sell below par because interest rates have been rising for over a year. Depositors ran on the bank because it was being run by incompetent people. It is absolutely a bail out.
All true but I am not persuaded that depositors should be wiped out. If a business cannot make payroll, who suffers the most?
I will watch for administrative and criminal proceedings against the SVB board and senior officers. Notoriously, nobody responsible for the bank and insurance failures of 2007-10 ever stood trial or even suffered a meaningful administrative penalty, like a lifetime ban from any position in the finance industry, and Obama bragged about that.
We have seen time and again, that financial harm to the businesses means nothing to the psychopaths who run them. Even the loss of their future stock options leaves them far richer than 99% of the population. It is time to put them in prison and leave their families impoverished. Maybe that will change some behaviors.
And, to be clear, a5 years of the Fed suppressing interest rates led banks like SVB into investments far too risky for a public bank. Then, the incredible federal deficits under Biden set the stage for the inflation that led the Feds to jack up interest rates, which in turn reduced the value of the securities SVB held, making them potentially insolvent. All those government officials are no doubt beyond reach, but it is important that they be shamed and their reputations ruined... won't happen, but justice does demand no less.
Depositors would not have been wiped out. They would have gotten $0.85-$0.90 on the dollar over $250K. If you don’t let business fail when their is incompetence, and people fe we l that, you get more incompetence. The people in Ohio can’t even get water filters for their houses. If this has been a bank for regular people and normal small businesses there would be no “you get your cash back.” This is cementing a 2-tiered system. Government spending is so massive the government pucks winners and losers. Now regulators are picking who is immune from poor decisions. It’s sick.
I think you might want to check your arithmetic. According to this morning's Wall Street Journal, at the end of 2022, SVB had $157 billion in deposits on their books from approximately 37,000 depositors. That works out to on average over $4 million per depositor. Where was the other 80%+ going to come from after the FDIC chips in their $250K guarantee? Most of the depositors would have gotten CRUSHED had Mr. Taxpayer not stepped in to bail them out AGAIN. Same circus - different clowns.
Who keeps over $250k in a bank account? My guess is that it's people who have LOTS of money, i.e., those who can afford to lose $25k-$40k without a second thought.
Depositors are never wiped out. We have a system for failed banks. The bank is seized. Insured deposits, up to $250K, are immediately available. The banks is sold or the bank assets are liquidated. Uninsured deposits are then repaid, to the extent possible. In this case, Yellen is ignoring the $250K limit and simply printing money to make billionaires whole.
Assuming no intervention, assuming things work as pre-determined by current regs and policies, then Silicon Valley is gutted, we lose a lot of tech companies that help keep us competitive in the world, and by mid-week, Regional Banks across the USA are failing.
Distinguish between depositors and bank executives and shareholders, and politicians. The latter set up an environment conducive for failure with COVID lockdowns, inflationary policies, and negligent regulation. The bank was negligent, invested in way too many long-term Treasuries and not recognizing the impact of the tightening tech investment climate. The depositors are victims. If we punish them, pretty much every business reacts by moving their funds to CitiBank, Chase, and BankOfAmeria because they are too big to fail.
And for Little Tech, waiting a year to make them whole is not an option. The climate for VC's to invest in small tech is dried up. Nobody is giving new lines of credit to little tech in 2023. They will just die.
There are something like 40,000 depositors and I doubt most of them are billionaires--a lot of small and medium sized businesses using the bank primarily as a checking account, maybe a line of credit for business cash-flow purposes. and if they are limited to $250K FDIC insurance a lot of them will be wiped out and their employees and vendors will not be paid.
And I doubt if many billionaires have a large part of their holdings in bank CDs, anyway. I mean, really!!
Yes, there is no literal "wipe out," but if you are running a business with a monthly churn of a couple of million dollars, $250K doesn't do much. to keep you afloat.
This is a difficult problem, if depositors are not made whole regional banks will all fail and people and businesses will only do business with the huge, systemically important (too big to fail) banks, and personally, I don't want to see banking concentrated in a small oligopoly.
There is no perfect answer, but something along the lines of more generous FDIC coverage coupled with limitations on what banks can invest in (i.e., not highly speculative, volatile stuff like mortgage backed securities) would be a step in the right direction.
And, some prosecutions and clawbacks, both as simple justice and "pour encourager les autres," as Voltaire described the execution of Admiral Byng as an example to other admirals.
SVB was paying 5.48% on Deposits. I did not know this until yesterday, but now I remain more convinced the depositors don’t deserve a bail-out.The rest of us, getting well under a 1% on deposits at responsible banks that responsibly hedged their rate risk, are now footing the bill for the downside risks of deposits with a 5.48% return. That is wrong and is nothing more than reallocation of wealth to rich Silicon Valley tech companies.
Was that 5.48% on 60 month CDs or checking accounts? If on the former, given what the Fed has been doing, not a big deal, 2yr Treasury Notes have been around 4.5%. If on demand deposits then yeah, that is a real problem, tho I still worry about employees and vendors getting stiffed.
I am encouraged to see people suing these banks and their executives, and hope to see aggressive action from the regulators. The people responsible need to suffer real harm. Maybe some depositors deserve a haircut. But the employees and suppliers to those depositors not being paid for work already done or materials or services already provided? I don’t see that.
Depositors, yes, but their employees? And suppliers? and the suppliers' suppliers? Is it reasonable to have the supplier to a supplier to a supplier vet the bank that the final customer uses? All the banks that all its customers use?
This is a fundamental problem with fractional reserve banking and won't go away, but we can make things better or worse. If I had my way we would go back to separating deposit-taking banks from investment banks, with the former tightly regulated almost like public utilities, and with robust insurance, and the latter only lightly regulated to address fraud, but no insurance at all, by law.
I would also reconsider mark-to-market, a cure for a real problem (misleading, even fraudulent accounting for assets) but worse than the disease. Mark-to-market is misleading in all cases other than imminent liquidation... the bonds will pay the income stream and repay principal as guaranteed, regardless of what interest rate swings may do to their present value. This happened in 2007-08 and again last week---M2M creates an appearance of insolvency when there is none, and that sets off a panic. I would not go back to the previous system, but M2M has created catastrophes. We need a better way.
We seem to have forgotten what Walter Bagehot knew in the 1870s---when a bank is in trouble, you should investigate its assets and liabilities. If it is solvent but temporarily illiquid, loan it what it needs to survive, at a high rate of interest, with the interest being incentive to not get into that sort of situation in the future.. If it is truly insolvent, let it die.
It would have been better to take a couple of days to go over the books and figure out whether the bank was worth saving, or not, and if not, to figure out to what extent liquidation would cover depositors. It may be that even in liquidation the uninsured depositors would have seen 80% or more in a couple of weeks, in which case I would be much more amenable to no govt intervention beyond the FDIC insurance limit and overseeing an orderly shut-down and liquidation.
I cannot know for sure, but I suspect that SVB was neither illiquid nor really insolvent at the end of February, but the M2M value of its assets, reduced more than they expected due to the Fed raising interest rates faster than they expected, to fight inflation, created the appearance of possible insolvency, which led to a run. At that point, the panic has a life of its own.
Why the only way we can fight price increases is to trash the economy and destroy jobs and businesses, is a question for another day.
America's best and brightest...from Sand Hill Rd even. I've been to Sand Hill Rd. Pitched VCs on Sand Hill Rd. They are the cream of the crop. The top layer. The creme de la creme. Is it hubris or...what was/is this? I mean, the Chief Investment Officer went to Harvard, right?
It's sad that Harvard and the other Ivys still show up so high in national and world rankings. Then again, maybe it's not so surprising since the people doing the ranking are Ivy grads themselves.
Deposits are insured up to 250k. Or are they? It’s Silicon Valley. Rich depositors are being made whole....by us. Now if it were Oklahoma Farmers Bank....
It is most certainly is a bailout. Yellen is printing any money necessary, which is a cute way of making taxpayers responsible for billionaire losses. Depositors were mainly Valley billionaires and 9 figure VCs, that ran their money thru startups. The notion they didn't realize FDIC insurance limits were $250K is laughable. What they knew, is that the rules never apply to them and that Dems would bail them out of any unfortunate outcomes, resulting from bad business decisions. Private profits and nationalized losses, should be the Dem 2024 slogan.
there is an argument for protecting depositors, irrespective of who the depositors are. I am aware of folks whose business were not large but did all their banking with SVB. Which means they lost their LOC too. So its not all rich VC. Also, those rich folks likely would not lose their deposits though they would be locked up for some time as the assets were sold off and possibly subject to a haircut.
Who do you think owns those small businesses? FDIC limits exist because we cannot charge enough premiums to banks, to insure every dime banked in the US. US banking law had a system that worked well for failed banks. Banks are seized. Immediately every depositor has access up to $250K. The bank is sold or assets are sold, and from those proceeds, uninsured deposits are paid, to the extent possible. That is gone, blown to shreds without a vote in Congress. When a bank in Iowa fails, are farmers with a million bucks in deposits going to take their $250K and wait? Or are farmers in Iowa expected to wait, because they are not as important as the Silicon Valley geniuses that ran the 16th largest US bank for 8 months, without a risk manager?
The last comment i one I have made in other places, though SVB was doing a "bang up job" on climate and social issues, they seem to have relegated their primary responsibility to the third team. (I for one am scared about getting on a United airlines plane for the first time in my life based on their "do good" campaign. I prefer they focus on getting me where I am going safely and on time. If they are as "successful" in their goal as SVB, a lot of people are going to die.)
You make a fair point and many of my friends feel the same way. I do think from a depositors side, it is more complicated for some but My contention in this thread is blaming the depositors is misguided. wE know who is to blame here and I strongly suspect they will cry all the way to the (SIB) bank.
This is the bank that lobbied to remove the regulations that would've saved them from exactly this kind of collapse. I have zero sympathy for them. Most of their depositors are Silicon Valley startups that should've been smart enough to keep their payroll in a bank that didn't engage in the extreme gambling this bank did. Those startups' founders got sweetheart mortgage loans from SVB to keep their payroll with SVB. Screw them. They should face the music for their bad business decisions. Bailing out these depositors will be disastrous for our democracy. Tea Party #2 is waiting in the wings.
First, I am all for clawing back any gains from the management team that were made in the last x years. My worst fear in all of this is there will be no punishment for poor management and the moral hazard will continue. And that is important because this was not gambling, it was incompetence. There is a difference. This was a failure to match their duration risk. And i doubt the regulators would catch that as I do not think they are any smarter than the guys at SVB.
This is a problem that every bank is dealing with due to interest rate increases and we will see which banks had crap risk management and which ones were competent. And please don't tell me that you saw this coming as you would be buying your yacht right now, not commenting on this forum. So do not blame the depositors because they did not see it coming as SVB had a sterling reputation, maybe unearned, but there was no due diligence to perform. The moral hazard issue is important and should be dealt with as such, but assigning guilt on the depositors is not the way to address this.
They did bail out SVB and signature. This is not about portfolio loss it’s about duration and the fact that no one at SVB understood that while taking in millions in bonuses is telling
The losses on the mortgages are big, but I'm curious how the losses in their loan portfolio look after using wokeness and DEI as funding criteria. I bet that could have blown up the bank even without the awful bet on mortgages.
i doubt it. This was duration problem. I think the fact that they bought MBS can be misleading. The fact is their long protfolio was mismatched with their short portfolio. The upshot is that for the last 10+ years every member of the Fed and the gov (R and D) has ignored the threat of inflation. COVID policies were the last straw. But instead of doing something they tried to wish it away by calling it transitory. when the Fed finally had to raise, the banks, despite years of warning and history from the 80's got caught flat footed. I suspect because they were too busy fighting racism and climate change to pay attention to risk management (eg their most important job.)
An article in the Wall Street Journal tonight stated that it's being funded by an inter Bank fund and a special program put together with the fed. Whatever that means!
SVB couldn't quietly raise the capital it needed because it is upside-down in all its Treasury investments and lacked collateral to secure additional financing. So the bonds are worth less than they paid (see also, 'unrealized losses') and the bank just doesn't possess assets to cover its liabilities - the depositors. So it's a toxic investment for other banks to buy into. Banks reinvest deposits to make money (that has to be a reasonably sound investment) and it doesn't always work. Bonds are thought to be one of the most secure assets, but core inflation and interest rate hikes gutted their return. So they invested $10 in bonds and now they're worth 6.
SVB is guilty of under-diversifying, over-leveraging what they had, and making stupid, rookie investment decisions. this wasn't a stock market thing at all, it was a financial incompetence thing. Highly recommend Patrick Boyle on YT to help sort things out.
What about the nice return depositors at SVB got - 5.48% on deposits while those of us footing the bill for the bailout via higher fees and rates get like 0.18% from the banks that are responsible in hedging their interest rate risk and will actually do business with us? How are we not bailing out the downside risk to essentially an investment for these people with a guaranteed return of 5.48% annually? What other group, and in what other circumstances, could anyone else access a 5.48% return for the last 2 years with a risk free backstop from loss? How is it not a bailout to ensure insane returns of 5.48% on bank deposits for billionaires and failing tech startups?
Yes, it’s clearly a bailout no matter what the government and MSM are calling it. SVB board and executives should be held accountable for their incompetence, but I doubt that will ever happen. And now we have the new “Bank Term Funding Program” (BTFP) ...
I was not aware of that. If that is correct it puts the onus on the depositors as anyone would know that those are not the returns of a FDIC insured account.
Your comment is the most telling of them all. It seems that the Democrats have become so dysfunctional in thought and expression they’re driving the “children” they claim to care so much about into the arms of their “enemy.”
When dysfunction becomes too extreme people run, as far as possible, away from it.
It’s weird, Biden and Fauci and Joe Paterno strike me as having a few things in common. It’s like the regular world is anathema to them. The coach once was quoted as saying why would he retire and do what - mow grass? Entitled ppl have a plan of the future and never let reality get in the way. That’s when they get into trouble - eventually. Some don’t
Of course it is, and I found him to be a sympathetic character in this circus (I'm neither R nor D). But if the tables were turned I can imagine Jordan not getting so fired up about the issue. Like I said, I could be wrong—maybe Jordan is a true civil libertarian and free speech warrior. But he strikes me as being more of a savvy political operator than a true idealist.
I think the point is that we have never ever ever had a group of people destroying civil liberties as ruthlessly as the current leadership. No one I know can remember anything like this happening before. It makes no sense to ask what Jim Jordan would do if rolls were reversed. I don’t think he would ever let things get this evil to begin with. This is one side of the political aisle who have crossed a line that has never been crossed before.
Yes, as a former Democrat myself, whole damn scene is unbelievable, isn’t it? My old friends (in DC) are now my enemies, and my old enemies my new friends.
Most of the psyop is the distortion and manipulation of reality to create extreme emotion, projection and loss of objectivity. There are no facts only accusation's (as demonstrated in the hearing). Knee-jerk is a disease I'm trying to recover from.
Tucker is a man with a rigid moral compass. Many don’t like the way it points, but he is firm on his direction. Everyone forgets that he describes himself as a libertarian first. Personally, I’d love to see Matt team up with Tucker on the J6 videos. I trust Matt to tell us in a different way the good, bad, and ugly.
Look up how Tucker sent emails to Hunter Biden toadying up for help with getting one of his kids into school. He's a fraud like the rest of them; he just plays a different assigned role in The Show.
It's all bullshit. There's no R and there's no D, except for a few genuine little small potatoes here and there who are either too dumb or too valiant to realize it's all stage lights and greasepaint. There's Them and there's Us. That's it.
While it may be true that Tucker and Hunter are both part of the same club, there is still some difference of opinion among members of the Club. For example, Tucker genuinely does disapprove of the open borders policy and has been a vocal critic for many years. He has also been a critical of our nonstop foreign interventions, and he is one of the few journalists other than Matt who has had anything bad to say out the vulture capitalists eating this country alive. I really do believe that very few people other than Tucker could have done the segment of Cabela's and Paul Singer without getting taken off the air. The only reason Tucker hasn't been removed from his platform is precisely because he's one of Them. And so while you are certainly right to question his motives and take everything he says with a grain of salt, he is still a rare and valuable dissenting voice among the elites.
That is precisely why I get my news from Matt. I get that Tucker is part of big media, but he does have issues that he will present accurately and with fervor. But he freely admits that he is an opinion guy--a commentator. I absolutely love Tucker's interviews and specials. He asks the questions that I want asked. But! All that said, I get my news from guys like Matt.
The Twitter files wouldn't have happened without subscription journalism and the Republican's are at least politically malleable right now. The psyop (MSM/surveillance state/criminal finance) talks over the top of us and openly lies because they can get away with it. The more truth we speak the more light shines on the lie. There is a huge change factor in that.
So he tried to help his kid and that negates all of the research, evidence and videos he has shown? I think you may be missing the forest for the trees. I’m not a Tucker fan, but I’m a truth fan. And as far as main stream media goes there’s hardly a shred of it besides Carlson.
My thought. Like the Taibbi Twitter files the J/6 footage needs to go to review and report by a qualified unbiased journalist. Not because of any left/right concern but because you and I deserve the truth. The DNC/surveillance state willingness to openly lie reveals how pathologically vicious they are.
He trafficked in evil for craven personal gain. There is no other way to interpret that action. There is no fucking school in the world that is worth groveling for favors from that shitstain Hunter Biden and anyone who "help[s] his kid" by trying to implant said kid deeper in to the rotting carcass that is the elite power structure in this country has demonstrated that he is a corrupt liar obviously hoovering up the bucks to tell the rubes what they want to hear.
Anyone who spends his days looking at what Tucker Carlson looks at and doesn't conclude that the best place for his family is a dairy farm in Iowa, not anywhere within a thousand miles of anywhere that Hunter Biden's influence is a plus, is one of them. This is not hard to figure out.
Learn to live without trying to find heroes, is my advice. No one is coming to save you. It's up to you.
I agree (with a suggestion). "Us" are the citizen's of the American Constitutional Republic. We're not capitalist, communist or DNC/RNC hack's. We are free and responsible citizen's of the Republic.
Maybe my memory is faulty because I was pretty liberal back in the 00s, but I remember despising Tucker during the Bush II era. That was bowtie Tucker. I should go back and watch some of his stuff from back then.
he hasn't changed. He described himself as a libertarian. I see why when I hear his rants on freedom of speech and corrupt government. he and I share the same roots. Most think me a conservative. I identify as conservative. Truth be told, I am a strict constructionist of our constitution. I guess that is conservative in a way.
For real. A few years ago I'm not sure if I would have slowed down for him in a crosswalk. Now he's the only MSM person speaking Truth. Upside down world.
They have shown their true color and it isn’t red, white and blue or anything resembling blue. It is black. Not as in racial identity, but as in soulless.
The hearings of the past few days should leave no doubt. The despicable attacking of Matt and Shellenberger, Nicholas Wade, the young man who’d written a book about the necessity for nuclear energy and fossil fuels until there is something proven more effective and available… accused of racism, collusion, shilling for Putin… I was sickened and frightened. It was obscene.
I think what we're viewing is pathological not political. I'm saying this because of the damage I'm witnessing around me and the inability of American elected political leadership to acknowledge and address it.
It’s called “walking away.” I left the Democratic party circa 2015.
I used to read the LA Times, NYT, and Wall Street Journal every day. I occasionally still read the WSJ, but not so much.
It is really eye-opening to listen to the source yourself, and then read the reporting on it later on these publications. Unbelievable the lies and spinned narratives that are “reported” as FACT... it was and still is shocking to me the lies that we are regularly told.
I get my news, now, from substack writers, Rumble videos, Real America’s Voice (I especially like Steve Bannon, Charlie Kirk and Wayne Allyn Root), and Tucker Carlson (the rest of Fox News is just... “outrage” culture and garbage as far as I am concerned).
Welcome this thing we call honest reality. Where, yeah, it's appropriate to discipline your children, teach them right from wrong, and call out the union loving Uber libs that think otherwise. I like to call it conservatism.
Me, too, Blake. Voted Dem for 30 years and even campaigned for them. I’ll never forgive them for embracing censorship, authoritarianism, and becoming the party of warmongering elites. This whole experience has made me question all of my principles, everything I held as true.
The Democrats have put me in a position to side with Franklin Graham… and I’m Jewish, albeit not terribly devout in practice, socially liberal in the classic sense and during my time volunteering at the Dali’ Museum became the infamous “ Indecent Docent”.
Whatever the once Democrats call themselves, they are no longer recognizable as anything American. They have “ transitioned” into a tyrannical, illiberal, racist, antisemitic, anti-free speech, anti-freedom, anti-civil liberties, anti-Constitutional, pro-surveillance,pro-war,,violent,lawless,savage,intolerant Cult of Hatred For All Things Living
Matt Stoller wrote about this yesterday. As a reporter who focuses almost exclusively on antitrust issues, Stoller's viewpoint is that "Jim Jordan has been a foe of antitrust action against big tech and government action to regulate dominant firms for years."
Stoller can get way too full of himself at times, but he is right on Jordan. I think the most telling is how much Ken Buck cannot stand Jordan for derailing his antitrust efforts.
Agreed, Stoller's style can come across as arrogant and condescending. But I generally trust his judgment on antitrust matters.
On a related note, yesterday Stoller also strongly dismissed the "chilling" nature of the FTC's request for reporters' names from Twitter. He said this was business as usual for the FTC since they had worked out a consent decree with Twitter years ago regarding their playing fast and loose with user data. It wasn't clear to me that the Twitter Files were relevant to this specific abuse at all, and when a commenter called him out on this, Stoller said "well that's why they're doing the investigation." I read all of this as Stoller wanting to protect the reputation of Lina Khan, who (to her credit) appears to be doing some real antitrust busting. One of the few Biden promises that seems to be getting some real follow through.
I guess--as Taibbi suggested in his testimony--everyone has their motives.
I read it too, but have cut back on my paid subscriptions, so just get the free version. Stoller really cares about--and is an expert in--this area. One funny detail is that he will actively ban commenters that he finds trollish or unproductive. I can certainly understand why one would want to do that, but...it's arguably not the best look in this day and age.
I'm not sure you contextually understand his objections to said legislation .
It's one thing to have read those pieces of legislation and object to his reasoning for not supporting them is another, if your frame of reference was formed by an opinion article or of cable mouth piece, it is suspect. If it is not the case then I wholly support opinion. Even if we differ on it.
This is no longer the Democratic Party of Lyndon Johnson, George McGovern od Dennis Kucinich. This is the party that warmly welcomed Dick Cheney during his last year visit to the Capitol.
The main goal of the democrats (and the old-style republicans) is to preserve power at any cost, while the current version of the Republican Party gravitates towards fascism. Vide Ron DeSantis attempts to enforce Christian morality. We are screwed.
This country is governed by fascists that claim they're fighting fascism. And by fascists, I mean the Democratic Party. 90% of the people who complain about fascism have no idea what it actually is.
The Uniparty is fascist. The only reason it isn't more obvious is because of the play-acting internecine conflict within the party between the Democrats and Republicans. All of that drama creates the necessary diversion.
The Dems fit nearly all of them now. It's time we recognize both parties are building a fascist state to protect business interests. We are just still in the "banality of evil" stage.
I'm trying to not allow my honest vitriol at the state of American elected political leadership to be manipulated by the criminal financier's fronting the psyop. Objectivity and the Constitution is our friend.
I am an Independent and 68 years old. I lived during LBJ. Todays Democrate is similar to the LBJ Democrat. LBJ had same authoritarian disregard for civil liberties but decentful about it. They better at giving the public appearance that they were for the people and civil liberties.
Why, you don't think "Landslide Lyndon" was legit? Lol. Johnson's man that swiped box 13 kept it as a survenir, was photographed with it in a story I read back in the 1990's.
I'll be honest, saying "the Republican Party gravitates towards fascism" sounds like bullshit rhetoric to me, but I'm absolutely open to being convinced otherwise. "Gravitates towards incompetence" I wouldn't question for a second, but "fascism" sounds highly questionable. Can you (or anyone else) provide concrete examples of this?
Isn't fascism the merger of corporate (financial elitism) and government power to create totalitarian rule?That's certainly what Hitler, Stalin and Mao represented. (All three were slaver's.)
I think what we're not seeing (or willing to accept) is that international criminal finance is looking to create a "one world" government. The D.C. hog trough doesn't make sense to us because we aren't looking at the big picture. We live crisis to manufactured crisis which is how the psyop prevents the actual healthy dialogue that would put solution's on the table.
We're winning because we are re-capturing the American national dialogue. That's what the hearing actually revealed.
Thank god level headed democrats exist. I find myself constantly wondering how some of these people get elected. Anyone with one brain cell of intellect should be able to see the train wreck the “democrats” have become. It’s a completely different thing than it was 15-20 years ago.
Under Brezhnev, the official diagnosis used to confine dissenters was “sluggish schizophrenia”, meaning they really exhibited no symptoms of disorder other than being outspoken in opposition to the government, demonstrating for reforms, etc. Sometimes it was enough to attempt to emigrate, possess or distribute literature. Even writing a book could instigate a psychiatric incarceration.
It is the most infamous diagnosis used by Soviet psychiatrists because it was applied against political dissenters. I think it is no longer used. But our government may just decide to resurrect its usage. It does not look too far-fetched.
Not far-fetched at all. Look at the quote provided by Matt of the Democrat speculating on who is allowed into the “conversation” at all. Once Democrats regain control of the House, I completely expect “dissenters” to be outlawed, including the Republican party. The “hate speech” law they want to create could easily be used to do that.
Andrew Sullivan, besides being an English jerk, is an avowed elitist and his interpretation is therein tainted and untrustworthy. He knows better: for shame.
They're arresting citizen's for speech and thought crime in England imprisoning and forcing them into camp's for "right think" (3,500 last year). The English people deserve American sympathy and support. Recent demands by international criminal finance at Davos that American's accept limit's on free speech and thought and the silence of American elected political leadership speaks to the realpolitik of our situation.
I knew the jig was up with democrats when I realized they owned every fucking union vote in the nation, and my fellow union hard core conservatives were ok with their money going to support that which they abhor, but wouldn't stand up. Fucking quislings, the lot of them. I mean that in a nice way though.
Why am I not surprised. While I am very thankful that Matt, a self described lefty, is doing good work on this, it seems he has a little tunnel vision on the past. Always referring to " Bush/Cheney" and WMD. But I never hear him talk about this incident, in relationship to Trumps home raid regarding the national archives or to just wonder about 9/11, and maybe a connection to why Bush did what he did. As I tell my lefty friends, and yes, they are still my friends. I am not going to defend the Republicans to the death. but in my lifetime (63 yrs old) they don't even come close to the treachery and hypocrisy of the Democratic party.
If the Democratic Party was honestly worried about a possible Trump victory, they would not be creating more Trump voters with shit-shows like the "hearing" Mr. Taibbi was subjected to.
As if anyone needed reminding, there is a growing contingent of fed-up citizens like me who want to vote for Trump just to goad the TDS crowd and to see how far his opponents will go to queer his efforts. This is a reasonable reaction, considering that Trump's election in 2016 has been used to rationalize a chain of drastic totalitarian maneuvers by the regime and its bureaucrats, from a kangaroo court impeachment process to the politicization of the coof "vaccine" to another kangaroo court fabricating an "insurrection" out of a riot and some Trump supporters milling around in the capitol building.
The entire apparatus trying to control the flow of information ("the narrative") that the Twitter Files project is revealing grew out of the rage and paranoia following Trump's election. The chattering classes, their highly-paid talking heads, and the Clinton campaign (read: Democratic Party), instead of adjusting to the voters' America First demands, began a campaign to bury Trump, to remove any possibility of his political resurgence, a campaign that is ongoing and getting more desperate now that he has declared. But they've shot their wad. Their covers have been pulled.
The apparent ethic of the DP these days reminds me of the famous statement to the press by a commander of a Vietnam War operation whose name escapes me, "We had to destroy the village to save it." In order to prevent what they delusionally see as a "threat to democracy" (free internet political discussion and expressing a preference to vote for Trump or DeSantis or any populist) they are willing to destroy any faith left in anyone for any form of centralized government, making anarchy very attractive and even getting people to seriously consider state secession.
In short, in order to maintain and increase control over the speech and the votes of citizens, the DP-controlled establishment has become totalitarian, and there are many Republicans who would be fine with the arrangement if it benefited their party, with a few exceptions . . . like Trump and DeSantis.
I can't believe Allred, with a straight face, just refers back to "Russian Disinformation". These people have such a high degree of "selective fact recognition", and an almost addict-like need to re-confirm their own narrative since 2016, that you can put the facts found in the Twitter Files in front of them... You can literally hand them the evidence of the security state doing something we all know is wrong, and because all roads lead back to Donald Trump, they will laugh it off. I honestly never thought it possible to live in a United States where such blatant fact denial was possible.
Nate O'Brien, there is a term for what you describe: Trump Derangement Syndrome. It should be in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders--and would be, except for the fact that the people who control that manual are themselves afflcted with TDS. To quote the man himself: "sad."
Truly, these people are mentally ill. That is how to understand it.
Nah, this is the same thing that the Bush/Cheney Republicans were doing long before Trump entered the political scene. There's something bigger at play and I think it's that the "Intelligence Community" is like a parasite or virus that can hop from one host to another as is deemed expedient.
Don't get me wrong, TDS is a real thing and most of these Democrats at the hearings are infected by it, but it wasn't the driving force for the censorship program nor was it the main reason for their horrid treatment of Taibbi and Shellenberger. We're talking serious Russia Derangement Syndrome w/ the "IC" co-opted DNC these days.
secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, especially in order to cheat or deceive others
So when I say publicly it would be nice if there was a Tesla in my driveway and the next day there is with the title in my name, it really wasn't in secret or illegal. It's why the term "collusion" is constantly used because that's not how it happened.
And this is my last day because letting sub lapse. Matt has been unimpressive and is turning into whiny boy. But he does know who's buttering his bread so he'll be OK.
I get it. Trump continues with his usual lies and then says he's running for President again and we're not allowed to talk about him because that's TDS. Well.....fuck that!!!
The really scary--when the justice system, infected with TDS, hides exculpatory evidence, denies bail, and sentences no violent people to a max sentence. That’s scary!
At least Bush/Cheney lied about something that was on its face reasonable--terrorist threats and the means to stop them became a pretext for the Patriot Act and its downstream abuses and really began the 21st-century "surveillance state." These conditions emboldened the spooks--and state bureaucrats generally--to the degree we're seeing revealed in the Twitter Files. Give them an inch and they think they're rulers.
The current crop of lies demonizes American citizens and treats us like children incapable of reading the real news (an endangered species) and arriving at rational conclusions. We must be protected from "information" of all things.
Just because most Americans are stupid and do what authority tells them doesn't give our rulers the right to capitalize on it.
Not so sure I'm with you on Bush and Cheney. Reasonable? Based on literally just two or three terror plots/events conducted by Islamists in the history of the country? Compared to US-bred terrorism? Don't even get me started on 9/11 either - we'll end up talking about Israel and the US government.
They're eagerly exploiting Trump Derangement Syndrome, which is mainly confined to the remaining gaslit supporters of the Democrates and/or "liberalism"
That DSM manual became political a long time ago. I won’t mention the first change I became aware of because I’d probably be lambasted. But I began noticing the political nature of the DSM when I was in graduate school, studying for my PhD in clinical psychology. And that was back in the late 1970’s.
Pacificus knows, he was there, he was there in that darkened room in the 1970s when the DSM was captured...or began to be captured...ideologically...or some shit like that...
Given the current edition of the DSM was essentially written by Big Pharma, it's mainly a catalog for the sale of psychotropic medications at this point. It's only political in the sense Big Pharma is clearly challenging the MISC for dominance of government function and extraction of funds.
Liz, I take your point that, these days, Big Pharma calls a good bit of the tune when it comes ot the DSM. But "woke" shrinks provide critical support to that effort, i.e., "we have to give puberty blockers to your gender dysphoric kid or they will commit suicide...Look, here are two studies that prove that!"
And voila! The Pediatric Gender Mutilation Industrial Complex was born.
My best insight is public donation's, tax dollar/grant's disguised as social program support and Soros/Davos funded type NGO's. The classic feminist ploy was 1.) Do a study. 2.) Create or discover a problem. 3.) Use p.r. and press to create hysteria and demand government action and funding.
Meanwhile, sane gays like Douglas Murray are tearing their hair out.
Even better, now we have a movement that tells gay kids they’re not gay, just in the wrong body. And that hormones and surgery — clip-clip — can fix that!
How long before the DSM has a disorder for people who refuse to comply with the official narrative. It will be classified as a delusional break from "reality" requiring extensive in-facility treatment.
This is not new. The Soviet Union used to forcefully commit dissidents to psychiatric institutions where they were medicated. Arguably, that was worse than a prison or GULAG because there was no official sentence, and they were kept there for as long as KGB desired or until the noise raised by international civil right activists became inconveniently too loud. These so-called liberals/activists now fight against “disinformation”. How ironic.
Oppositional defiant disorder is indeed in the DSM-5. However, CURRENTLY the diagnosis can only be made in children who resist authority figures. Given that it is described as "a pattern of angry/irritable mood, argumentative/defiant behavior...," it seems ripe for the expansion to adults who react in this way to our political elites, whom we should acknowledge know better than us.
The Scientologists discovered and codified this disorder more than 50 years ago. Scientologists don't need no DSM to tell'em who's complying with the official narrative and who's not.
Michael Savage discovered it. You'd have to go back many years to his book, " liberalism is a mental disorder" to see that. With I think three phd's, doctor savage knows a mental disorder when he sees it. Tds is a manifestation of same!
TDS—I like it. People were/are so blinded by their hatred of Trump, they‘ve driven themselves mad. Remember the signs in 2020 that said “Any functioning adult!” You’ve gotta love Life’s Supreme Ironies.
TDS is a real thing for sure, but I don't think that's quite what is in play with these Dems at the hearing. It's more like RDS (Russia Derangement Syndrome) or PDS (Putin Derangement Syndrome). They didn't focus on Trump, but on Mueller's indictments of various Russians. The Dems inherited their Russophobia from the Republicans in the post-Bush years (barring Obama's one-off quip to Romney that the Cold War was over), but of course it really took off w/ Trump as a means of de-legitimizing his election. Granted, it was TDS that really kicked it into high gear. But now that Trump is (mostly) gone, they're even more rabid and deranged about it and it's because the "Intelligence" Community and FBI have adopted (or rather infected) the Corporate Democrat Party.
Sheesh I dunno. I gave up on TV news - specifically cable - during the Bush/Cheney years when the so-called "left" leaning outlets like MSDNC joined with Fox and pumped war and Islamophobia day and night. Oh and did I mention it was ALL lies? So hopefully you're right but I know SOME people who still watch Fox and MSDNC/CNN.
You know what's really funny about the DSM? How they have to keep putting in an exemption for religious belief in the descriptions of behaviors that might indicate mental disorder, e.g., delusion, is defined by:
delusion--A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly
held despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture (i.e., it is not an article of
religious faith).
. If you take a pdf version of the DSM and search for 'religious', the whole scroll bar is full of the little tick marks indicating where 'religious' is used, the section for 'sexual disorders' is almost a solid color there's so many search hits.
Who's more mentally ill, those with TDS or those who think Trump isn't so prone to lying that he might actually be incapable of recognizing the truth?
I've always found it funny how it's fine and acceptable to mock or shame a flat earther, but an equally evidence free belief must be "respected" as long as it's called "religious".
Reality is not rational. Also, human beings appear to need a teleological explanation for existence that neither the big bang theory nor the theory of evolution satisfies.
"...except for the fact that the people who control that manual are themselves afflcted with TDS."
Love it. A gratuitous cheap shot at thousands of people you don't know apropos of nothing in particular. "Trump Derangement Syndrome." Right up there with "libtards," though I haven't encountered it in awhile. "DMS authors afflicted with TDS." I recommend a lot of adderall for that. But then I recommend a lot of adderall for almost anything.
TDS is a real thing and most Democrats have it, but that isn't what's happening in this hearing. This is "IC" related Russia Derangement Syndrome. The Republicans (and many Dems) have China Derangement Syndrome.
Maybe I do too, but I don't know you and I have been boycotting Chinese products since the late 2010s -- including Nike shoes manufactured by Uighur Chinese locked in concentration camps hundreds of miles from their homes. I also disapprove of the Chinese murder of tens of thousands of prisoners each year whose essential organs are being sold for cash . I've also had it with American filmmakers' adjustment of scripts so as not to offend the CCP, plus Lebron James' and John Cena's apologies to China for offenses that boil down to not bowing to totalitarians. And let's not forget American retailers' efforts to make it impossible to find the sources of the products they sell.
I have Chinese friends in the US now who want to stay, and I hope they will. I don't like either of our political parties, but I do care about human rights.
A lot of people do these kinds of ‘both sides are bad’ analogies, but China and Russia are two different things. To have a true Derangement Disorder your beliefs really need to be based on false information. Most of the stuff the right (used to be the left) believes about China is mostly verifiable and true. Russia, not so much.
Nonsense. Name three things about China that you think are "verifiable and true" and I can counter them within minutes (after I wake up tomorrow and have time w/ work). You sound like a candidate for a CDS diagnosis. Furthermore, "the left" never has had any substantial criticisms of China other than that they perhaps allowed too much capitalism, but at the end of the day their banking, education and healthcare are run by the government. There are no Uighur "concentration camps" and I can prove it if you're actually willing to debate and not closed minded and convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that China = Evil.
I understand the debate on Uighur concentration camps. I hope Max Blumenthal is right that that’s just a western fabrication, but Max also strikes me as a white monkey. The evidence for is compelling. I have a book I read, but can’t remember title. But I hope it’s wrong.
I don’t base this off what I read in the media. I work in China. I am a professional product sourcer with a staffed warehouse in Wuhan. I belong to about 100 WeChat groups and have more mainlander friends than I do American. I’ve helped Chinese dissidents get out of China.
1) No freedom of speech (I can break down. Even give you forbidden words)
2) No freedom of movement (I can break down)
3) Religious persecution
4) Major plastics pollution (seen the Yangtze River?)
Decimation of habitat and endangered species in Vietnam
Illegal fishing
Illegal logging
Extreme racism toward Africans (talks with Chinese males is like a Klan rally)
Endangered animal trade (I know guys who I can buy tiger claws from)
Mass counterfeiting (I can break down the different types of counterfeit goods from fine 1:1 to F goods to customs goods.)
Fake food (I can break that all down, how it works. Where you can eat to avoid it)
Caste system (mostly this is urban vs rural) Did you know that you can’t just up and move to any city you want?
Sexism
Fake poverty rates
It’s a techno-totalitarian hell. Everyone is transparent. All have been born into it and can’t see it, some are absolutely aware of it and feel powerless, others are trying to get out.
My Chinese friend Zong Gu sums up China well. “If you want to be rich in China you must be a great liar and cheater.”
Most Chinese want to be wealthy at all costs. Not all. They are imperialist, not in the war mongering American way, but imperialist in trade and business. They are very, very smart people. I love them, but they are straight hustlers.
Oh, and the stuff going through customs would blow your mind. Are you going to tell me they aren’t sending gun parts and fake pills? If so, give me your mailing address and I’ll send you all the illicit shit you can dream up. I will pay for it.
My Chinese homies call me Amerinese because I know
“Too much about real China.”
I even have a nickname: White Lee. Named after a great, ancient Chinese poet.
1. China has an extensive program to steal technology and trade secrets from advanced countries for both military and civilian applications.
2. China has spent years subsidizing state owned companies to take control of the global supply chain (with the west stupidly cheering them on, admittedly...)
3. China is quietly modernizing their armed forced and spending massive amounts of money so they can project their power in the future. They currently rank #2 in the world for military spending, with the gap closing each year on the USA.
4. China is projected to surpass the USA in GDP around 2035.
5. China aspires to be a global superpower.
Are these things "evil"? Not necessarily. After all, the West is or was guilty of all of these things as well. Is China a far bigger threat than Russia to western hegemony? Absolutely.
I like most of your posts Mango, but I suspect the truth about the human rights situation in both China and Russia falls somewhere between what the Western establishment says and what you are saying.
China is run by an authoritarian government— those will always be guilty of human rights violations towards anyone they perceive as a risk.
That's really interesting. There's been a ridiculously long supply problem for adderall generics, it was attributed to an upsurge in prescriptions. It's led to pharmacies sometimes switching suppliers or at least going with different ones when necessary, so users can get pills that look different than they're used to. Just like the placebo effect, as humans, it's very easy for us to fool ourselves, any suspicion that there's something amiss could easily lead someone to perceive a change that isn't really there. That's not to say it's not happening, but generics still have some pretty heavy quality control, it's more likely it's mistaken perceptions. I'd bet a lot of 'conspiracy theories' arise from similar scenarios, initially, no intention of deception, just mistakes that warp as they're spread.
Now stop and consider for a moment the constituencies which place and keep these intellectual dwarfs in power. Then you realize how and why we are so totally fuc**d up.
“No wonder we are all more or less pleased with mediocrity, since it leaves us at rest, and gives the same comfortable feeling as when one associates with his equals.”
As far as I can tell, most Democrats, but not all, aspire to mediocrity. Actually most of the world aspires to mediocrity. Striving for excellence is too hard. It takes time, hard work, patience and often failure to get to excellence.
That election totally destroyed their vanity as custodians of Democracysplaining and curating culture. It was like they all had electroshock therapy. They are fighting for their lives. They are now nothing - unless they reach the billionaire class,and that’s not gonna happen. Ask the millionaire next door
Not only the offensive smear campaign of 2 highly respected journalists, the clear evidence of government interference in our constitutionally protected free speech rights, such unprofessional, inappropriate behavior from these dems, no surprise if they get voted out in the next election. But its funny to me that HRC "cherrypicked" the Donald to be her opponent in 2016 assuming it would be an easy win for her! Looks like these Dems overestimate their own popularity! I'm a Dem no more!
The gaslighting is crazy. Chris Hayes just saying "I don't see the government in this" is both a blatant lie and phrased just like a doctor doing a medical report -- if he says "There was no government involvement," that's a solid claim he can't walk back later by pretending he's even dumber than he is, just like a doctor who "doesn't see" something that turns out to be a tumor etc. can blame a radiologist or whatever in a courtroom far more easily than they could had they dictated "There is no evidence of a tumor" etc.
I never thought it possible to have a president who was so constantly in denial of facts that you had to wonder if they were lies or if he was actually delusional. Clearly, there is real Trump Derangement Syndrome, but you have to ask what's more deranged, to have TDS or to NOT have it? It's no wonder lots of folks have as default the assumption that if Trump claims something, it's most likely a lie--because that's the rational choice. While it's true "That the roles have been reversed is old news,", is the right really on the 'right' side of these issues or is it all just reflexive anti-antiTrump reaction? One glaring example is all the new-found concern over conditions in the DC jails. Is there any indication they suddenly care about treatment of inmates in jails and prisons across the country? No, what you get is accusations that the mistreatment of the 1/6 detainees is politically motivated punishment. Is there the slightest evidence the right suddenly become anti-war? Or anti-surveillance state? Is there a large-scale GOP-led attempt to stop the persecution of Assange or Snowden?
The Dimocrats behavior of late has been excruciating and appalling, they've gone off the deep end, no question that's the case, I get that. What I really don't get is how almost all of the criticisms come with assumptions the other side is any better, failing to acknowledge the serious and constant, SOP-level of lunacy, denial of fact, acceptance of conspiracy theories etc. How many times have you heard about how bad the lefts attack on free speech are without managing to acknowledge that's not only the age-old norm from the right but that they are right now participating in the large-scale, overt and actually legislated attacks on free speech in 'don't say gay' and book banning. Those are part of a huge, decades-long, highly organized efforts by rightwingers to legislate their versions of christian morals and ideals, attacking not just religious freedom but include broad attacks on the freedom of speech, e.g., the two just mentioned but also forcing the dissemination of lies about the risks of abortion and condoms while restricted doctors from giving actual, real medical advice for what's best for the health of the mother.
You're preaching to the choir. I see the same hypocrisy on the right... The distressing thing is that the left is supposed to be better than that. They're supposed to be the party that isn't dominated by dogma, and winning at any cost.. Giving that away, becoming the thing they fought against, is depressing and surreal.
Like I've been saying for years. I didn't leave the Democrats, they left me. I find my world is upside-down these days when I find myself supporting the right in issues that were democrats bread and butter. The Twitter files has created some interesting if not disingenuous narratives in the media.
I think with both Taibbi and Greenwald and their focus on the left is likely due to what you describe--the left's seeming betrayal of everything they seemed to stand for. Left and right really have lost their meaning, it's more corporate/mainstream vs reality now. BUT, as I described above, I think they're making a big mistake by taking their eyes off the seriousness of the threats posed by rightwing attacks on speech and religious freedoms. FFS, we have 6 in SCOTUS who have no problem with rampant denial of reality, going so far as to call the stripping away of basic rights as something done FOR religious freedom.
Where exactly do you see me saying 'the right does it too'? You think I'm denying what is actually happening? I made it pretty clear, what do you think "The Dimocrats behavior of late has been excruciating and appalling, they've gone off the deep end, no question that's the case" says? What I DID say was that the right is worse and always has been and that their seeming reversal on lots of issues is, at best, paper thin and highly suspect as it seems it's only about crap Trump-related, and they're engaged in direct denials of free speech through legislation. That ain't moral equivalence. Plus, what exactly is paranoid? You'd have to claim I said something that wasn't true, try and tell me what.
I believe you need a better neonced information on the rights, so called attacks on free speech and religious freedoms. Mind you I tend not to let my news sources be the only arbiters of my understanding of what is actually transpired in a given day. Their biases lead there reporting.
I need better sources? Do you think Alito's Dobbs opinion is a bad source? Are 'don't say gay' and book banning laws not real? Do you think the right isn't and hasn't been for a long time catering to religious extremists? Quite a few GOP are flagrantly and even openly christian nationalists, many white christian nationalists. If you don't understand this, YOU need better sources.
Alito's Dobbs opinion got rid of a precedent that everyone from Scalia to Ginsberg thought was poorly reasoned. There can't be the "right" to terminate the life of another human. Insofar as the definition of human is debatable, the concept needs to be written in the language of statute, not rights. The "Don't Say Gay" law isn't real, obviously, because "don't say gay" isn't part of the language or intent of a law that is widely popular in the state it was written. Nor are there laws "banning books" anywhere in the US. There is no book that you can't buy or read in Florida. Parents may opt to disallow their children access to particular books in their school libraries, but this is hardly a "ban" in any reasonable sense of the word. Unless you think that pornography should be allowable in school libraries, you don't have much of a principled legal leg to stand on here. Maybe you do need better sources.
What you fail to realize is that party affiliation is not static, and many conservatives grew up to be Times liberals, steeped in principles of civil liberties. A person doesn’t drop those principles when the Democrat party does, because they have become part of the person’s core. The Democrats principles changed and left the people behind to find another place on the political spectrum. There one picks up the best that new party has to offer and rejects the rest. The voices you are hearing from didn’t just decide a week ago that “yeah, First and Fifth Amendment rights sound pretty cool.” The passion has only grown stronger because the liberal conservative has found that the new party loves our freedoms, our Founding Documents, studies them, and has favorite authors that strengthen the quest for justice, truth, and freedom.
Always assume the best about individuals until you have a reason not to (other than Rachel Maddow).
You make some really valid points. I will digress with two you did make. The so called don't say gay bill, never mentioned that ever. The bill simply stated that K through 3rd grade should not be introduced to sexual concepts that they are to young to understand the complex nuances. Personally I wouldn't want children exposed to that untill 7th grad at the earliest. One thing I have come to understand is, in reality there is know Republican or Democrat party there is a uni party. Not all members of either parties belong to it, but the leadership of both parties now represent themselves and not the people that entrusted to be there voice in the peoples house. Those people serve themselves and special interests.
Jim Jordan is amoung the few in each party that in my humble opinion that serve the peoples intrests.
What the bill says and how it's used and enforced are not the same thing. Just mentioning a married gay couple is somehow bad and can get a textbook or teaching material to run afoul of the law. Why? Here's a very simple thing that most religious freaks are incapable of understanding: NO religion gets to decide what is or isn't true/a fact, NO religion gets to decide what is or isn't moral. Not in reality and not legally in the US. If christians want to claim gay marriage is immoral, they're exposing how badly religion has warped their thinking. All it means is it's not being a good christian. What christians or their god says has absolutely ZERO meaning to anyone who isn't a christian, no more than what any god of any tribe living thousands of years ago.
You also seemed to ignore the book banning which should be abhorrent to anyone. Those laws ostensibly about parents having some control over their kid's education but they are set up so that even the objections of 1 parent can get a book banned, it wouldn't matter if most mothers wanted that book available for their kids. There isn't a single book that's been banned that has anywhere near the fucked up sexual content that the bible contains, plus all the monstrous behavior of their god like genocide, slavery, and telling his chosen buddies to use little girls as sex slaves. That's what makes these laws so infuriating and also laughably ignorant and moronic, not to mention monumental hypocrisy.
He ignored the book banning because no books have been banned. Some porn has been taken out of grade school curriculum, but you can still read those books if that is your cup of tea.
Oh please, porn? That's very revealing. Books have been banned from schools and libraries, that's pretty banned. Some of these laws have felony charges.
You do not know the facts. It was porn books that Desantis banned, that’s all. The law was against curriculum introducing sexual concepts to young kids. You are wrong about that fact also. There is no don’t say gay. Regular literature and age appropriate materials are not being banned. End of story. If you want your 7 year old to read about fiating and dildos and boys can be girls and whatever that’s your prerogative. No functional society, and most rational people would ever consider it appropriate curriculum for young kids. You are allowing yourself to fall in with fake narratives and spin because you are anti religion and must hate Desantis or something.
I largely agree with you. When the right has power they do the same things. The problem is giving anyone too much power.
And yeah, some of the comments from some ( not all) of the right wingers here are the mirror image of what I have seen for twenty years in the comment sections of Democrat-supporting blogs. Partisans are cherrypickers by definition.
Before any rightwingers jump on me, I think the corporate liberals have a lot more power right now to impose censorship, but in general you have to judge situations on a case by case basis.
Allred (D-Perkins Coie) has been programmed to act that way. Were you looking for personal integrity or a lack of cowardice? LOL. Allred is a team-player, not an independent thinker.
They remind me of the kind of extreme creationists who require nothing short of a time-lapse film of the past 300 million years to be convinced biological evolution is real. And even that wouldn't work.
But there's a tiny difference.: Creationists have never been in full control of the media, government, schools, intel services, DoD, Wall Street, etc.
"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people..."
Henry Kissenger
Regime change has now been openly turned against US. The coup is coming from inside the house. So many little Kissingers. Any of this sound familiar--
---
Since the early 1960s, U.S. policy makers had dedicated tens of millions of dollars in overt aid and covert actions to preventing the popular head of the Chilean Socialist party from being elected. Allende’s victory set in motion a furious effort, ordered by President Nixon, supervised by his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, and implemented by the CIA, to destabilize Chile and undermine Allende’s ability to govern—an effort that set the stage for the September 11, 1973 military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. “I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people,” Kissinger famously told his top aides.
Before the election, U.S. officials believed that the CIA “spoiling operations”—covert propaganda efforts to undermine Allende’s popularity before the election—would succeed.
[...]
When his cable, “Allende Wins” was first declassified more than 25 years ago, the second paragraph was entirely redacted. But a more recent declassification for the State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series revealed that the censorship was not intended to safeguard sensitive national security information, but rather to hide the melodramatic and abjectly insulting nature of the ambassador’s opinions. “We have been living with a corpse in our midst for some time and its name is Chile,” reads the redacted graph. “The decomposition is no less malodorous because of the civility which accompanies it. Chileans could as usual chatter endlessly on television and radio and in the early hours today as if nothing had changed and the screen switched from variety shows to roundtables of politicians pontificating as foolishly as ever. Chileans like to die peacefully with their mouths open.”
[...]
Even before the votes were fully counted, Allende’s election triggered a series of covert U.S. contingency plans designed to block his inauguration. Since no candidate had won a plurality of the balloting, the strategy focused on influencing the October 24, 1970, vote of the Chilean Congress to ratify the winner—through bribery and economic disruption, and a possible military coup. On the day of the election, Kissinger’s office reviewed a TOP SECRET/EYES ONLY CIA planning paper for the “40 Committee” which approved covert operations. The CIA initially saw “no chance that any action by US can influence [Chilean] Congressional vote to defeat Allende”—a position that Nixon and Kissinger refused to accept. The next day, CIA headquarters transmitted a cable to its station chief in Santiago asking for an assessment on “chances of overturning an Allende’s victory.”
I lived in Dallas when Allred beat Pete Sessions, a great moment. While I'm disappointed, I give Allred a pass, because he's just doing as instructed by his superiors in the Dem leadership. Chris Hayes's revelation of his lack of integrity is bothersome. It shouldn't be, but it is. Hayes seemed--for a while--that he wasn't going to sink to the depths of Maddow/Carlson/Hannity. Not anymore.
Are you saying you approve of Allred's lack of integrity because he is simply acting how he was told to act? You're gonna use the Auschwitz guard defense? Fitting, but I'm not sure it will be effective.
Thanks for saying that. It must be a habit for some to reach up their sleeve for that Ace that they had for so many years, and start moving their lips before they realize it no longer there. Too late, the mouths are already moving, telling that comforting bedtime story once again.
Matt asks: "The big question remains: why did this happen?"
I think the first aspect, as Matt says, is the enormous chasm that has opened up between the elite ruling class and the rest of the country (which may be at a similar level as the chasm between nobles and plebes in pre-Revolutionary France): our globalist elites are almost entirely postnational and have walled themselves off from the rest of us and have zero loyalty to America and its citizens, culture, history, traditions (in fact, more than no loyalty they have deep hostility toward all these things). Also, upscale white liberals absolutely despise downscale white conservatives, have no interest in sharing a country with them, and would rather silence and impoverish them than compromise. Trump 2016 hit our progressive oligarchy like a declaration of war, a total psychological assault, and instead of pausing to ask why America elected a cheesy and sleazy game-show host as president, they went straight into permanent tantrum mode aka The Resistance.
And secondly, the fact that we all live on the internet now presents just too juicy a target for any aspiring tyrants to resist.
The famously demented Emperor Caligula famously said "I wish all of Rome had one throat, so I could cut it", and that is the position our global ruling class has arrived at. Sometime in the past decade it seemed to dawn on everyone at the top of the food chain, from the WEF to the NYT etc: Our society does have one throat! (Or one voicebox) And this presented too tempting a prize not to be fought for: imagine that with a few clicks the FBI, DHS, NIH, FDA etc could coordinate between themselves to craft a single reigning narrative, and then imagine that w a few more clicks they could get their friends at Big Tech (who are the mouth of our social voicebox) to make their narrative the sole permissible one, while censoring all dissent and silencing or banishing all dissenters. With a few keystrokes, they made themselves omnipotent, omniscient, godlike.
Our entire ruling class, from the most useless bureaucrat at the DHS or NIH up to Gates, Zuckerberg, Soros & Sulzberger etc, couldn't resist the temptation: they have been able to grab more power than even the immortal Emperor Caligula dreamed of, and didn't even have to shed a drop of blood (and it even made them more $$).
To mix my Roman metaphors, aiming for total social control is their Rubicon, and they've crossed it and are not turning back.
Bear in mind also that many of our richest elites are in relatively new industries -- i.e., tech. Many were raised after high schools stopped requiring or even offering civics classes.
A few years ago, one of my almae matres (UCLA) eliminated a very popular First Amendment course because the lawyer adjunct who taught it was a conservative -- even though students said he encouraged free discussion because, well, that is the whole point of the First Amendment.
But, hey, these new elites can code, so they obviously know more than the rest of us. Think of Meta's Zuck, who spent $400+ million on get-out-the-vote campaigns in 2020 that spent much more money to encourage voting in Democratic precincts than in icky Republican ones.
Taibbi was supported by a rep-Jim Jordan-from the practical equivalent of District 12-he lives in a village where it isn’t uncommon to get stuck behind a combine-I’ve had it happen personally there.
I believe Matt has mentioned Jersey? Maybe stuck behind horse vans. His partner may have a profession there. Crazy high taxes. Don’t see politics lol. Even Bon Jovi’s ‘bee farming’ tax dodge grift made him move out
Non-affiliation-D vs R, and shared general values/principles are a very different thing. If a place completely gives up on the later, I would not want to live there.
People for the most part only care about their status and money needs in the moment, people see which way the tide is flowing and flow with it, and nothing matters but the present and its urgency. (and if the urgency of the moment, what the press is saying, what your colleagues are saying, has always been vital, that's only massively magnified now that we all live inside the digital panopticon.)
i think psychologically we're all prone to privatizing the gains and socializing the losses, meaning that any mistakes will be pinned on others, any future disasters will be someone else's fault...so as for the upscale American liberals who rule us, they truly believe all evil emanates from their political opponents (Trump made me do it!), and no matter what the future holds, even a civil war, they will absolutely blame it all on the other side and sleep easily knowing they've always been on the RIght Side of History.
“I think psychologically we're all prone to privatizing the gains and socializing the losses, meaning that any mistakes will be pinned on others, any future disasters will be someone else's fault”
Very much yes.
I just finished reading Martin Seligman’s “Learned Optimism” and was sarcastically delighted to see his defense of pessimism, five pages of 290, buried deep in the middle and containing what appeared to me to be a precise description of the values we should be trying to live our lives by.
There is an entire chapter about optimism in the political sphere and how American voters prefer optimists. Of that I have little doubt. What lies buried in that brief section defending pessimism, however, is this gem:
“There is clear evidence that nondepressed people distort reality in a self-serving direction and depressed people tend to see reality accurately.”
One need not look far to see the profound impact of Seligman and the Positive Psychology movement on our society. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote an excellent critique of it called “Bright Sided” years ago. But having just read it myself, it’s awfully tempting to connect the dots between this entire mindset and our current state of affairs. All I was thinking while reading this book was “why on Earth would we be ENCOURAGING this?”
The roots of the New Left are both in post-Marxist Crit Theory and also Self-esteem Self-help psychology...they traded the redistribution of wealth and assets for the redistribution of stigma and esteem..."Self-esteem" seems to be one of the great sacred myths of our time, no matter how many times it fails, it is never abandoned.
it is kinda funny in a twisted way...the Marxists said that liberated man would want to fish in the morning and write poetry at night, various other utopias posit a race of unleashed ubermenschen taking us to space as we all sing "Imagine" together...none of them could have guessed that when the needs of survival were met what people would most want would be to attend a permanent group therapy session and talk about their suffering Selves and how much they've been victimized....LOL!
As absurd as it sounds the millionaire next door will not join the 1% - and that used not to be the case. They are feeling vulnerable, especially if they lose their political and cultural clout. The billionaires have locked the gate to the aspirational class and Trump was like a series of electrical shock treatments. It’s as if they all have brain injuries Democracysplaining to us.
They’re too stuck in their bubble. What they don’t understand is that people will take only so much abuse. Especially people here in the USA. Let’s not forget, we are the descendants of those uppity peasants who left the Old World so they could own land and forge their own destiny.
We have a history, society and culture that will not be beholden to anyone who forces it upon us.
This is an excellent post. One thing that’s been odd for me to observe is that my high school-educated working class conservative friends are smarter and better informed on most political and social issues than my wealthy and highly credentialed liberal friends. And my conservative friends aren’t just regurgitating talking points that might happen to be correct. They understand their positions and can logically defend them.
yeah, i also come from a working-class background but was educated at a private liberal arts college (where i sat behind some crazy kid named Matt Taibbi one class) and for me the major difference bw my working-class friends and my upscale/suburban friends more or less comes down to bullshit detection...my working-class friends can't be played as easily by gauzy moral appeals or intellectual/philosophical trends. they are not as status conscious and also don't have the same desperate need my friends in the Blue Bubble do to appear morally righteous. they are much more refreshing to talk to, and also i don't have to walk on eggshells and worry that one wrong word will cause a denunciation.
Not all of us! We're not in Kansas anymore; we're well beyond the old school binaries of Right and Left. Critical thinking has not left the building for many of us on the Left; it's that the Democrats have abandoned the Left, along with critical thinking. As others have written, it's now more about the Establishment versus the rest of us. When we drop into simplistic adversarial binaries, we give them exactly what they want - a distracted bunch of drama creators and perpetuators who are easily manipulated and unwittingly captured. Gotta stay awake and be open to new associations.
Dear Rep. Goldman -- If you and your party don't believe that our First Amendment applies to the government, especially in matters of public policy, then:
Maybe we can build them an island paradise they can never leave so they can act out the last aeon's dying throes on each other and leave the vast majority of us the FUCK alone.
Who is Goldman to deny free speech to those who dissent from his opinions? And what is not permitted to participate in the "convo" [ugh] but the denial of a voice? Is he not bright enough to see that this is dictatorial?
For all their modern bluster about "democracy", these Democrats are clearly no small-d democrats. They are authoritarians, pure and simple. Goldman's "zero tolerance" quote epitomizes it: They see an opponent as a child, or a subhuman, or the enemy in a "just" war. Possibly, they believe all three. Theirs is certainly not the language of equals or of diplomacy.
He knows it is dictatorial. They crave dictatorship and cheat and cry when they can't get their way honorably. They can't win by their ideas anymore, so they have to use their ill -gained power to squash dissent.
They always stay steps ahead on the public discourse. At the moment we notice there's war against us (that is, publicly speak of it, not just act against it), we are declared to be *starting* the war (and, of course, that we are stupid, evil, and/or crazy). It applies everywhere, such as: their reaction to pushback against CRT's effect on immature minds in elementary schools; or their decade-plus M.O. in Ukraine. We must up our game, and yesterday.
I'm actually surprised Taibbi (and his team?) hadn't put in more "PR" work/time on this, strategizing the exact pithy zinger responses against a fairly predictable spew of garbage, to better spur wake-up calls to viewers. (Nothing against his work! It's extremely admirable he(/they) are on the front lines.) Instead, he seemed to rely on the caught-by-surprise response to do the work. IOW, on the 20th-century method of straight-man responses, expecting most people would instantly notice absurdities.
But I think that's unlikely to work sufficiently on the majority of a by-now thoroughly indoctrinated audience, who might instead just think Taibbi's slow (i.e stupid). His approach worked decades ago, but today, counterintuitively, it's not a good (enough) look. You can't just walk in there with facts...
After 52 years as a Dem, I dropped my party affiliation 6 months ago. I’m now unaffiliated. I joke about how if I drop Netflix, I get a “sorry to see you go” email. I think the Dems have lost their minds. Matt, I was so upset to see how you were treated at the hearing. I was equally happy that I am no longer associated with them. My immigrant grandparents who adored FDR and had a portrait of him in their foyer would be as horrified as I am. Joe Biden goes to Ukraine to promise pensions, among other things, but says he’ll go to East Palestine, OH “at some point”? We’re in the Twight Zone. Keep up the great fight, Matt!
I have been watching the House hearings on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. While I am not under any illusions that the Republicans are in this for the “right” reasons, I am appalled by the deliberate misdirection by the Democrats. They are deliberately missing the point. Our government agencies led, if not outright directed, social media sites to censor voices that did not fit the narrative they wanted presented. This was not just done to conservatives by any means. This was done under, at least, the last two presidential terms so, again, this should not be a partisan issue but a free speech issue. This should be a chilling wake up call that our government is grossly overstepping its bounds.
They're so obviously in CYA mode. They're also so short-sighted they don't even realize the censorship apparatus they're trying so hard to implement will be used against them when a different party takes the Oval.
"Woke" is just a manufactured and propagated corporate control mechanism to control the masses when the next 2008 happens, no more unaligned and uncontrolled "Occupy" movements, no more Bernie Sander threats. Let the plebes tilt at race and gender windmills while Rome burns.
The next 2008 may have started. The FDIC announced the SVB uninsured depositors will be made whole. Friday I believed that at least one regulatory agency (the FDIC) was still an honest broker. Tonight I believe we are again at moral hazard.
I was a rank & file dem but once I did an event for a woman running for Senate and got 20 women to come at $50 each which I then donated as one check. My whole communication from DEMS changed. I got invited to parties from rich DEMS but to come you had to donate at least $500. The names were the richest people in town who never went to any of the rank and file stuff. I didn't go to any but I suppose it would escalate. I still get those e-mails 20 years later. It was like there was another level of dems I had no idea about. Anyone who donates their small amounts is just giving the candidate the right to brag about small money donors/ suckers.
If you give money to anyone in politics, make up an email address and then delete it. Somehow Dems think I'm Michael and I never knew there were so many ways to say "begging" and "pleading."
It was somewhat of a surprise that this committee was even formed. It was obviously spurred on by J6, but I think the country is way overdue for an Intelligence and FBI overhaul. I hope the Democrats see the value in that, and I hope the Republicans are flexible enough to tackle cross-partisan issues. Those issues seem to be FISA 702 reform, complete repeal of the vestiges of The PATRIOT Act and much needed transparency and declassification of material.. Executive overreach has gone too far. I am a nonpartisan so I am especially interested in bipartisan approaches. I am deeply disappointed about security trumping freedom and I hope the pendulum swings back again.
This is what will happen: They will replace the Terr.. ISI... Trum.. Russ... COV... Russ... Domestic Terr... Russia threat with China.
They will not repeal squat. They will arrive at a bipartisan consensus that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE. And the insanity will continue, until reality finally asserts itself in a very dramatic way.
Watching the hearing, I was struck by the venom in the room. I was left with the impression that the country is hopelessly riven. The Democrats have absolutely no interest in turning down the temperature, even for the 1st Amendment, and especially now that the next election is for the Presidency. Whatever it takes to win. Even lukewarm attempts at compromise will be reconfigured as attacks on "democracy."
We use robots (computer programs) to collect all communications--everything--and then use robots (computer programs) to repeatedly search this information, and the argument is that it doesn't count as a constitutional violation because a robot can't violate the constitution--and none of it counts until a human sees it--and then it's somehow legal because a warrant now has nothing to do with the collection and search, but authorizes the robots to communicate with humans.
It's completely insane.
The precedent of logic and law unavoidably ends where George Floyd's death is fine as long as a robot does it.
[Robot Voice] "Comply or die. Comply or die. Look out he's got a gun!"
What to do? The laws need to be updated. Who even understands all of this? Who is going to stand up for civil liberties? I fear that the lawmakers are so beholden to the intelligence community and law enforcement that Americans will indeed loose their freedoms.
I don't think they're deliberately missing the point. They're deliberately throwing up walls and legal blockages to avoid anyone being able to see their crimes. They know they did wrong. They know they can't win in elections, or narratives, or power unless they cheat in any way possible.
I read that Andrew Sullivan article and I will probably be pissed for the next few hours. Maybe I am just learning to accept my hate at the people who keep bringing things to the brink while pretending they are trying to save everything. Sometimes I wish they could get a good old Twentieth Century jackboot on their throats for a while so they might have a clue what totalitarianism really is. It is not mean tweets, distrusting bullshitters, holding on to your rights, telling experts who are always wrong to kiss your ass, or treating institutions with less than sacred reverence.
I happen to agree with Sullivan’s point that elites in 2016 still had some persuasive capacity and were called upon to use it to avoid the election of a demagogue by responding to the very real and justified anger felt by Trump supporters.
That’s not what they did. They instead demonized, lied, and obfuscated and that has only made the situation worse. In fact, the Democratic Party is now creating exactly the structures they sought to oppose. Sullivan’s recommendation would have been better for democracy and likely more effective.
Say what you will about Trump (who was certainly mischaracterized by many) but he is not a fundamental believer in our democratic systems by his own, repeated, admission. He was certainly worth opposing then and now. Just not they way it’s been done to date.
You might have a point if Bush, Hillary, and Obama, did not also factor into this equation. Get back to me on one of those "fundamental believers in our democratic systems" the elites were supposed to support to "save the country" while pretending to give a shit about people they hated.
Best comment ever! Anyone that thinks the Bush/Clinton/Obama we’re better than Trump need to get a real look at what’s wrong with the world. Hint---it’s not the Trump people.
We’ve gotta get beyond this grievance stuff. We’re here as caretakers and this democracy goes on after we’re dead. That cuts both ways: against the elites who don’t respect common people and our values; and us, reminding us our democratic values matter more than anything we might gain short-term by abandoning them.
What "democratic values" are you talking about? As far as I can tell, the opinion of your average voter has little weight in Washington decision making. Neoliberalism means not caring what the plebs think. How about the nondemocratic parts built into our system? Well the Bill of Rights is treated like toilet paper by technocrats who think they know better (and act as if it is something to be voted on). The simple truth is all this bloviating about "democracy", "extremism", "norms", "civility", and "freedom" (biggest lie of all) has been bullshit for a long time now. If you expect people who have been lied to and pushed around to roll over and not fight back, then I don't know what to tell you.
Yeah, Mike, your shot at Trump fpr being "not a fundamental believer in our democratic system" is pretty ridiculous in light of how the system treated him, from 2016 onward. I'm guessing you think Obama, Hillary, et al, are "believers "in our democratic system. And by the way: when did Trump say he didn't believe in our democratic system?
I'm guessing you have a touch (and maybe more than a touch) of the TDS...more ramapant than COVID.
Friend, we can agree Trump was not treated fairly by the establishment. I thought we might also agree that none of that justifies his reaction to losing the 2020 election.
Mike, I think you are behind the info curve....the intel agencies actively sought to defeat Trump by controlling the flow of information during the 2020 election...not to mention, seeking to subvert his entire presidency by the bogus "Russian collusion" hoax. You cannot talk about Trump "losing" the election, given these very very stubborn facts. It was not a "free and fair" election.
Maybe re-read Matt's Twitter files pieces. That should get you up to speed on this critical issue.
Mike, one more point: it is an undisputable fact that not only did the Deep State actively work to sabotage Trump, the same people actively ran/are running interference for Biden, most notoriously regarding Hunter's laptop, which they famously mis-labeled as "Russian disinformation"--even though the FBI had possession of the laptop for a year prior to this bogus claim being made.
We have never had such corruoption in our political system. This is far far worse than Watergate, because there is so much institutional wrong doing. It is not too much to say that, at this point, we are living in a post-democratic America. Maybe we can recover our democracy. But first we have to have the courage to acknowledge where we are, right now.
When Trump is viewed in the context of it was either him or HRC, I say he was the most worthy candidate of the last 20 years.
I always thought he was going to be only 10-15 % better than HRC. And that’s what he turned out to be.
This mean he was essentially the same as HRC in 5 of 6 big issues of the day. But on that one big issue he was a big reformer. And NAFTA won’t ever be the same because of him.
This is great for our nation AND Mexico. DT gave the biggest raise to Mexican maquiladora auto workers in their life.
And when I saw how he made the authoritarians go full throated in their hatred I say he had all the right enemies.
I can almost visualize Tucker Carlson with that phrase on a backdrop underneath Fetterman's face. And I would spit out my cocktail laughing if I ever actually saw it.
Matt - you are too generous (not just in this post, but in others) when portraying interactions such as that between Allred and Hayes as misled at best and disingenuous at worst. These establishment actors are giving your Twitter Files reporting a full-court press worth of obfuscation and misrepresentation. It’s not just the dolts like Rupar that are engaged in it: the whole machinery is winding up to quash this story. Pete “Insurance Policy” Strzok is leading Twitter attacks against you for goodness sakes.
My suggestion: you know you have a winning argument in the public sphere (the Munck Debate performance is empirical proof enough). Start playing more aggressive offense with these people to break through their full-court press (pardon the Selection Sunday-inspired analogy). It’s high time there was more concerted pushback against this intensifying suffocation of civil liberties.
It's reported that the No Labels group has gained 2024 ballot access in Colorado, Arizona, and Oregon, so far. It will be interesting to watch what powers coalesce to abort that effort. A lot of things are falling apart and coming together in this country at the same time. Surely the people will begin to see and do something. Sauron aways does.
People who think they know Democrats because of the Bush years are slowly waking up to the fact that the party is now pro-war, pro-corporation, pro-media, pro Wall Street.........
Let me clue you in: the Dems and Repubs and the press have always been pro-war. America is a pro-war country. Check out The First Casualty by Phillip Knightly.
That is both a shock to me and yet not a shock. As an antiwar lefty back in the Bush era, it was a pleasant surprise to see so many mainstream liberals outraged about US war crimes, but even then I suspected much of this was really just another reason to bash the Republicans. Don’t get me wrong— they deserved bashing. But much of that mainstream liberal outrage about Iraq and torture was motivated by partisanship.
So now being pro war and linking Republicans to Putin is just more of the same.
Realistically, the anti-war Democrats were an oddity. If you go back to the 50's and before, it was the GOP that was anti-war. Then William F Buckley came along and the modern GOP was born. The Democrats changed it up in response, but the tendency towards war always remained. It's just that the GOP was beating them at their own game.
This confused me at first. People who were right there with me when I was ranting about Bush turned around and started simping for Obama when he did the same things.
He’s on substack now. Did you see his article detailing how Biden said he would blow up the pipeline, did it, then claimed Russia blew up their own pipeline?
Some are, some aren't. I've been disillusioned since 2011, when Obama tuned out to be Bush 2.0. My mother, on the other hand, will believe any propaganda the state throws at her. "Not your parents' democrats?" Tell that to my mother.
Would your Ukrainian grandfather agree with American support of Ukraine as it fights Russian aggression? What would he think of Jim Jordan’s statement that he doesn’t want to spend any more American tax dollars in support of Ukraine?
He’d likely disagree with Jordan. My father and his sisters disagree on Trump, but they all support aid to Ukraine. It isn’t a partisan issue for them.
I am of the "your parents" generation and I assure you that those democrats were not what we believe today. There were some dems who cared about people, bu tnot as many as you think. We got lucky with LBJ, but dems like President Biden will be attacking those social programs under the guise of fiscal responsibility. That is what Senator, VP, and now President Bident has always had in his heart, or the place where his heart should be.
He was better than a lot of presidents between 1860 and 2000 and while he screwed up with bosnia sure enough it can’t begin to be compared to what bush-obama-biden did
Too much democracy isn't the problem. Too much profiteering through dishonesty is.
Congress is incredibly corrupt, a tool of the moneyed interests. You, Matt, tried to point out a tip of that iceberg of corruption, and for that you were smeared and slapped and held up as a "direct threat" to the system.
And so the HMS America keeps steaming toward that iceberg, ignoring those few like you who see clearly the calamity awaiting us.
True. I sent a lengthy email to my Dem Senator more or less asking him to visit Plaskett and give her a good shake. Good god what a disappointment. Really thought she’d get into the weeds of the rights and wrongs of FBI/DHS behaviors. I give up.
Plaskett actually Tweeted that this is the Republican playbook (I am not a Republican myself), apparently-risk Americans safety and security to score political points. I think this is appalling.
No I’m curious how long you’ve followed the leadership of our nation. Every chance you get to slam the conservative wing of the world you take, and brag constantly of you being a democrat, and how you would never ever consider voting Republican, not that they are any different, so I’m curious how long you’ve been this beholden to a party with no chance of ever seeing the other side.
Exactly. One can have very fixed ideological/policy beliefs and vote for the option that one believes best serves those beliefs without being in thrall to “The Party”, whichever it may be.
I still have to say that I will vote. And can’t believe I could ever support a Republican platform. So. Maybe it’s time to get involved at State level again.
No remotely an apt comparison. You're not taking into account 9/11, the War on Terror, the LACK of a war on terror before 9/11 (the Cole bombing, the previous Trade Center attack in '93, etc.
The Internet was there, but not nearly as impactive - broadband wasn't even a thing then. Video online was a joke. Social media didn't exist.
Somewhere between 2006 and 2010, our entire world changed.
I voted for W in 2000. If by the end of his second year you didn't see the disaster he had created in more ways than just Iraq, you just don't want to admit it.
That was the last time I got conned by a presidential candidate. Refusing to acknowledge the bamboozle makes you susceptible to it continuing. Don't do that.
Happy to share it with you as well as some excerpts from transcripts that perfectly reflect the contempt he held not only for the defendants whom he prosecuted but for the defense lawyers who represented them.
You know how people unsubscribe because they get all pissed off at the author because they disagree or feel mislead?
I may have to unsubscribe because there is too much truth and I agree too much with Racket. I read and part way through I begin softly weeping at what has become of our political system, until I reach the end, convulsed by sobs. Okay, not really, but kinda really on the inside.
It is depressing, but I think we need new institutions. For example, local clubs where you can meet face to face with people who see through the gaslighting. Discuss it and laugh about it over a beer. I think that would be therapeutic
Good point. But the disappearance of local clubs and other civic institutions over the last several decades is a subject of several books. See, e.g., Bowling Alone. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone) Can they, or something like them, be revived?
Illustrating how difficult it is to get out of The Borg: I went from Amazon to Bookshop, and then stopped patronizing Bookshop when they refused to carry Abigail Shrier's book Irreversible Damage because it is critical of the trans movement and industry. As much as I am able, I refuse to support those who stifle conversation and the free sharing of ideas.
Thriftbooks does not seem to engage in viewpoint discrimination so I tend to take my book business there, when I can't get what I need at the two local booksellers in my town (obvious first stop).
Thank you for your comment. I checked, and sure enough, Shrier's book is not listed on BookShop [dot] org.
I will cease recommending BookShop [dot] org. I will check out Thriftbooks. I also recommend Bookfinder [dot] com, with the caution that both Amazon and one or more of its owned subsidiaries (e.g., ABE Books) are among the vendors there.
Again, thank you for comment. Obviously, we share a common view.
I have read Bowling Alone, or parts of it. The breakdown of local clubs has affected Democracy in America. At the same time, organizations are springing up all the time that meet, some quite effective. Let me put it in a different way. We need a movement to restore traditional liberalism (philosophical, not political). That has to have a face to face and bottom up component
Absolutely! This reshuffling is challenging, but it's an opportunity to discover those who continue to employ critical thinking and stand for what liberalism actually means. Sadly, most people follow the "leaders" right off the cliff.
We tried that here. Met a bunch of like minded patriots from truth social. Except we truly weren't like minded. There were two conservative couples, who we are still friends with. Then was the nuts. The scammers. The victims of conservatism that didn't know what truth meant. Then the hangers on that I think were libretards, trying to infiltrate. We broke up.
Sounds like it wasn’t a total loss. You gained friends. Good for you for trying also. Just because that particular effort fell apart, doesn’t mean that another would, also. I would prefer discussions that go deeper than partisan politics, sort
Hang in there, Dave, lots of us feel the same way. But moderating the nausea on a daily basis comes with the task of staying informed. My solution, among others, is bourbon, lol.
I can’t believe Democrats put me in a position to side with Jim Jordan. Unreal.
Look what they do in banking. My dad said it best - “This isn’t capitalism. In bailing out SVB, after first lying about it, they’ve cemented ensuring profits are private and losses are socialized.” It can’t surprise you they also think freedom of speech is whatever the Brandon administration says is ok and everyone who complains is a domestic terrorist.
It’s klepto-corporate multinational globalist technocracy. A caste system of two classes. The Uber-rich and powerful and the working poor. The middle class has been gutted and otherwise healthy, able bodied people are encouraged not to work. The endgame is to create a nation of government dependency and ownership. That’s when the fun begins. And freedom ends.
That's what Piketty said in CAPITAL a decade ago. Add the Victor Davis Hanson admonition that a healthy citizenship and a thriving middle class is necessary for a Republic to survive. Napoleon observed that financier's have no allegiance to country at all (though they love wrapping themselves in the flag). I'm finding that thinking of America as the Constitutional Republic it is rather than as a Democracy grounds my frame of reference, lessens my sense of vitriol and allows me a little objectivity.
They aren’t bailing out SVB, but it isn’t clear who is providing the money to cover deposits. It also isn’t clear who talked and set off the bank run before SVB could quietly raise the capital to cover its bond portfolio losses. Did someone make a nice profit shorting SVB stock? The share holders are now SOL, but that’s what happens when you gamble, I mean invest in the stock market.
They are bailing out SVB. They announced a special assessment on other banks - which is passed along to all of us in the form of higher fees and interest rates. SVB incompetence set off the run. Rather than normal bond ladders high schoolers can grasp, they invested their reserves in long term fed funds and mortgage backed securities in 2021 despite inflation and the feds making clear they’d raise rates to address it. SVB just held the damn things as they tanked. Then a funding round flopped and they had to sell below par because interest rates have been rising for over a year. Depositors ran on the bank because it was being run by incompetent people. It is absolutely a bail out.
All true but I am not persuaded that depositors should be wiped out. If a business cannot make payroll, who suffers the most?
I will watch for administrative and criminal proceedings against the SVB board and senior officers. Notoriously, nobody responsible for the bank and insurance failures of 2007-10 ever stood trial or even suffered a meaningful administrative penalty, like a lifetime ban from any position in the finance industry, and Obama bragged about that.
We have seen time and again, that financial harm to the businesses means nothing to the psychopaths who run them. Even the loss of their future stock options leaves them far richer than 99% of the population. It is time to put them in prison and leave their families impoverished. Maybe that will change some behaviors.
And, to be clear, a5 years of the Fed suppressing interest rates led banks like SVB into investments far too risky for a public bank. Then, the incredible federal deficits under Biden set the stage for the inflation that led the Feds to jack up interest rates, which in turn reduced the value of the securities SVB held, making them potentially insolvent. All those government officials are no doubt beyond reach, but it is important that they be shamed and their reputations ruined... won't happen, but justice does demand no less.
Depositors would not have been wiped out. They would have gotten $0.85-$0.90 on the dollar over $250K. If you don’t let business fail when their is incompetence, and people fe we l that, you get more incompetence. The people in Ohio can’t even get water filters for their houses. If this has been a bank for regular people and normal small businesses there would be no “you get your cash back.” This is cementing a 2-tiered system. Government spending is so massive the government pucks winners and losers. Now regulators are picking who is immune from poor decisions. It’s sick.
I think you might want to check your arithmetic. According to this morning's Wall Street Journal, at the end of 2022, SVB had $157 billion in deposits on their books from approximately 37,000 depositors. That works out to on average over $4 million per depositor. Where was the other 80%+ going to come from after the FDIC chips in their $250K guarantee? Most of the depositors would have gotten CRUSHED had Mr. Taxpayer not stepped in to bail them out AGAIN. Same circus - different clowns.
Who keeps over $250k in a bank account? My guess is that it's people who have LOTS of money, i.e., those who can afford to lose $25k-$40k without a second thought.
Depositors are never wiped out. We have a system for failed banks. The bank is seized. Insured deposits, up to $250K, are immediately available. The banks is sold or the bank assets are liquidated. Uninsured deposits are then repaid, to the extent possible. In this case, Yellen is ignoring the $250K limit and simply printing money to make billionaires whole.
Assuming no intervention, assuming things work as pre-determined by current regs and policies, then Silicon Valley is gutted, we lose a lot of tech companies that help keep us competitive in the world, and by mid-week, Regional Banks across the USA are failing.
Distinguish between depositors and bank executives and shareholders, and politicians. The latter set up an environment conducive for failure with COVID lockdowns, inflationary policies, and negligent regulation. The bank was negligent, invested in way too many long-term Treasuries and not recognizing the impact of the tightening tech investment climate. The depositors are victims. If we punish them, pretty much every business reacts by moving their funds to CitiBank, Chase, and BankOfAmeria because they are too big to fail.
And for Little Tech, waiting a year to make them whole is not an option. The climate for VC's to invest in small tech is dried up. Nobody is giving new lines of credit to little tech in 2023. They will just die.
I agree, this is exactly what is happening.
There are something like 40,000 depositors and I doubt most of them are billionaires--a lot of small and medium sized businesses using the bank primarily as a checking account, maybe a line of credit for business cash-flow purposes. and if they are limited to $250K FDIC insurance a lot of them will be wiped out and their employees and vendors will not be paid.
And I doubt if many billionaires have a large part of their holdings in bank CDs, anyway. I mean, really!!
Yes, there is no literal "wipe out," but if you are running a business with a monthly churn of a couple of million dollars, $250K doesn't do much. to keep you afloat.
This is a difficult problem, if depositors are not made whole regional banks will all fail and people and businesses will only do business with the huge, systemically important (too big to fail) banks, and personally, I don't want to see banking concentrated in a small oligopoly.
There is no perfect answer, but something along the lines of more generous FDIC coverage coupled with limitations on what banks can invest in (i.e., not highly speculative, volatile stuff like mortgage backed securities) would be a step in the right direction.
And, some prosecutions and clawbacks, both as simple justice and "pour encourager les autres," as Voltaire described the execution of Admiral Byng as an example to other admirals.
SVB was paying 5.48% on Deposits. I did not know this until yesterday, but now I remain more convinced the depositors don’t deserve a bail-out.The rest of us, getting well under a 1% on deposits at responsible banks that responsibly hedged their rate risk, are now footing the bill for the downside risks of deposits with a 5.48% return. That is wrong and is nothing more than reallocation of wealth to rich Silicon Valley tech companies.
Was that 5.48% on 60 month CDs or checking accounts? If on the former, given what the Fed has been doing, not a big deal, 2yr Treasury Notes have been around 4.5%. If on demand deposits then yeah, that is a real problem, tho I still worry about employees and vendors getting stiffed.
I am encouraged to see people suing these banks and their executives, and hope to see aggressive action from the regulators. The people responsible need to suffer real harm. Maybe some depositors deserve a haircut. But the employees and suppliers to those depositors not being paid for work already done or materials or services already provided? I don’t see that.
Well said and well written. Nice work.
Depositors assume risk. If they don't, whose risk do you think it should be?
Depositors, yes, but their employees? And suppliers? and the suppliers' suppliers? Is it reasonable to have the supplier to a supplier to a supplier vet the bank that the final customer uses? All the banks that all its customers use?
This is a fundamental problem with fractional reserve banking and won't go away, but we can make things better or worse. If I had my way we would go back to separating deposit-taking banks from investment banks, with the former tightly regulated almost like public utilities, and with robust insurance, and the latter only lightly regulated to address fraud, but no insurance at all, by law.
I would also reconsider mark-to-market, a cure for a real problem (misleading, even fraudulent accounting for assets) but worse than the disease. Mark-to-market is misleading in all cases other than imminent liquidation... the bonds will pay the income stream and repay principal as guaranteed, regardless of what interest rate swings may do to their present value. This happened in 2007-08 and again last week---M2M creates an appearance of insolvency when there is none, and that sets off a panic. I would not go back to the previous system, but M2M has created catastrophes. We need a better way.
We seem to have forgotten what Walter Bagehot knew in the 1870s---when a bank is in trouble, you should investigate its assets and liabilities. If it is solvent but temporarily illiquid, loan it what it needs to survive, at a high rate of interest, with the interest being incentive to not get into that sort of situation in the future.. If it is truly insolvent, let it die.
It would have been better to take a couple of days to go over the books and figure out whether the bank was worth saving, or not, and if not, to figure out to what extent liquidation would cover depositors. It may be that even in liquidation the uninsured depositors would have seen 80% or more in a couple of weeks, in which case I would be much more amenable to no govt intervention beyond the FDIC insurance limit and overseeing an orderly shut-down and liquidation.
I cannot know for sure, but I suspect that SVB was neither illiquid nor really insolvent at the end of February, but the M2M value of its assets, reduced more than they expected due to the Fed raising interest rates faster than they expected, to fight inflation, created the appearance of possible insolvency, which led to a run. At that point, the panic has a life of its own.
Why the only way we can fight price increases is to trash the economy and destroy jobs and businesses, is a question for another day.
Oh hell! Not the mortgage-backed securities again. Thanks for the added info. Incompetence is right.
Right. I as a simple peasant know that mortgage-backed securities were Musical Chairs. The last person holding them gets screwed – until the bailout.
America's best and brightest...from Sand Hill Rd even. I've been to Sand Hill Rd. Pitched VCs on Sand Hill Rd. They are the cream of the crop. The top layer. The creme de la creme. Is it hubris or...what was/is this? I mean, the Chief Investment Officer went to Harvard, right?
The modern credential (Ivy League degree) seems to be worth about as much as a medieval Church Indulgence.
Indulgences? they call them carbon credits now
It's sad that Harvard and the other Ivys still show up so high in national and world rankings. Then again, maybe it's not so surprising since the people doing the ranking are Ivy grads themselves.
Not when I was there lol.
His incompetence may explain why SVB's CEO only got $3.5 million as a bonus hours before the bank was seized.
And Gavin Newsom’s wife is on the board of SVB by the way
That puts the cherry on top of this shit cake.
Deposits are insured up to 250k. Or are they? It’s Silicon Valley. Rich depositors are being made whole....by us. Now if it were Oklahoma Farmers Bank....
It is most certainly is a bailout. Yellen is printing any money necessary, which is a cute way of making taxpayers responsible for billionaire losses. Depositors were mainly Valley billionaires and 9 figure VCs, that ran their money thru startups. The notion they didn't realize FDIC insurance limits were $250K is laughable. What they knew, is that the rules never apply to them and that Dems would bail them out of any unfortunate outcomes, resulting from bad business decisions. Private profits and nationalized losses, should be the Dem 2024 slogan.
there is an argument for protecting depositors, irrespective of who the depositors are. I am aware of folks whose business were not large but did all their banking with SVB. Which means they lost their LOC too. So its not all rich VC. Also, those rich folks likely would not lose their deposits though they would be locked up for some time as the assets were sold off and possibly subject to a haircut.
Who do you think owns those small businesses? FDIC limits exist because we cannot charge enough premiums to banks, to insure every dime banked in the US. US banking law had a system that worked well for failed banks. Banks are seized. Immediately every depositor has access up to $250K. The bank is sold or assets are sold, and from those proceeds, uninsured deposits are paid, to the extent possible. That is gone, blown to shreds without a vote in Congress. When a bank in Iowa fails, are farmers with a million bucks in deposits going to take their $250K and wait? Or are farmers in Iowa expected to wait, because they are not as important as the Silicon Valley geniuses that ran the 16th largest US bank for 8 months, without a risk manager?
The last comment i one I have made in other places, though SVB was doing a "bang up job" on climate and social issues, they seem to have relegated their primary responsibility to the third team. (I for one am scared about getting on a United airlines plane for the first time in my life based on their "do good" campaign. I prefer they focus on getting me where I am going safely and on time. If they are as "successful" in their goal as SVB, a lot of people are going to die.)
You make a fair point and many of my friends feel the same way. I do think from a depositors side, it is more complicated for some but My contention in this thread is blaming the depositors is misguided. wE know who is to blame here and I strongly suspect they will cry all the way to the (SIB) bank.
This is the bank that lobbied to remove the regulations that would've saved them from exactly this kind of collapse. I have zero sympathy for them. Most of their depositors are Silicon Valley startups that should've been smart enough to keep their payroll in a bank that didn't engage in the extreme gambling this bank did. Those startups' founders got sweetheart mortgage loans from SVB to keep their payroll with SVB. Screw them. They should face the music for their bad business decisions. Bailing out these depositors will be disastrous for our democracy. Tea Party #2 is waiting in the wings.
It's even worse than I suspected:
SILICON VALLEY BANK USED FORMER MCCARTHY STAFFERS TO WEAKEN REGULATIONS, LOBBY FDIC
https://theintercept.com/2023/03/11/silicon-valley-bank-used-former-mccarthy-staffers-to-weaken-regulations-lobby-fdic/
First, I am all for clawing back any gains from the management team that were made in the last x years. My worst fear in all of this is there will be no punishment for poor management and the moral hazard will continue. And that is important because this was not gambling, it was incompetence. There is a difference. This was a failure to match their duration risk. And i doubt the regulators would catch that as I do not think they are any smarter than the guys at SVB.
This is a problem that every bank is dealing with due to interest rate increases and we will see which banks had crap risk management and which ones were competent. And please don't tell me that you saw this coming as you would be buying your yacht right now, not commenting on this forum. So do not blame the depositors because they did not see it coming as SVB had a sterling reputation, maybe unearned, but there was no due diligence to perform. The moral hazard issue is important and should be dealt with as such, but assigning guilt on the depositors is not the way to address this.
SVB CEO Greg Becker sold his bank stock just before the collapse.
They did bail out SVB and signature. This is not about portfolio loss it’s about duration and the fact that no one at SVB understood that while taking in millions in bonuses is telling
The losses on the mortgages are big, but I'm curious how the losses in their loan portfolio look after using wokeness and DEI as funding criteria. I bet that could have blown up the bank even without the awful bet on mortgages.
i doubt it. This was duration problem. I think the fact that they bought MBS can be misleading. The fact is their long protfolio was mismatched with their short portfolio. The upshot is that for the last 10+ years every member of the Fed and the gov (R and D) has ignored the threat of inflation. COVID policies were the last straw. But instead of doing something they tried to wish it away by calling it transitory. when the Fed finally had to raise, the banks, despite years of warning and history from the 80's got caught flat footed. I suspect because they were too busy fighting racism and climate change to pay attention to risk management (eg their most important job.)
You speak truth.
Bingo!
An article in the Wall Street Journal tonight stated that it's being funded by an inter Bank fund and a special program put together with the fed. Whatever that means!
SVB couldn't quietly raise the capital it needed because it is upside-down in all its Treasury investments and lacked collateral to secure additional financing. So the bonds are worth less than they paid (see also, 'unrealized losses') and the bank just doesn't possess assets to cover its liabilities - the depositors. So it's a toxic investment for other banks to buy into. Banks reinvest deposits to make money (that has to be a reasonably sound investment) and it doesn't always work. Bonds are thought to be one of the most secure assets, but core inflation and interest rate hikes gutted their return. So they invested $10 in bonds and now they're worth 6.
SVB is guilty of under-diversifying, over-leveraging what they had, and making stupid, rookie investment decisions. this wasn't a stock market thing at all, it was a financial incompetence thing. Highly recommend Patrick Boyle on YT to help sort things out.
What about the nice return depositors at SVB got - 5.48% on deposits while those of us footing the bill for the bailout via higher fees and rates get like 0.18% from the banks that are responsible in hedging their interest rate risk and will actually do business with us? How are we not bailing out the downside risk to essentially an investment for these people with a guaranteed return of 5.48% annually? What other group, and in what other circumstances, could anyone else access a 5.48% return for the last 2 years with a risk free backstop from loss? How is it not a bailout to ensure insane returns of 5.48% on bank deposits for billionaires and failing tech startups?
Yes, it’s clearly a bailout no matter what the government and MSM are calling it. SVB board and executives should be held accountable for their incompetence, but I doubt that will ever happen. And now we have the new “Bank Term Funding Program” (BTFP) ...
I was not aware of that. If that is correct it puts the onus on the depositors as anyone would know that those are not the returns of a FDIC insured account.
zzzzz
zzzzzz
I read that the execs got their bonuses just before the shutdown.
Does anyone know if that's been confirmed?
I understand BofA was enticing its customers, or was it JPMorgan? We don’t have to wonder who will be making the depositors whole.
Absolutely correct and socialized on the backs of the middle classes. They take the profits and we take the risks.
Your comment is the most telling of them all. It seems that the Democrats have become so dysfunctional in thought and expression they’re driving the “children” they claim to care so much about into the arms of their “enemy.”
When dysfunction becomes too extreme people run, as far as possible, away from it.
I am not sure why that seems strange, Jordan is more coherent and principled than the majority of his peers.
He's one of the 10 out of 535 people in that fucking den of iniquity that are honest.
I thought the den on iniquity was the college gym and shower room.
At Penn State perhaps.
It’s weird, Biden and Fauci and Joe Paterno strike me as having a few things in common. It’s like the regular world is anathema to them. The coach once was quoted as saying why would he retire and do what - mow grass? Entitled ppl have a plan of the future and never let reality get in the way. That’s when they get into trouble - eventually. Some don’t
I can give you a list as big as the phone book of people I would like to hang out with before Jim Jordan. But i like what he is doing
I could be wrong, but he seems like he's just being opportunistic here.
Protecting your 1st Amendment is not important ?
Of course it is, and I found him to be a sympathetic character in this circus (I'm neither R nor D). But if the tables were turned I can imagine Jordan not getting so fired up about the issue. Like I said, I could be wrong—maybe Jordan is a true civil libertarian and free speech warrior. But he strikes me as being more of a savvy political operator than a true idealist.
I think the point is that we have never ever ever had a group of people destroying civil liberties as ruthlessly as the current leadership. No one I know can remember anything like this happening before. It makes no sense to ask what Jim Jordan would do if rolls were reversed. I don’t think he would ever let things get this evil to begin with. This is one side of the political aisle who have crossed a line that has never been crossed before.
you make a fair point - its why I might agree with one or another at a certain point but I would never trust them. Thus my phone book comment.
Why wouldn't he be opportunistic, when provided with such a tempting opportunity?
What is this "phone book" you speak of?
showing my age....it also doubled as a booster seat at Thanksgiving
It's called, "list of enemies that are the enemy of my enemy ergo, my friend, for now"
Yes, as a former Democrat myself, whole damn scene is unbelievable, isn’t it? My old friends (in DC) are now my enemies, and my old enemies my new friends.
Right—who would have ever dreamed that Tucker Carlson would be the voice of reason???
I used to HATE Tucker and now I’ll sometimes share his videos.
I still don't like him, and I'm not sure why - just something about him.
But DAAaaaammmmnnnn, he's just nailing people that need to be nailed.
SAME!!
Most of the psyop is the distortion and manipulation of reality to create extreme emotion, projection and loss of objectivity. There are no facts only accusation's (as demonstrated in the hearing). Knee-jerk is a disease I'm trying to recover from.
Tucker is a man with a rigid moral compass. Many don’t like the way it points, but he is firm on his direction. Everyone forgets that he describes himself as a libertarian first. Personally, I’d love to see Matt team up with Tucker on the J6 videos. I trust Matt to tell us in a different way the good, bad, and ugly.
Look up how Tucker sent emails to Hunter Biden toadying up for help with getting one of his kids into school. He's a fraud like the rest of them; he just plays a different assigned role in The Show.
It's all bullshit. There's no R and there's no D, except for a few genuine little small potatoes here and there who are either too dumb or too valiant to realize it's all stage lights and greasepaint. There's Them and there's Us. That's it.
While it may be true that Tucker and Hunter are both part of the same club, there is still some difference of opinion among members of the Club. For example, Tucker genuinely does disapprove of the open borders policy and has been a vocal critic for many years. He has also been a critical of our nonstop foreign interventions, and he is one of the few journalists other than Matt who has had anything bad to say out the vulture capitalists eating this country alive. I really do believe that very few people other than Tucker could have done the segment of Cabela's and Paul Singer without getting taken off the air. The only reason Tucker hasn't been removed from his platform is precisely because he's one of Them. And so while you are certainly right to question his motives and take everything he says with a grain of salt, he is still a rare and valuable dissenting voice among the elites.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jseaman/p/the-mortal-storm?r=16x9b8&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
That is precisely why I get my news from Matt. I get that Tucker is part of big media, but he does have issues that he will present accurately and with fervor. But he freely admits that he is an opinion guy--a commentator. I absolutely love Tucker's interviews and specials. He asks the questions that I want asked. But! All that said, I get my news from guys like Matt.
The Twitter files wouldn't have happened without subscription journalism and the Republican's are at least politically malleable right now. The psyop (MSM/surveillance state/criminal finance) talks over the top of us and openly lies because they can get away with it. The more truth we speak the more light shines on the lie. There is a huge change factor in that.
So he tried to help his kid and that negates all of the research, evidence and videos he has shown? I think you may be missing the forest for the trees. I’m not a Tucker fan, but I’m a truth fan. And as far as main stream media goes there’s hardly a shred of it besides Carlson.
My thought. Like the Taibbi Twitter files the J/6 footage needs to go to review and report by a qualified unbiased journalist. Not because of any left/right concern but because you and I deserve the truth. The DNC/surveillance state willingness to openly lie reveals how pathologically vicious they are.
He trafficked in evil for craven personal gain. There is no other way to interpret that action. There is no fucking school in the world that is worth groveling for favors from that shitstain Hunter Biden and anyone who "help[s] his kid" by trying to implant said kid deeper in to the rotting carcass that is the elite power structure in this country has demonstrated that he is a corrupt liar obviously hoovering up the bucks to tell the rubes what they want to hear.
Anyone who spends his days looking at what Tucker Carlson looks at and doesn't conclude that the best place for his family is a dairy farm in Iowa, not anywhere within a thousand miles of anywhere that Hunter Biden's influence is a plus, is one of them. This is not hard to figure out.
Learn to live without trying to find heroes, is my advice. No one is coming to save you. It's up to you.
I agree (with a suggestion). "Us" are the citizen's of the American Constitutional Republic. We're not capitalist, communist or DNC/RNC hack's. We are free and responsible citizen's of the Republic.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jseaman/p/the-mortal-storm?r=16x9b8&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
https://open.substack.com/pub/jseaman/p/the-mortal-storm?r=16x9b8&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Maybe my memory is faulty because I was pretty liberal back in the 00s, but I remember despising Tucker during the Bush II era. That was bowtie Tucker. I should go back and watch some of his stuff from back then.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jseaman/p/the-mortal-storm?r=16x9b8&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
he hasn't changed. He described himself as a libertarian. I see why when I hear his rants on freedom of speech and corrupt government. he and I share the same roots. Most think me a conservative. I identify as conservative. Truth be told, I am a strict constructionist of our constitution. I guess that is conservative in a way.
He does seem to nail his points to the wall, like ducks.
For real. A few years ago I'm not sure if I would have slowed down for him in a crosswalk. Now he's the only MSM person speaking Truth. Upside down world.
I might even start wearing a bow tie now.
They have shown their true color and it isn’t red, white and blue or anything resembling blue. It is black. Not as in racial identity, but as in soulless.
The hearings of the past few days should leave no doubt. The despicable attacking of Matt and Shellenberger, Nicholas Wade, the young man who’d written a book about the necessity for nuclear energy and fossil fuels until there is something proven more effective and available… accused of racism, collusion, shilling for Putin… I was sickened and frightened. It was obscene.
I think what we're viewing is pathological not political. I'm saying this because of the damage I'm witnessing around me and the inability of American elected political leadership to acknowledge and address it.
It’s called “walking away.” I left the Democratic party circa 2015.
I used to read the LA Times, NYT, and Wall Street Journal every day. I occasionally still read the WSJ, but not so much.
It is really eye-opening to listen to the source yourself, and then read the reporting on it later on these publications. Unbelievable the lies and spinned narratives that are “reported” as FACT... it was and still is shocking to me the lies that we are regularly told.
I get my news, now, from substack writers, Rumble videos, Real America’s Voice (I especially like Steve Bannon, Charlie Kirk and Wayne Allyn Root), and Tucker Carlson (the rest of Fox News is just... “outrage” culture and garbage as far as I am concerned).
Welcome this thing we call honest reality. Where, yeah, it's appropriate to discipline your children, teach them right from wrong, and call out the union loving Uber libs that think otherwise. I like to call it conservatism.
Me, too, Blake. Voted Dem for 30 years and even campaigned for them. I’ll never forgive them for embracing censorship, authoritarianism, and becoming the party of warmongering elites. This whole experience has made me question all of my principles, everything I held as true.
It’s going around.
The Democrats have put me in a position to side with Franklin Graham… and I’m Jewish, albeit not terribly devout in practice, socially liberal in the classic sense and during my time volunteering at the Dali’ Museum became the infamous “ Indecent Docent”.
Whatever the once Democrats call themselves, they are no longer recognizable as anything American. They have “ transitioned” into a tyrannical, illiberal, racist, antisemitic, anti-free speech, anti-freedom, anti-civil liberties, anti-Constitutional, pro-surveillance,pro-war,,violent,lawless,savage,intolerant Cult of Hatred For All Things Living
I know and I cannot even stand Jordan because he is always sabotaging legislation to keep big tech in check while pretending otherwise.
Matt Stoller wrote about this yesterday. As a reporter who focuses almost exclusively on antitrust issues, Stoller's viewpoint is that "Jim Jordan has been a foe of antitrust action against big tech and government action to regulate dominant firms for years."
Stoller can get way too full of himself at times, but he is right on Jordan. I think the most telling is how much Ken Buck cannot stand Jordan for derailing his antitrust efforts.
Agreed, Stoller's style can come across as arrogant and condescending. But I generally trust his judgment on antitrust matters.
On a related note, yesterday Stoller also strongly dismissed the "chilling" nature of the FTC's request for reporters' names from Twitter. He said this was business as usual for the FTC since they had worked out a consent decree with Twitter years ago regarding their playing fast and loose with user data. It wasn't clear to me that the Twitter Files were relevant to this specific abuse at all, and when a commenter called him out on this, Stoller said "well that's why they're doing the investigation." I read all of this as Stoller wanting to protect the reputation of Lina Khan, who (to her credit) appears to be doing some real antitrust busting. One of the few Biden promises that seems to be getting some real follow through.
I guess--as Taibbi suggested in his testimony--everyone has their motives.
Stoller/BIG is one of the few Substack's that talk's about actual monopoly and anti-trust legislation. I subscribe.
I read it too, but have cut back on my paid subscriptions, so just get the free version. Stoller really cares about--and is an expert in--this area. One funny detail is that he will actively ban commenters that he finds trollish or unproductive. I can certainly understand why one would want to do that, but...it's arguably not the best look in this day and age.
You know what they say about opinions Gnome.
Is it: "if I had a nickel for every opinion, I'd have a pretty good amount of nickels" ?
Um... no.
Actually, doesn’t pretend otherwise. He’s quite clear abt putting checks on big tech.
Okay, cool. Maybe it was time for a 'cute puppy' break.
I'm not sure you contextually understand his objections to said legislation .
It's one thing to have read those pieces of legislation and object to his reasoning for not supporting them is another, if your frame of reference was formed by an opinion article or of cable mouth piece, it is suspect. If it is not the case then I wholly support opinion. Even if we differ on it.
Come again?
This is no longer the Democratic Party of Lyndon Johnson, George McGovern od Dennis Kucinich. This is the party that warmly welcomed Dick Cheney during his last year visit to the Capitol.
The main goal of the democrats (and the old-style republicans) is to preserve power at any cost, while the current version of the Republican Party gravitates towards fascism. Vide Ron DeSantis attempts to enforce Christian morality. We are screwed.
This country is governed by fascists that claim they're fighting fascism. And by fascists, I mean the Democratic Party. 90% of the people who complain about fascism have no idea what it actually is.
The Uniparty is fascist. The only reason it isn't more obvious is because of the play-acting internecine conflict within the party between the Democrats and Republicans. All of that drama creates the necessary diversion.
This. Run down Umberto Eco's definition of fascism: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism
The Dems fit nearly all of them now. It's time we recognize both parties are building a fascist state to protect business interests. We are just still in the "banality of evil" stage.
I'm trying to not allow my honest vitriol at the state of American elected political leadership to be manipulated by the criminal financier's fronting the psyop. Objectivity and the Constitution is our friend.
Definitely the party of LBJ, who stole his Senate seat in 1948. A completely corrupt, sick man
I am an Independent and 68 years old. I lived during LBJ. Todays Democrate is similar to the LBJ Democrat. LBJ had same authoritarian disregard for civil liberties but decentful about it. They better at giving the public appearance that they were for the people and civil liberties.
Also a major monetizer of political influence. Robert Caro's long LBS bio (whose final volume I await) tells the whole story very well.
Why, you don't think "Landslide Lyndon" was legit? Lol. Johnson's man that swiped box 13 kept it as a survenir, was photographed with it in a story I read back in the 1990's.
Unlike the man who succeeded him...
I'll be honest, saying "the Republican Party gravitates towards fascism" sounds like bullshit rhetoric to me, but I'm absolutely open to being convinced otherwise. "Gravitates towards incompetence" I wouldn't question for a second, but "fascism" sounds highly questionable. Can you (or anyone else) provide concrete examples of this?
"Can you (or anyone else) provide concrete examples of this?"
Narrator: there are no examples of this.
Isn't fascism the merger of corporate (financial elitism) and government power to create totalitarian rule?That's certainly what Hitler, Stalin and Mao represented. (All three were slaver's.)
I think what we're not seeing (or willing to accept) is that international criminal finance is looking to create a "one world" government. The D.C. hog trough doesn't make sense to us because we aren't looking at the big picture. We live crisis to manufactured crisis which is how the psyop prevents the actual healthy dialogue that would put solution's on the table.
We're winning because we are re-capturing the American national dialogue. That's what the hearing actually revealed.
Thank god level headed democrats exist. I find myself constantly wondering how some of these people get elected. Anyone with one brain cell of intellect should be able to see the train wreck the “democrats” have become. It’s a completely different thing than it was 15-20 years ago.
If only there were more of them. Instead, they're unicorns, at least, the elected ones are as rare as that.
Under Brezhnev, the official diagnosis used to confine dissenters was “sluggish schizophrenia”, meaning they really exhibited no symptoms of disorder other than being outspoken in opposition to the government, demonstrating for reforms, etc. Sometimes it was enough to attempt to emigrate, possess or distribute literature. Even writing a book could instigate a psychiatric incarceration.
It is the most infamous diagnosis used by Soviet psychiatrists because it was applied against political dissenters. I think it is no longer used. But our government may just decide to resurrect its usage. It does not look too far-fetched.
Not far-fetched at all. Look at the quote provided by Matt of the Democrat speculating on who is allowed into the “conversation” at all. Once Democrats regain control of the House, I completely expect “dissenters” to be outlawed, including the Republican party. The “hate speech” law they want to create could easily be used to do that.
Are they going to re-capture it?
And we have better drugs now. People may line up for them. Sigh
Haha, that’s an unexpected POV
Somewhat sarcastic. Lol
Wow wow wow, Sherry, thanks for sharing your story....Tales from the American Gulag...but where is our Solzhenitsyn?
All I can say is wow. I could never imagine this happening in the land of the free. Are we Soviet Union 2.0?
Andrew Sullivan, besides being an English jerk, is an avowed elitist and his interpretation is therein tainted and untrustworthy. He knows better: for shame.
They're arresting citizen's for speech and thought crime in England imprisoning and forcing them into camp's for "right think" (3,500 last year). The English people deserve American sympathy and support. Recent demands by international criminal finance at Davos that American's accept limit's on free speech and thought and the silence of American elected political leadership speaks to the realpolitik of our situation.
What the heck is an “English jerk?”
All of them.
Glad to see bigotry is alive and well.
Accurate observation
LOL!
That's when you yank on something, but with a slight twist.
English Bob from “Unforgiven”
The Duck of Death!
N- n - na - no . It’s Duke. Duke of Death
Duck I says.
Don't fear it embrace it! We are coming together as Americans to fight for truth and justice for all
Yep. The Constitution is the only legitimate frame of American political reference. Everything else is psyop.
It's hard to believe that Jim Jordan could be the adult in any room that he's in, but last Thursday he managed to pull it off.
I laughed and laughed when I saw this comment. How true and how absurd
I knew the jig was up with democrats a long time ago when Sandy Burger was caught stuffing documents in his shorts and nothing happened to him.
I knew the jig was up with democrats when I realized they owned every fucking union vote in the nation, and my fellow union hard core conservatives were ok with their money going to support that which they abhor, but wouldn't stand up. Fucking quislings, the lot of them. I mean that in a nice way though.
Why am I not surprised. While I am very thankful that Matt, a self described lefty, is doing good work on this, it seems he has a little tunnel vision on the past. Always referring to " Bush/Cheney" and WMD. But I never hear him talk about this incident, in relationship to Trumps home raid regarding the national archives or to just wonder about 9/11, and maybe a connection to why Bush did what he did. As I tell my lefty friends, and yes, they are still my friends. I am not going to defend the Republicans to the death. but in my lifetime (63 yrs old) they don't even come close to the treachery and hypocrisy of the Democratic party.
Strange bedfellows now a days
It’s like the old saying,” They could turn a gay man straight”. I’m a straight woman,btw😂
If the Democratic Party was honestly worried about a possible Trump victory, they would not be creating more Trump voters with shit-shows like the "hearing" Mr. Taibbi was subjected to.
As if anyone needed reminding, there is a growing contingent of fed-up citizens like me who want to vote for Trump just to goad the TDS crowd and to see how far his opponents will go to queer his efforts. This is a reasonable reaction, considering that Trump's election in 2016 has been used to rationalize a chain of drastic totalitarian maneuvers by the regime and its bureaucrats, from a kangaroo court impeachment process to the politicization of the coof "vaccine" to another kangaroo court fabricating an "insurrection" out of a riot and some Trump supporters milling around in the capitol building.
The entire apparatus trying to control the flow of information ("the narrative") that the Twitter Files project is revealing grew out of the rage and paranoia following Trump's election. The chattering classes, their highly-paid talking heads, and the Clinton campaign (read: Democratic Party), instead of adjusting to the voters' America First demands, began a campaign to bury Trump, to remove any possibility of his political resurgence, a campaign that is ongoing and getting more desperate now that he has declared. But they've shot their wad. Their covers have been pulled.
The apparent ethic of the DP these days reminds me of the famous statement to the press by a commander of a Vietnam War operation whose name escapes me, "We had to destroy the village to save it." In order to prevent what they delusionally see as a "threat to democracy" (free internet political discussion and expressing a preference to vote for Trump or DeSantis or any populist) they are willing to destroy any faith left in anyone for any form of centralized government, making anarchy very attractive and even getting people to seriously consider state secession.
In short, in order to maintain and increase control over the speech and the votes of citizens, the DP-controlled establishment has become totalitarian, and there are many Republicans who would be fine with the arrangement if it benefited their party, with a few exceptions . . . like Trump and DeSantis.
I can't believe Allred, with a straight face, just refers back to "Russian Disinformation". These people have such a high degree of "selective fact recognition", and an almost addict-like need to re-confirm their own narrative since 2016, that you can put the facts found in the Twitter Files in front of them... You can literally hand them the evidence of the security state doing something we all know is wrong, and because all roads lead back to Donald Trump, they will laugh it off. I honestly never thought it possible to live in a United States where such blatant fact denial was possible.
Nate O'Brien, there is a term for what you describe: Trump Derangement Syndrome. It should be in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders--and would be, except for the fact that the people who control that manual are themselves afflcted with TDS. To quote the man himself: "sad."
Truly, these people are mentally ill. That is how to understand it.
Nah, this is the same thing that the Bush/Cheney Republicans were doing long before Trump entered the political scene. There's something bigger at play and I think it's that the "Intelligence Community" is like a parasite or virus that can hop from one host to another as is deemed expedient.
No doubt. The Censorship-Industrial Complex is open for business and they don’t discriminate by party, corporation, or maybe even country
Don't get me wrong, TDS is a real thing and most of these Democrats at the hearings are infected by it, but it wasn't the driving force for the censorship program nor was it the main reason for their horrid treatment of Taibbi and Shellenberger. We're talking serious Russia Derangement Syndrome w/ the "IC" co-opted DNC these days.
But RDS is rooted in TDS, given that it originated with the fabricated charges of "collusion" between Trump and Putin to cheat in the 2016 election.
col·lu·sion
/kəˈlo͞oZH(ə)n/
noun
secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, especially in order to cheat or deceive others
So when I say publicly it would be nice if there was a Tesla in my driveway and the next day there is with the title in my name, it really wasn't in secret or illegal. It's why the term "collusion" is constantly used because that's not how it happened.
And this is my last day because letting sub lapse. Matt has been unimpressive and is turning into whiny boy. But he does know who's buttering his bread so he'll be OK.
I get it. Trump continues with his usual lies and then says he's running for President again and we're not allowed to talk about him because that's TDS. Well.....fuck that!!!
Bet you vibrated with joy when they impeached him for a phone call we all heard. That was big, huh?
You're mixing issues up. You can despise Trump for those legitimate reasons but that's not relevant to the Twitter Files hearings.
The really scary--when the justice system, infected with TDS, hides exculpatory evidence, denies bail, and sentences no violent people to a max sentence. That’s scary!
At least Bush/Cheney lied about something that was on its face reasonable--terrorist threats and the means to stop them became a pretext for the Patriot Act and its downstream abuses and really began the 21st-century "surveillance state." These conditions emboldened the spooks--and state bureaucrats generally--to the degree we're seeing revealed in the Twitter Files. Give them an inch and they think they're rulers.
The current crop of lies demonizes American citizens and treats us like children incapable of reading the real news (an endangered species) and arriving at rational conclusions. We must be protected from "information" of all things.
Just because most Americans are stupid and do what authority tells them doesn't give our rulers the right to capitalize on it.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jseaman/p/the-mortal-storm?r=16x9b8&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Not so sure I'm with you on Bush and Cheney. Reasonable? Based on literally just two or three terror plots/events conducted by Islamists in the history of the country? Compared to US-bred terrorism? Don't even get me started on 9/11 either - we'll end up talking about Israel and the US government.
But I agree with the rest.
They're eagerly exploiting Trump Derangement Syndrome, which is mainly confined to the remaining gaslit supporters of the Democrates and/or "liberalism"
A friend says that Donald Trump is the best thing that ever happened to the Democratic Party, the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Interesting analogy... and terrifying.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jseaman/p/the-mortal-storm?r=16x9b8&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
That DSM manual became political a long time ago. I won’t mention the first change I became aware of because I’d probably be lambasted. But I began noticing the political nature of the DSM when I was in graduate school, studying for my PhD in clinical psychology. And that was back in the late 1970’s.
Yes, the ideological capture of the DSM manual, like that of many American institutions, began in the 70s.
Pacificus knows, he was there, he was there in that darkened room in the 1970s when the DSM was captured...or began to be captured...ideologically...or some shit like that...
Fedspar! Working on a Sunday...I think you Deep Staters need to unionize.
Fedspar Goebbels is just working overtime for the regime
The lies don"t write themselves you know
There must be no drag queen shows with kiddies to attend on Sundays. He's probably bored.
Hey, maybe I was there, Fedspar...like Walt Whitman, I am large, I contain multitudes. ; )
Wherever a left-winger is beating up on truth...I'll be there...
You make me rraugh
Abnormal psychology is now a civil right.
Normal isn't looking too good lately.
When nothing is normal- everything is acceptable.
channeling you inner Dostoevsky?
A virtuous one at that! Much more valuable than say, a clinical case of depression.
Given the current edition of the DSM was essentially written by Big Pharma, it's mainly a catalog for the sale of psychotropic medications at this point. It's only political in the sense Big Pharma is clearly challenging the MISC for dominance of government function and extraction of funds.
Liz, I take your point that, these days, Big Pharma calls a good bit of the tune when it comes ot the DSM. But "woke" shrinks provide critical support to that effort, i.e., "we have to give puberty blockers to your gender dysphoric kid or they will commit suicide...Look, here are two studies that prove that!"
And voila! The Pediatric Gender Mutilation Industrial Complex was born.
So well said!!
Jordan Petersen is fighting the equivalent Canadian racket at this time.
Agree.
Could it be ideological utopianism ("woke") manipulated by megalomaniacal narcissism (international criminal finance)?
No revolution without the useful idiots to do the actual revolting.
Mike R, I think what you say is a big part of it..."woke" could not be doing this without financing...
My best insight is public donation's, tax dollar/grant's disguised as social program support and Soros/Davos funded type NGO's. The classic feminist ploy was 1.) Do a study. 2.) Create or discover a problem. 3.) Use p.r. and press to create hysteria and demand government action and funding.
Yes, Mike R....anytime someone says "there was a study," grab your balls. You are about to get hit.
Wow
He/she loves that
I'd love to hear that story!
Nailed it.
Meanwhile, sane gays like Douglas Murray are tearing their hair out.
Even better, now we have a movement that tells gay kids they’re not gay, just in the wrong body. And that hormones and surgery — clip-clip — can fix that!
Turns out it was a slippery slope...sigh...
How long before the DSM has a disorder for people who refuse to comply with the official narrative. It will be classified as a delusional break from "reality" requiring extensive in-facility treatment.
This is not new. The Soviet Union used to forcefully commit dissidents to psychiatric institutions where they were medicated. Arguably, that was worse than a prison or GULAG because there was no official sentence, and they were kept there for as long as KGB desired or until the noise raised by international civil right activists became inconveniently too loud. These so-called liberals/activists now fight against “disinformation”. How ironic.
Gitmo Bay not in Russia.
What sort of "facility"? Are there any asylums still open in the US?
China already has that version. Coming soon to neighborhood near you.
Narrative Disphoria
And Pfizer will have a drug to cure the disorder.
Believe OCD, oppositional defiance disorder, is already in the DSM.
Oppositional defiant disorder is indeed in the DSM-5. However, CURRENTLY the diagnosis can only be made in children who resist authority figures. Given that it is described as "a pattern of angry/irritable mood, argumentative/defiant behavior...," it seems ripe for the expansion to adults who react in this way to our political elites, whom we should acknowledge know better than us.
The Scientologists discovered and codified this disorder more than 50 years ago. Scientologists don't need no DSM to tell'em who's complying with the official narrative and who's not.
Michael Savage discovered it. You'd have to go back many years to his book, " liberalism is a mental disorder" to see that. With I think three phd's, doctor savage knows a mental disorder when he sees it. Tds is a manifestation of same!
Michael Savage is a hateful bitch. He doesn't further your argument.
TDS—I like it. People were/are so blinded by their hatred of Trump, they‘ve driven themselves mad. Remember the signs in 2020 that said “Any functioning adult!” You’ve gotta love Life’s Supreme Ironies.
TDS is a real thing for sure, but I don't think that's quite what is in play with these Dems at the hearing. It's more like RDS (Russia Derangement Syndrome) or PDS (Putin Derangement Syndrome). They didn't focus on Trump, but on Mueller's indictments of various Russians. The Dems inherited their Russophobia from the Republicans in the post-Bush years (barring Obama's one-off quip to Romney that the Cold War was over), but of course it really took off w/ Trump as a means of de-legitimizing his election. Granted, it was TDS that really kicked it into high gear. But now that Trump is (mostly) gone, they're even more rabid and deranged about it and it's because the "Intelligence" Community and FBI have adopted (or rather infected) the Corporate Democrat Party.
That and nobody watches tv news anymore, because Trump.
Sheesh I dunno. I gave up on TV news - specifically cable - during the Bush/Cheney years when the so-called "left" leaning outlets like MSDNC joined with Fox and pumped war and Islamophobia day and night. Oh and did I mention it was ALL lies? So hopefully you're right but I know SOME people who still watch Fox and MSDNC/CNN.
Pogo - We have met the enemy and he is us
You know what's really funny about the DSM? How they have to keep putting in an exemption for religious belief in the descriptions of behaviors that might indicate mental disorder, e.g., delusion, is defined by:
delusion--A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly
held despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture (i.e., it is not an article of
religious faith).
. If you take a pdf version of the DSM and search for 'religious', the whole scroll bar is full of the little tick marks indicating where 'religious' is used, the section for 'sexual disorders' is almost a solid color there's so many search hits.
Who's more mentally ill, those with TDS or those who think Trump isn't so prone to lying that he might actually be incapable of recognizing the truth?
I've always found it funny how it's fine and acceptable to mock or shame a flat earther, but an equally evidence free belief must be "respected" as long as it's called "religious".
Reality is not rational. Also, human beings appear to need a teleological explanation for existence that neither the big bang theory nor the theory of evolution satisfies.
Reality IS rational, how could it not be? What it isn't is giving a damn about what anyone needs.
"...except for the fact that the people who control that manual are themselves afflcted with TDS."
Love it. A gratuitous cheap shot at thousands of people you don't know apropos of nothing in particular. "Trump Derangement Syndrome." Right up there with "libtards," though I haven't encountered it in awhile. "DMS authors afflicted with TDS." I recommend a lot of adderall for that. But then I recommend a lot of adderall for almost anything.
TDS is a real thing and most Democrats have it, but that isn't what's happening in this hearing. This is "IC" related Russia Derangement Syndrome. The Republicans (and many Dems) have China Derangement Syndrome.
Maybe I do too, but I don't know you and I have been boycotting Chinese products since the late 2010s -- including Nike shoes manufactured by Uighur Chinese locked in concentration camps hundreds of miles from their homes. I also disapprove of the Chinese murder of tens of thousands of prisoners each year whose essential organs are being sold for cash . I've also had it with American filmmakers' adjustment of scripts so as not to offend the CCP, plus Lebron James' and John Cena's apologies to China for offenses that boil down to not bowing to totalitarians. And let's not forget American retailers' efforts to make it impossible to find the sources of the products they sell.
I have Chinese friends in the US now who want to stay, and I hope they will. I don't like either of our political parties, but I do care about human rights.
A lot of people do these kinds of ‘both sides are bad’ analogies, but China and Russia are two different things. To have a true Derangement Disorder your beliefs really need to be based on false information. Most of the stuff the right (used to be the left) believes about China is mostly verifiable and true. Russia, not so much.
Nonsense. Name three things about China that you think are "verifiable and true" and I can counter them within minutes (after I wake up tomorrow and have time w/ work). You sound like a candidate for a CDS diagnosis. Furthermore, "the left" never has had any substantial criticisms of China other than that they perhaps allowed too much capitalism, but at the end of the day their banking, education and healthcare are run by the government. There are no Uighur "concentration camps" and I can prove it if you're actually willing to debate and not closed minded and convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that China = Evil.
I understand the debate on Uighur concentration camps. I hope Max Blumenthal is right that that’s just a western fabrication, but Max also strikes me as a white monkey. The evidence for is compelling. I have a book I read, but can’t remember title. But I hope it’s wrong.
I don’t base this off what I read in the media. I work in China. I am a professional product sourcer with a staffed warehouse in Wuhan. I belong to about 100 WeChat groups and have more mainlander friends than I do American. I’ve helped Chinese dissidents get out of China.
1) No freedom of speech (I can break down. Even give you forbidden words)
2) No freedom of movement (I can break down)
3) Religious persecution
4) Major plastics pollution (seen the Yangtze River?)
Decimation of habitat and endangered species in Vietnam
Illegal fishing
Illegal logging
Extreme racism toward Africans (talks with Chinese males is like a Klan rally)
Endangered animal trade (I know guys who I can buy tiger claws from)
Mass counterfeiting (I can break down the different types of counterfeit goods from fine 1:1 to F goods to customs goods.)
Fake food (I can break that all down, how it works. Where you can eat to avoid it)
Caste system (mostly this is urban vs rural) Did you know that you can’t just up and move to any city you want?
Sexism
Fake poverty rates
It’s a techno-totalitarian hell. Everyone is transparent. All have been born into it and can’t see it, some are absolutely aware of it and feel powerless, others are trying to get out.
My Chinese friend Zong Gu sums up China well. “If you want to be rich in China you must be a great liar and cheater.”
Most Chinese want to be wealthy at all costs. Not all. They are imperialist, not in the war mongering American way, but imperialist in trade and business. They are very, very smart people. I love them, but they are straight hustlers.
Oh, and the stuff going through customs would blow your mind. Are you going to tell me they aren’t sending gun parts and fake pills? If so, give me your mailing address and I’ll send you all the illicit shit you can dream up. I will pay for it.
My Chinese homies call me Amerinese because I know
“Too much about real China.”
I even have a nickname: White Lee. Named after a great, ancient Chinese poet.
Anyway, I look forward to this debate.
I don't know much about the Uighur situation, but I'm pretty sure China reneged on the "One Country Two Systems" agreement for Hong Kong.
Also what's up with Chinese fishing in other countries' territorial waters?
OK, i'll bite:
1. China has an extensive program to steal technology and trade secrets from advanced countries for both military and civilian applications.
2. China has spent years subsidizing state owned companies to take control of the global supply chain (with the west stupidly cheering them on, admittedly...)
3. China is quietly modernizing their armed forced and spending massive amounts of money so they can project their power in the future. They currently rank #2 in the world for military spending, with the gap closing each year on the USA.
4. China is projected to surpass the USA in GDP around 2035.
5. China aspires to be a global superpower.
Are these things "evil"? Not necessarily. After all, the West is or was guilty of all of these things as well. Is China a far bigger threat than Russia to western hegemony? Absolutely.
I like most of your posts Mango, but I suspect the truth about the human rights situation in both China and Russia falls somewhere between what the Western establishment says and what you are saying.
China is run by an authoritarian government— those will always be guilty of human rights violations towards anyone they perceive as a risk.
That's really interesting. There's been a ridiculously long supply problem for adderall generics, it was attributed to an upsurge in prescriptions. It's led to pharmacies sometimes switching suppliers or at least going with different ones when necessary, so users can get pills that look different than they're used to. Just like the placebo effect, as humans, it's very easy for us to fool ourselves, any suspicion that there's something amiss could easily lead someone to perceive a change that isn't really there. That's not to say it's not happening, but generics still have some pretty heavy quality control, it's more likely it's mistaken perceptions. I'd bet a lot of 'conspiracy theories' arise from similar scenarios, initially, no intention of deception, just mistakes that warp as they're spread.
Haha. No joke
It is pathological not political.
Now stop and consider for a moment the constituencies which place and keep these intellectual dwarfs in power. Then you realize how and why we are so totally fuc**d up.
It is the very mediocrity of people like Andrew Sullivan that makes them eligible to be elevated by the Powers that Be to the role of "expert."
As a colleague of mine puts it: "Mediocrity is an art. What you do not want to do, is to excel."
“No wonder we are all more or less pleased with mediocrity, since it leaves us at rest, and gives the same comfortable feeling as when one associates with his equals.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Or more simply: You’re making the rest of us look bad!
As far as I can tell, most Democrats, but not all, aspire to mediocrity. Actually most of the world aspires to mediocrity. Striving for excellence is too hard. It takes time, hard work, patience and often failure to get to excellence.
“Dependable mediocrity.”
Kinda like affirmative action only different
Nailed it.
It’s dwarves, you tall ableist! Don’t get short with me.
That election totally destroyed their vanity as custodians of Democracysplaining and curating culture. It was like they all had electroshock therapy. They are fighting for their lives. They are now nothing - unless they reach the billionaire class,and that’s not gonna happen. Ask the millionaire next door
Well said.
Not only the offensive smear campaign of 2 highly respected journalists, the clear evidence of government interference in our constitutionally protected free speech rights, such unprofessional, inappropriate behavior from these dems, no surprise if they get voted out in the next election. But its funny to me that HRC "cherrypicked" the Donald to be her opponent in 2016 assuming it would be an easy win for her! Looks like these Dems overestimate their own popularity! I'm a Dem no more!
The gaslighting is crazy. Chris Hayes just saying "I don't see the government in this" is both a blatant lie and phrased just like a doctor doing a medical report -- if he says "There was no government involvement," that's a solid claim he can't walk back later by pretending he's even dumber than he is, just like a doctor who "doesn't see" something that turns out to be a tumor etc. can blame a radiologist or whatever in a courtroom far more easily than they could had they dictated "There is no evidence of a tumor" etc.
They only see what they are paid to see!
Except for they’ll just cheat next election like they have for the past few.
I never thought it possible to have a president who was so constantly in denial of facts that you had to wonder if they were lies or if he was actually delusional. Clearly, there is real Trump Derangement Syndrome, but you have to ask what's more deranged, to have TDS or to NOT have it? It's no wonder lots of folks have as default the assumption that if Trump claims something, it's most likely a lie--because that's the rational choice. While it's true "That the roles have been reversed is old news,", is the right really on the 'right' side of these issues or is it all just reflexive anti-antiTrump reaction? One glaring example is all the new-found concern over conditions in the DC jails. Is there any indication they suddenly care about treatment of inmates in jails and prisons across the country? No, what you get is accusations that the mistreatment of the 1/6 detainees is politically motivated punishment. Is there the slightest evidence the right suddenly become anti-war? Or anti-surveillance state? Is there a large-scale GOP-led attempt to stop the persecution of Assange or Snowden?
The Dimocrats behavior of late has been excruciating and appalling, they've gone off the deep end, no question that's the case, I get that. What I really don't get is how almost all of the criticisms come with assumptions the other side is any better, failing to acknowledge the serious and constant, SOP-level of lunacy, denial of fact, acceptance of conspiracy theories etc. How many times have you heard about how bad the lefts attack on free speech are without managing to acknowledge that's not only the age-old norm from the right but that they are right now participating in the large-scale, overt and actually legislated attacks on free speech in 'don't say gay' and book banning. Those are part of a huge, decades-long, highly organized efforts by rightwingers to legislate their versions of christian morals and ideals, attacking not just religious freedom but include broad attacks on the freedom of speech, e.g., the two just mentioned but also forcing the dissemination of lies about the risks of abortion and condoms while restricted doctors from giving actual, real medical advice for what's best for the health of the mother.
You're preaching to the choir. I see the same hypocrisy on the right... The distressing thing is that the left is supposed to be better than that. They're supposed to be the party that isn't dominated by dogma, and winning at any cost.. Giving that away, becoming the thing they fought against, is depressing and surreal.
Like I've been saying for years. I didn't leave the Democrats, they left me. I find my world is upside-down these days when I find myself supporting the right in issues that were democrats bread and butter. The Twitter files has created some interesting if not disingenuous narratives in the media.
I think with both Taibbi and Greenwald and their focus on the left is likely due to what you describe--the left's seeming betrayal of everything they seemed to stand for. Left and right really have lost their meaning, it's more corporate/mainstream vs reality now. BUT, as I described above, I think they're making a big mistake by taking their eyes off the seriousness of the threats posed by rightwing attacks on speech and religious freedoms. FFS, we have 6 in SCOTUS who have no problem with rampant denial of reality, going so far as to call the stripping away of basic rights as something done FOR religious freedom.
That is such paranoid baloney. Moral equivalence, "the right does it too", is still rank denial of what is actually happening.
Where exactly do you see me saying 'the right does it too'? You think I'm denying what is actually happening? I made it pretty clear, what do you think "The Dimocrats behavior of late has been excruciating and appalling, they've gone off the deep end, no question that's the case" says? What I DID say was that the right is worse and always has been and that their seeming reversal on lots of issues is, at best, paper thin and highly suspect as it seems it's only about crap Trump-related, and they're engaged in direct denials of free speech through legislation. That ain't moral equivalence. Plus, what exactly is paranoid? You'd have to claim I said something that wasn't true, try and tell me what.
I believe you need a better neonced information on the rights, so called attacks on free speech and religious freedoms. Mind you I tend not to let my news sources be the only arbiters of my understanding of what is actually transpired in a given day. Their biases lead there reporting.
I need better sources? Do you think Alito's Dobbs opinion is a bad source? Are 'don't say gay' and book banning laws not real? Do you think the right isn't and hasn't been for a long time catering to religious extremists? Quite a few GOP are flagrantly and even openly christian nationalists, many white christian nationalists. If you don't understand this, YOU need better sources.
Alito's Dobbs opinion got rid of a precedent that everyone from Scalia to Ginsberg thought was poorly reasoned. There can't be the "right" to terminate the life of another human. Insofar as the definition of human is debatable, the concept needs to be written in the language of statute, not rights. The "Don't Say Gay" law isn't real, obviously, because "don't say gay" isn't part of the language or intent of a law that is widely popular in the state it was written. Nor are there laws "banning books" anywhere in the US. There is no book that you can't buy or read in Florida. Parents may opt to disallow their children access to particular books in their school libraries, but this is hardly a "ban" in any reasonable sense of the word. Unless you think that pornography should be allowable in school libraries, you don't have much of a principled legal leg to stand on here. Maybe you do need better sources.
What you fail to realize is that party affiliation is not static, and many conservatives grew up to be Times liberals, steeped in principles of civil liberties. A person doesn’t drop those principles when the Democrat party does, because they have become part of the person’s core. The Democrats principles changed and left the people behind to find another place on the political spectrum. There one picks up the best that new party has to offer and rejects the rest. The voices you are hearing from didn’t just decide a week ago that “yeah, First and Fifth Amendment rights sound pretty cool.” The passion has only grown stronger because the liberal conservative has found that the new party loves our freedoms, our Founding Documents, studies them, and has favorite authors that strengthen the quest for justice, truth, and freedom.
Always assume the best about individuals until you have a reason not to (other than Rachel Maddow).
You make some really valid points. I will digress with two you did make. The so called don't say gay bill, never mentioned that ever. The bill simply stated that K through 3rd grade should not be introduced to sexual concepts that they are to young to understand the complex nuances. Personally I wouldn't want children exposed to that untill 7th grad at the earliest. One thing I have come to understand is, in reality there is know Republican or Democrat party there is a uni party. Not all members of either parties belong to it, but the leadership of both parties now represent themselves and not the people that entrusted to be there voice in the peoples house. Those people serve themselves and special interests.
Jim Jordan is amoung the few in each party that in my humble opinion that serve the peoples intrests.
Jim Jordan is a horrendous human being, having remained silent while young men athletes were sexually abused by coaches and others in authority.
What the bill says and how it's used and enforced are not the same thing. Just mentioning a married gay couple is somehow bad and can get a textbook or teaching material to run afoul of the law. Why? Here's a very simple thing that most religious freaks are incapable of understanding: NO religion gets to decide what is or isn't true/a fact, NO religion gets to decide what is or isn't moral. Not in reality and not legally in the US. If christians want to claim gay marriage is immoral, they're exposing how badly religion has warped their thinking. All it means is it's not being a good christian. What christians or their god says has absolutely ZERO meaning to anyone who isn't a christian, no more than what any god of any tribe living thousands of years ago.
You also seemed to ignore the book banning which should be abhorrent to anyone. Those laws ostensibly about parents having some control over their kid's education but they are set up so that even the objections of 1 parent can get a book banned, it wouldn't matter if most mothers wanted that book available for their kids. There isn't a single book that's been banned that has anywhere near the fucked up sexual content that the bible contains, plus all the monstrous behavior of their god like genocide, slavery, and telling his chosen buddies to use little girls as sex slaves. That's what makes these laws so infuriating and also laughably ignorant and moronic, not to mention monumental hypocrisy.
He ignored the book banning because no books have been banned. Some porn has been taken out of grade school curriculum, but you can still read those books if that is your cup of tea.
Oh please, porn? That's very revealing. Books have been banned from schools and libraries, that's pretty banned. Some of these laws have felony charges.
You do not know the facts. It was porn books that Desantis banned, that’s all. The law was against curriculum introducing sexual concepts to young kids. You are wrong about that fact also. There is no don’t say gay. Regular literature and age appropriate materials are not being banned. End of story. If you want your 7 year old to read about fiating and dildos and boys can be girls and whatever that’s your prerogative. No functional society, and most rational people would ever consider it appropriate curriculum for young kids. You are allowing yourself to fall in with fake narratives and spin because you are anti religion and must hate Desantis or something.
"That's very revealing. Books have been banned from schools and libraries, that's pretty banned."
citation needed
"Did you hear they BANNED alcohol?"
"WHAT!!??"
"Yep. Total bannination. Alcohol - BANNED."
"Holy shit!"
"I know, right? Now we have to go all the way to the liquor store to get it. Fucking fascists."
I largely agree with you. When the right has power they do the same things. The problem is giving anyone too much power.
And yeah, some of the comments from some ( not all) of the right wingers here are the mirror image of what I have seen for twenty years in the comment sections of Democrat-supporting blogs. Partisans are cherrypickers by definition.
Before any rightwingers jump on me, I think the corporate liberals have a lot more power right now to impose censorship, but in general you have to judge situations on a case by case basis.
Nah.
Allred (D-Perkins Coie) has been programmed to act that way. Were you looking for personal integrity or a lack of cowardice? LOL. Allred is a team-player, not an independent thinker.
I can’t understand how anyone on the left agrees with these morons unless they support the unraveling of america.
They remind me of the kind of extreme creationists who require nothing short of a time-lapse film of the past 300 million years to be convinced biological evolution is real. And even that wouldn't work.
But there's a tiny difference.: Creationists have never been in full control of the media, government, schools, intel services, DoD, Wall Street, etc.
"you can put the facts found in the Twitter Files in front of them"
The Twitter Files is an impressive work of journalism. And I said when they first came out, it will change zero minds and move the needle zero inches.
Denial of fact will always occur when the narrative justifying the people in power staying in power is threatened.
"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people..."
Henry Kissenger
Regime change has now been openly turned against US. The coup is coming from inside the house. So many little Kissingers. Any of this sound familiar--
---
Since the early 1960s, U.S. policy makers had dedicated tens of millions of dollars in overt aid and covert actions to preventing the popular head of the Chilean Socialist party from being elected. Allende’s victory set in motion a furious effort, ordered by President Nixon, supervised by his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, and implemented by the CIA, to destabilize Chile and undermine Allende’s ability to govern—an effort that set the stage for the September 11, 1973 military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. “I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people,” Kissinger famously told his top aides.
Before the election, U.S. officials believed that the CIA “spoiling operations”—covert propaganda efforts to undermine Allende’s popularity before the election—would succeed.
[...]
When his cable, “Allende Wins” was first declassified more than 25 years ago, the second paragraph was entirely redacted. But a more recent declassification for the State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series revealed that the censorship was not intended to safeguard sensitive national security information, but rather to hide the melodramatic and abjectly insulting nature of the ambassador’s opinions. “We have been living with a corpse in our midst for some time and its name is Chile,” reads the redacted graph. “The decomposition is no less malodorous because of the civility which accompanies it. Chileans could as usual chatter endlessly on television and radio and in the early hours today as if nothing had changed and the screen switched from variety shows to roundtables of politicians pontificating as foolishly as ever. Chileans like to die peacefully with their mouths open.”
[...]
Even before the votes were fully counted, Allende’s election triggered a series of covert U.S. contingency plans designed to block his inauguration. Since no candidate had won a plurality of the balloting, the strategy focused on influencing the October 24, 1970, vote of the Chilean Congress to ratify the winner—through bribery and economic disruption, and a possible military coup. On the day of the election, Kissinger’s office reviewed a TOP SECRET/EYES ONLY CIA planning paper for the “40 Committee” which approved covert operations. The CIA initially saw “no chance that any action by US can influence [Chilean] Congressional vote to defeat Allende”—a position that Nixon and Kissinger refused to accept. The next day, CIA headquarters transmitted a cable to its station chief in Santiago asking for an assessment on “chances of overturning an Allende’s victory.”
---
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile/2020-09-04/allende-wins
Yes, the covet ops chickens are indeed coming home to roost...
Good call on the National Security Archive. John Prados deserves a lot of credit for creating it.
Weir my post lasted a second then disappeared.
Maybe check with your brother Chris about that lost post!
I lived in Dallas when Allred beat Pete Sessions, a great moment. While I'm disappointed, I give Allred a pass, because he's just doing as instructed by his superiors in the Dem leadership. Chris Hayes's revelation of his lack of integrity is bothersome. It shouldn't be, but it is. Hayes seemed--for a while--that he wasn't going to sink to the depths of Maddow/Carlson/Hannity. Not anymore.
Are you saying you approve of Allred's lack of integrity because he is simply acting how he was told to act? You're gonna use the Auschwitz guard defense? Fitting, but I'm not sure it will be effective.
Thanks for saying that. It must be a habit for some to reach up their sleeve for that Ace that they had for so many years, and start moving their lips before they realize it no longer there. Too late, the mouths are already moving, telling that comforting bedtime story once again.
Matt asks: "The big question remains: why did this happen?"
I think the first aspect, as Matt says, is the enormous chasm that has opened up between the elite ruling class and the rest of the country (which may be at a similar level as the chasm between nobles and plebes in pre-Revolutionary France): our globalist elites are almost entirely postnational and have walled themselves off from the rest of us and have zero loyalty to America and its citizens, culture, history, traditions (in fact, more than no loyalty they have deep hostility toward all these things). Also, upscale white liberals absolutely despise downscale white conservatives, have no interest in sharing a country with them, and would rather silence and impoverish them than compromise. Trump 2016 hit our progressive oligarchy like a declaration of war, a total psychological assault, and instead of pausing to ask why America elected a cheesy and sleazy game-show host as president, they went straight into permanent tantrum mode aka The Resistance.
And secondly, the fact that we all live on the internet now presents just too juicy a target for any aspiring tyrants to resist.
The famously demented Emperor Caligula famously said "I wish all of Rome had one throat, so I could cut it", and that is the position our global ruling class has arrived at. Sometime in the past decade it seemed to dawn on everyone at the top of the food chain, from the WEF to the NYT etc: Our society does have one throat! (Or one voicebox) And this presented too tempting a prize not to be fought for: imagine that with a few clicks the FBI, DHS, NIH, FDA etc could coordinate between themselves to craft a single reigning narrative, and then imagine that w a few more clicks they could get their friends at Big Tech (who are the mouth of our social voicebox) to make their narrative the sole permissible one, while censoring all dissent and silencing or banishing all dissenters. With a few keystrokes, they made themselves omnipotent, omniscient, godlike.
Our entire ruling class, from the most useless bureaucrat at the DHS or NIH up to Gates, Zuckerberg, Soros & Sulzberger etc, couldn't resist the temptation: they have been able to grab more power than even the immortal Emperor Caligula dreamed of, and didn't even have to shed a drop of blood (and it even made them more $$).
To mix my Roman metaphors, aiming for total social control is their Rubicon, and they've crossed it and are not turning back.
Bear in mind also that many of our richest elites are in relatively new industries -- i.e., tech. Many were raised after high schools stopped requiring or even offering civics classes.
A few years ago, one of my almae matres (UCLA) eliminated a very popular First Amendment course because the lawyer adjunct who taught it was a conservative -- even though students said he encouraged free discussion because, well, that is the whole point of the First Amendment.
But, hey, these new elites can code, so they obviously know more than the rest of us. Think of Meta's Zuck, who spent $400+ million on get-out-the-vote campaigns in 2020 that spent much more money to encourage voting in Democratic precincts than in icky Republican ones.
Taibbi was supported by a rep-Jim Jordan-from the practical equivalent of District 12-he lives in a village where it isn’t uncommon to get stuck behind a combine-I’ve had it happen personally there.
So? Is it not possible that Mr. Taibbi settled in a place with good schools for his children, or a climate he favors or close to his publisher?
I am unaffiliated politically, and I would NEVER locate in a place for its politics.
I believe Matt has mentioned Jersey? Maybe stuck behind horse vans. His partner may have a profession there. Crazy high taxes. Don’t see politics lol. Even Bon Jovi’s ‘bee farming’ tax dodge grift made him move out
His wife is a pediatrician.
I left nys 14 years ago for its poison, I mean politics. I found myself in Florida. And wish I had done it fifty years earlier.
Non-affiliation-D vs R, and shared general values/principles are a very different thing. If a place completely gives up on the later, I would not want to live there.
Icky. Love it.
Do you think they have any idea what forces they risk unleashing or are they just too stuck in their bubble to notice?
People for the most part only care about their status and money needs in the moment, people see which way the tide is flowing and flow with it, and nothing matters but the present and its urgency. (and if the urgency of the moment, what the press is saying, what your colleagues are saying, has always been vital, that's only massively magnified now that we all live inside the digital panopticon.)
i think psychologically we're all prone to privatizing the gains and socializing the losses, meaning that any mistakes will be pinned on others, any future disasters will be someone else's fault...so as for the upscale American liberals who rule us, they truly believe all evil emanates from their political opponents (Trump made me do it!), and no matter what the future holds, even a civil war, they will absolutely blame it all on the other side and sleep easily knowing they've always been on the RIght Side of History.
“I think psychologically we're all prone to privatizing the gains and socializing the losses, meaning that any mistakes will be pinned on others, any future disasters will be someone else's fault”
Very much yes.
I just finished reading Martin Seligman’s “Learned Optimism” and was sarcastically delighted to see his defense of pessimism, five pages of 290, buried deep in the middle and containing what appeared to me to be a precise description of the values we should be trying to live our lives by.
There is an entire chapter about optimism in the political sphere and how American voters prefer optimists. Of that I have little doubt. What lies buried in that brief section defending pessimism, however, is this gem:
“There is clear evidence that nondepressed people distort reality in a self-serving direction and depressed people tend to see reality accurately.”
One need not look far to see the profound impact of Seligman and the Positive Psychology movement on our society. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote an excellent critique of it called “Bright Sided” years ago. But having just read it myself, it’s awfully tempting to connect the dots between this entire mindset and our current state of affairs. All I was thinking while reading this book was “why on Earth would we be ENCOURAGING this?”
The roots of the New Left are both in post-Marxist Crit Theory and also Self-esteem Self-help psychology...they traded the redistribution of wealth and assets for the redistribution of stigma and esteem..."Self-esteem" seems to be one of the great sacred myths of our time, no matter how many times it fails, it is never abandoned.
Too true. We’re not going to fix any societal problems, but we WILL make it cool to be a victim, and really, what’s the difference?
it is kinda funny in a twisted way...the Marxists said that liberated man would want to fish in the morning and write poetry at night, various other utopias posit a race of unleashed ubermenschen taking us to space as we all sing "Imagine" together...none of them could have guessed that when the needs of survival were met what people would most want would be to attend a permanent group therapy session and talk about their suffering Selves and how much they've been victimized....LOL!
As absurd as it sounds the millionaire next door will not join the 1% - and that used not to be the case. They are feeling vulnerable, especially if they lose their political and cultural clout. The billionaires have locked the gate to the aspirational class and Trump was like a series of electrical shock treatments. It’s as if they all have brain injuries Democracysplaining to us.
A million ain't what it used to be.
Perfectly put.
Some understand. They're all too frightened to change course. They know there's hell to pay.
They’re too stuck in their bubble. What they don’t understand is that people will take only so much abuse. Especially people here in the USA. Let’s not forget, we are the descendants of those uppity peasants who left the Old World so they could own land and forge their own destiny.
We have a history, society and culture that will not be beholden to anyone who forces it upon us.
I hope you’re right about us. I’m not convinced, but I am more hopeful than I’ve been for a while.
Not me anyhow.
they would scream alt right and double down on repression, listening is no longer an option
They are so insulated from reality, they think their security details are omnipotent. Lol.
I am glowing in the gloriousness of this post. Cleverly written, Clever Pseudonym. Well said.
thanks!
Thank you for writing it. Loved it.
This is an excellent post. One thing that’s been odd for me to observe is that my high school-educated working class conservative friends are smarter and better informed on most political and social issues than my wealthy and highly credentialed liberal friends. And my conservative friends aren’t just regurgitating talking points that might happen to be correct. They understand their positions and can logically defend them.
yeah, i also come from a working-class background but was educated at a private liberal arts college (where i sat behind some crazy kid named Matt Taibbi one class) and for me the major difference bw my working-class friends and my upscale/suburban friends more or less comes down to bullshit detection...my working-class friends can't be played as easily by gauzy moral appeals or intellectual/philosophical trends. they are not as status conscious and also don't have the same desperate need my friends in the Blue Bubble do to appear morally righteous. they are much more refreshing to talk to, and also i don't have to walk on eggshells and worry that one wrong word will cause a denunciation.
Same here. Logic is a foreign concept that causes fight or flight in Leftist brains.
Not all of us! We're not in Kansas anymore; we're well beyond the old school binaries of Right and Left. Critical thinking has not left the building for many of us on the Left; it's that the Democrats have abandoned the Left, along with critical thinking. As others have written, it's now more about the Establishment versus the rest of us. When we drop into simplistic adversarial binaries, we give them exactly what they want - a distracted bunch of drama creators and perpetuators who are easily manipulated and unwittingly captured. Gotta stay awake and be open to new associations.
True dat. 👊 Well said.
Nice job CP!!
thanks!
100 percent
Dear Rep. Goldman -- If you and your party don't believe that our First Amendment applies to the government, especially in matters of public policy, then:
1. You have no place in our Congress
2. Your party has no place in our government.
That is all there is to it.
3. But you will always have a place amongst your fellow Democrats, who above all crave dominion over others.
Maybe we can build them an island paradise they can never leave so they can act out the last aeon's dying throes on each other and leave the vast majority of us the FUCK alone.
They would devolve into Lord Of The Flies in no time.
"No, you don't get to hold the conch shell!"
I heard Jeff Epstein’s island is for sale.
Like cannon fodder only different. You usually don’t die, but that can depend on who you are doing things for.
Who is Goldman to deny free speech to those who dissent from his opinions? And what is not permitted to participate in the "convo" [ugh] but the denial of a voice? Is he not bright enough to see that this is dictatorial?
For all their modern bluster about "democracy", these Democrats are clearly no small-d democrats. They are authoritarians, pure and simple. Goldman's "zero tolerance" quote epitomizes it: They see an opponent as a child, or a subhuman, or the enemy in a "just" war. Possibly, they believe all three. Theirs is certainly not the language of equals or of diplomacy.
He knows it is dictatorial. They crave dictatorship and cheat and cry when they can't get their way honorably. They can't win by their ideas anymore, so they have to use their ill -gained power to squash dissent.
They always stay steps ahead on the public discourse. At the moment we notice there's war against us (that is, publicly speak of it, not just act against it), we are declared to be *starting* the war (and, of course, that we are stupid, evil, and/or crazy). It applies everywhere, such as: their reaction to pushback against CRT's effect on immature minds in elementary schools; or their decade-plus M.O. in Ukraine. We must up our game, and yesterday.
I'm actually surprised Taibbi (and his team?) hadn't put in more "PR" work/time on this, strategizing the exact pithy zinger responses against a fairly predictable spew of garbage, to better spur wake-up calls to viewers. (Nothing against his work! It's extremely admirable he(/they) are on the front lines.) Instead, he seemed to rely on the caught-by-surprise response to do the work. IOW, on the 20th-century method of straight-man responses, expecting most people would instantly notice absurdities.
But I think that's unlikely to work sufficiently on the majority of a by-now thoroughly indoctrinated audience, who might instead just think Taibbi's slow (i.e stupid). His approach worked decades ago, but today, counterintuitively, it's not a good (enough) look. You can't just walk in there with facts...
Writing "convo", even saying it.... ughhh. Is this how one gets elected?
No. One gets selected.
He will be re-elected continuously by 2/1 margins for the rest of his life.
It’s time to makes his voters regret their choices.
the incumbency of these guys explains a lot of their behavior
Amen
After 52 years as a Dem, I dropped my party affiliation 6 months ago. I’m now unaffiliated. I joke about how if I drop Netflix, I get a “sorry to see you go” email. I think the Dems have lost their minds. Matt, I was so upset to see how you were treated at the hearing. I was equally happy that I am no longer associated with them. My immigrant grandparents who adored FDR and had a portrait of him in their foyer would be as horrified as I am. Joe Biden goes to Ukraine to promise pensions, among other things, but says he’ll go to East Palestine, OH “at some point”? We’re in the Twight Zone. Keep up the great fight, Matt!
Welcome to the coalition of the sane.
I have been watching the House hearings on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. While I am not under any illusions that the Republicans are in this for the “right” reasons, I am appalled by the deliberate misdirection by the Democrats. They are deliberately missing the point. Our government agencies led, if not outright directed, social media sites to censor voices that did not fit the narrative they wanted presented. This was not just done to conservatives by any means. This was done under, at least, the last two presidential terms so, again, this should not be a partisan issue but a free speech issue. This should be a chilling wake up call that our government is grossly overstepping its bounds.
And there's really no political reason for Democrats to be defending all this crap, but they are........
There are legal reasons for them to do so. There have been serious crimes committed in the name of "preserving democracy."
They are afraid of what they know they have done. Just look at the anger over the 1/6 tapes. Schumer was freaking out, as was McConnell.
So much so for the Turtle that he tripped in panic and sent himself to the hospital.
They're so obviously in CYA mode. They're also so short-sighted they don't even realize the censorship apparatus they're trying so hard to implement will be used against them when a different party takes the Oval.
In a 24-hour news cycle, those focusing on the next quarterly report are farsighted.
The Democrats have become the party, along with Republican neoconservatives, of the CIA, DHS, military and the FBI. I know it is old news by now...
Well, that depends on whether you think pacifying the wokeists who don't want people being mean to them on social media is political.
"Woke" is just a manufactured and propagated corporate control mechanism to control the masses when the next 2008 happens, no more unaligned and uncontrolled "Occupy" movements, no more Bernie Sander threats. Let the plebes tilt at race and gender windmills while Rome burns.
The next 2008 may have started. The FDIC announced the SVB uninsured depositors will be made whole. Friday I believed that at least one regulatory agency (the FDIC) was still an honest broker. Tonight I believe we are again at moral hazard.
Yep. Woke is pure social engineering.
Most mass social movements are. Otherwise if they cannot be co-opted by the Establishment they are shut down.
That might indicate there *is* a political reason -- even if it's not an immediately evident one... n'est-ce pas?
Maybe a sudden lack of funding next primary season......... ;)
All that FTX $$$
Yes indeed Kathleen.
How do you propose we stop the richest people in all of human history from giving money to them?
I get $0/year from special interests because I can't help them.
I want government to be in the same situation.
I was a rank & file dem but once I did an event for a woman running for Senate and got 20 women to come at $50 each which I then donated as one check. My whole communication from DEMS changed. I got invited to parties from rich DEMS but to come you had to donate at least $500. The names were the richest people in town who never went to any of the rank and file stuff. I didn't go to any but I suppose it would escalate. I still get those e-mails 20 years later. It was like there was another level of dems I had no idea about. Anyone who donates their small amounts is just giving the candidate the right to brag about small money donors/ suckers.
If you give money to anyone in politics, make up an email address and then delete it. Somehow Dems think I'm Michael and I never knew there were so many ways to say "begging" and "pleading."
They're playing to their supporters and funders.
Campaign contributions aren’t a political reason?!?!
It was somewhat of a surprise that this committee was even formed. It was obviously spurred on by J6, but I think the country is way overdue for an Intelligence and FBI overhaul. I hope the Democrats see the value in that, and I hope the Republicans are flexible enough to tackle cross-partisan issues. Those issues seem to be FISA 702 reform, complete repeal of the vestiges of The PATRIOT Act and much needed transparency and declassification of material.. Executive overreach has gone too far. I am a nonpartisan so I am especially interested in bipartisan approaches. I am deeply disappointed about security trumping freedom and I hope the pendulum swings back again.
This is what will happen: They will replace the Terr.. ISI... Trum.. Russ... COV... Russ... Domestic Terr... Russia threat with China.
They will not repeal squat. They will arrive at a bipartisan consensus that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE. And the insanity will continue, until reality finally asserts itself in a very dramatic way.
Watching the hearing, I was struck by the venom in the room. I was left with the impression that the country is hopelessly riven. The Democrats have absolutely no interest in turning down the temperature, even for the 1st Amendment, and especially now that the next election is for the Presidency. Whatever it takes to win. Even lukewarm attempts at compromise will be reconfigured as attacks on "democracy."
The irony lies in that attacks on civil liberties are attacks on democracy.
Attacks on their democracy. Not necessarily ours.
Whenever you hear them say "our Dwmocracy," you need to understand that it's for them, not you.
Uh, duh, you want venom, try MSNBC.
We have to get rid of 702 period.
We use robots (computer programs) to collect all communications--everything--and then use robots (computer programs) to repeatedly search this information, and the argument is that it doesn't count as a constitutional violation because a robot can't violate the constitution--and none of it counts until a human sees it--and then it's somehow legal because a warrant now has nothing to do with the collection and search, but authorizes the robots to communicate with humans.
It's completely insane.
The precedent of logic and law unavoidably ends where George Floyd's death is fine as long as a robot does it.
[Robot Voice] "Comply or die. Comply or die. Look out he's got a gun!"
What to do? The laws need to be updated. Who even understands all of this? Who is going to stand up for civil liberties? I fear that the lawmakers are so beholden to the intelligence community and law enforcement that Americans will indeed loose their freedoms.
I'm just hoping against hope that we have a big surprise from the committee.
Honestly looking forward to it
Been rehearsing.
I don't think they're deliberately missing the point. They're deliberately throwing up walls and legal blockages to avoid anyone being able to see their crimes. They know they did wrong. They know they can't win in elections, or narratives, or power unless they cheat in any way possible.
I read that Andrew Sullivan article and I will probably be pissed for the next few hours. Maybe I am just learning to accept my hate at the people who keep bringing things to the brink while pretending they are trying to save everything. Sometimes I wish they could get a good old Twentieth Century jackboot on their throats for a while so they might have a clue what totalitarianism really is. It is not mean tweets, distrusting bullshitters, holding on to your rights, telling experts who are always wrong to kiss your ass, or treating institutions with less than sacred reverence.
Andrew Sullivan: another intellectual lightweight whose work has received far more attention than it deserves.
An English accent gets you anything in the USA. It's actually hilarious.
I happen to agree with Sullivan’s point that elites in 2016 still had some persuasive capacity and were called upon to use it to avoid the election of a demagogue by responding to the very real and justified anger felt by Trump supporters.
That’s not what they did. They instead demonized, lied, and obfuscated and that has only made the situation worse. In fact, the Democratic Party is now creating exactly the structures they sought to oppose. Sullivan’s recommendation would have been better for democracy and likely more effective.
Say what you will about Trump (who was certainly mischaracterized by many) but he is not a fundamental believer in our democratic systems by his own, repeated, admission. He was certainly worth opposing then and now. Just not they way it’s been done to date.
You might have a point if Bush, Hillary, and Obama, did not also factor into this equation. Get back to me on one of those "fundamental believers in our democratic systems" the elites were supposed to support to "save the country" while pretending to give a shit about people they hated.
Best comment ever! Anyone that thinks the Bush/Clinton/Obama we’re better than Trump need to get a real look at what’s wrong with the world. Hint---it’s not the Trump people.
We’ve gotta get beyond this grievance stuff. We’re here as caretakers and this democracy goes on after we’re dead. That cuts both ways: against the elites who don’t respect common people and our values; and us, reminding us our democratic values matter more than anything we might gain short-term by abandoning them.
What "democratic values" are you talking about? As far as I can tell, the opinion of your average voter has little weight in Washington decision making. Neoliberalism means not caring what the plebs think. How about the nondemocratic parts built into our system? Well the Bill of Rights is treated like toilet paper by technocrats who think they know better (and act as if it is something to be voted on). The simple truth is all this bloviating about "democracy", "extremism", "norms", "civility", and "freedom" (biggest lie of all) has been bullshit for a long time now. If you expect people who have been lied to and pushed around to roll over and not fight back, then I don't know what to tell you.
Yeah, Mike, your shot at Trump fpr being "not a fundamental believer in our democratic system" is pretty ridiculous in light of how the system treated him, from 2016 onward. I'm guessing you think Obama, Hillary, et al, are "believers "in our democratic system. And by the way: when did Trump say he didn't believe in our democratic system?
I'm guessing you have a touch (and maybe more than a touch) of the TDS...more ramapant than COVID.
Friend, we can agree Trump was not treated fairly by the establishment. I thought we might also agree that none of that justifies his reaction to losing the 2020 election.
Mike, I think you are behind the info curve....the intel agencies actively sought to defeat Trump by controlling the flow of information during the 2020 election...not to mention, seeking to subvert his entire presidency by the bogus "Russian collusion" hoax. You cannot talk about Trump "losing" the election, given these very very stubborn facts. It was not a "free and fair" election.
Maybe re-read Matt's Twitter files pieces. That should get you up to speed on this critical issue.
Mike, one more point: it is an undisputable fact that not only did the Deep State actively work to sabotage Trump, the same people actively ran/are running interference for Biden, most notoriously regarding Hunter's laptop, which they famously mis-labeled as "Russian disinformation"--even though the FBI had possession of the laptop for a year prior to this bogus claim being made.
We have never had such corruoption in our political system. This is far far worse than Watergate, because there is so much institutional wrong doing. It is not too much to say that, at this point, we are living in a post-democratic America. Maybe we can recover our democracy. But first we have to have the courage to acknowledge where we are, right now.
He didn’t lose though.
When Trump is viewed in the context of it was either him or HRC, I say he was the most worthy candidate of the last 20 years.
I always thought he was going to be only 10-15 % better than HRC. And that’s what he turned out to be.
This mean he was essentially the same as HRC in 5 of 6 big issues of the day. But on that one big issue he was a big reformer. And NAFTA won’t ever be the same because of him.
This is great for our nation AND Mexico. DT gave the biggest raise to Mexican maquiladora auto workers in their life.
And when I saw how he made the authoritarians go full throated in their hatred I say he had all the right enemies.
We had to start somewhere...
I love how, whenever Democrats take or re-take power, they like to preen how "The adults are back in the room."
Most schoolchildren are better behaved than the Democrat "adults" sitting on that panel.
Or, with Fetterman, or Biden for that matter, the legume is in the room.
"the legume is in the room"
I can almost visualize Tucker Carlson with that phrase on a backdrop underneath Fetterman's face. And I would spit out my cocktail laughing if I ever actually saw it.
Matt - you are too generous (not just in this post, but in others) when portraying interactions such as that between Allred and Hayes as misled at best and disingenuous at worst. These establishment actors are giving your Twitter Files reporting a full-court press worth of obfuscation and misrepresentation. It’s not just the dolts like Rupar that are engaged in it: the whole machinery is winding up to quash this story. Pete “Insurance Policy” Strzok is leading Twitter attacks against you for goodness sakes.
My suggestion: you know you have a winning argument in the public sphere (the Munck Debate performance is empirical proof enough). Start playing more aggressive offense with these people to break through their full-court press (pardon the Selection Sunday-inspired analogy). It’s high time there was more concerted pushback against this intensifying suffocation of civil liberties.
It's reported that the No Labels group has gained 2024 ballot access in Colorado, Arizona, and Oregon, so far. It will be interesting to watch what powers coalesce to abort that effort. A lot of things are falling apart and coming together in this country at the same time. Surely the people will begin to see and do something. Sauron aways does.
Watching these hearings made me ashamed of our government; I feel so hopeless. Sadly you will have to get used to writing..."my former friend..."
That made me sad as well. People have turned into monsters.
Yea - people have turned into monsters - well said
Lambs to the slaughter, profiting all the way.
Listen here you little shit. Only "WE" can say when there's a vast conspiracy.
Russia, Russia, Russia.
These are not your parents' democrats.
Not your parents Democrats? They aren't even my Democrats from a decade ago.
People who think they know Democrats because of the Bush years are slowly waking up to the fact that the party is now pro-war, pro-corporation, pro-media, pro Wall Street.........
"the party is now pro-war, pro-corporation, pro-media, pro Wall Street"
They were all of these things back in the 1990s. We're getting Clinton Regime 2.0 good and hard, minus the trickle-down.
Let me clue you in: the Dems and Repubs and the press have always been pro-war. America is a pro-war country. Check out The First Casualty by Phillip Knightly.
Have that on my desk!
Yep. The Bush years were the aberration -- but it was all a ploy to score political points.
Didn’t see this a minute ago— I just typed the same thing in response to your earlier comment.
That is both a shock to me and yet not a shock. As an antiwar lefty back in the Bush era, it was a pleasant surprise to see so many mainstream liberals outraged about US war crimes, but even then I suspected much of this was really just another reason to bash the Republicans. Don’t get me wrong— they deserved bashing. But much of that mainstream liberal outrage about Iraq and torture was motivated by partisanship.
So now being pro war and linking Republicans to Putin is just more of the same.
Realistically, the anti-war Democrats were an oddity. If you go back to the 50's and before, it was the GOP that was anti-war. Then William F Buckley came along and the modern GOP was born. The Democrats changed it up in response, but the tendency towards war always remained. It's just that the GOP was beating them at their own game.
This confused me at first. People who were right there with me when I was ranting about Bush turned around and started simping for Obama when he did the same things.
Tide turned a bit by Sy Hersch reports on torture.
Yeah, he was popular with liberals when his work exposed what they could see as Republican war crimes.
He’s on substack now. Did you see his article detailing how Biden said he would blow up the pipeline, did it, then claimed Russia blew up their own pipeline?
Some are, some aren't. I've been disillusioned since 2011, when Obama tuned out to be Bush 2.0. My mother, on the other hand, will believe any propaganda the state throws at her. "Not your parents' democrats?" Tell that to my mother.
It’s the uniparty. I’ve been a conservative forever and unaffiliated for forty years. Both of them suck.
Very slowly, still most dems are very much in denial. TDS and COVID wrecked their minds.
They sure as hell aren’t my grandparents Ds-my Ukrainian grandfather was a big JFK fan.
Would your Ukrainian grandfather agree with American support of Ukraine as it fights Russian aggression? What would he think of Jim Jordan’s statement that he doesn’t want to spend any more American tax dollars in support of Ukraine?
He’d likely disagree with Jordan. My father and his sisters disagree on Trump, but they all support aid to Ukraine. It isn’t a partisan issue for them.
What happened is that the National Security State gave Team D/liberals/the PMC (all largely the same thing) the whip hand.
I am of the "your parents" generation and I assure you that those democrats were not what we believe today. There were some dems who cared about people, bu tnot as many as you think. We got lucky with LBJ, but dems like President Biden will be attacking those social programs under the guise of fiscal responsibility. That is what Senator, VP, and now President Bident has always had in his heart, or the place where his heart should be.
LBJ was a warmonger and the War in Poverty was a complete failure.
When lbj left office he was the worst President since Buchanan. Worse even than Harding.
The only reason lbj isn’t still the worst President since Buchanan, is because there was the single monolithic presidency of bush ii-obama-biden
Add Clinton.
Can’t.
He was better than a lot of presidents between 1860 and 2000 and while he screwed up with bosnia sure enough it can’t begin to be compared to what bush-obama-biden did
Would be nice to look back with rose-tinted glasses except Biden's been there with most of our grandparents and he's now running the show. What gives?
Too much democracy isn't the problem. Too much profiteering through dishonesty is.
Congress is incredibly corrupt, a tool of the moneyed interests. You, Matt, tried to point out a tip of that iceberg of corruption, and for that you were smeared and slapped and held up as a "direct threat" to the system.
And so the HMS America keeps steaming toward that iceberg, ignoring those few like you who see clearly the calamity awaiting us.
Great analogy!
And the consequence of this is political homelessness.
True. I sent a lengthy email to my Dem Senator more or less asking him to visit Plaskett and give her a good shake. Good god what a disappointment. Really thought she’d get into the weeds of the rights and wrongs of FBI/DHS behaviors. I give up.
Plaskett actually Tweeted that this is the Republican playbook (I am not a Republican myself), apparently-risk Americans safety and security to score political points. I think this is appalling.
I’m dismayed. To me she is stooping to what I expect from the Republican playbook.
Wow, not even close. Conservative all of my life and have never seen this level of stupidity or obfuscation ever by a Republican.
Unless you’re old enough to have seen lunatic joe mccarthy you never saw a republican act like that
Except that lunatic was right. Obviously
True. Stupid, but right.
Stay tuned Ann. I don’t think you and I agree on much but not liking the dem playbook either. Principle is important and I’m glad you see that
It's none of my business, but how long have you occupied a space on this planet? Just curious.
You’re right, it’s not. But long enough to hear a personal insult heading my way…
Does anyone wonder how Musk can be so bad.. and yet all these folks are still Tweeting?
No I’m curious how long you’ve followed the leadership of our nation. Every chance you get to slam the conservative wing of the world you take, and brag constantly of you being a democrat, and how you would never ever consider voting Republican, not that they are any different, so I’m curious how long you’ve been this beholden to a party with no chance of ever seeing the other side.
I can understand that concern to a point. Certainly you want to be able to discuss political issues without being shouted down or called names.
But in another sense, I've found it's better to be an independent than a member of a political party.
Exactly. One can have very fixed ideological/policy beliefs and vote for the option that one believes best serves those beliefs without being in thrall to “The Party”, whichever it may be.
What happened to voting for competence instead of ideology?
I still have to say that I will vote. And can’t believe I could ever support a Republican platform. So. Maybe it’s time to get involved at State level again.
Maybe it's time to open your mind to the fact you have been wrong, most of your life?
If you voted republican nationally from 2000-2008, you got conned just like today's Democrats are getting conned.
No remotely an apt comparison. You're not taking into account 9/11, the War on Terror, the LACK of a war on terror before 9/11 (the Cole bombing, the previous Trade Center attack in '93, etc.
The Internet was there, but not nearly as impactive - broadband wasn't even a thing then. Video online was a joke. Social media didn't exist.
Somewhere between 2006 and 2010, our entire world changed.
I voted for W in 2000. If by the end of his second year you didn't see the disaster he had created in more ways than just Iraq, you just don't want to admit it.
That was the last time I got conned by a presidential candidate. Refusing to acknowledge the bamboozle makes you susceptible to it continuing. Don't do that.
Agree to an extent but the alternative, Al Gore and John Kerry, were no better.
There were other options. As the Dems and Reps have made clear, voting for them is a vote for corruption in all of its forms.
Ah..because you’ve obviously been right all along…
I remember when I first realized it made way more sense to vote Republican. I felt weird and gross about it. But when I did it..... it felt goooooood.
This means that you think for yourself.
Order out of chaos...
I tried a case against Dan Goldman. He’s as sanctimonious and disingenuous in court as he was during the hearing.
I want to hear that story!
Happy to share it with you as well as some excerpts from transcripts that perfectly reflect the contempt he held not only for the defendants whom he prosecuted but for the defense lawyers who represented them.
Inside every journalist is a lover of gossip.
Me too!
There’s a good story about your boy Gym Jordan that you might be interested in too
'Your boy'.... please be careful about getting too invested in one side or the other.
The bamboozle may have you.
You know how people unsubscribe because they get all pissed off at the author because they disagree or feel mislead?
I may have to unsubscribe because there is too much truth and I agree too much with Racket. I read and part way through I begin softly weeping at what has become of our political system, until I reach the end, convulsed by sobs. Okay, not really, but kinda really on the inside.
It is depressing, but I think we need new institutions. For example, local clubs where you can meet face to face with people who see through the gaslighting. Discuss it and laugh about it over a beer. I think that would be therapeutic
Good point. But the disappearance of local clubs and other civic institutions over the last several decades is a subject of several books. See, e.g., Bowling Alone. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone) Can they, or something like them, be revived?
(If you decide to buy the book, ask your local independent book seller, and if that fails, try bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/p/books/bowling-alone-the-collapse-and-revival-of-american-community-robert-d-putnam/12581479?ean=9781982130848.
(Whatever you do, please don't buy it from Amazon.)
Illustrating how difficult it is to get out of The Borg: I went from Amazon to Bookshop, and then stopped patronizing Bookshop when they refused to carry Abigail Shrier's book Irreversible Damage because it is critical of the trans movement and industry. As much as I am able, I refuse to support those who stifle conversation and the free sharing of ideas.
Thriftbooks does not seem to engage in viewpoint discrimination so I tend to take my book business there, when I can't get what I need at the two local booksellers in my town (obvious first stop).
Thank you for your comment. I checked, and sure enough, Shrier's book is not listed on BookShop [dot] org.
I will cease recommending BookShop [dot] org. I will check out Thriftbooks. I also recommend Bookfinder [dot] com, with the caution that both Amazon and one or more of its owned subsidiaries (e.g., ABE Books) are among the vendors there.
Again, thank you for comment. Obviously, we share a common view.
I have read Bowling Alone, or parts of it. The breakdown of local clubs has affected Democracy in America. At the same time, organizations are springing up all the time that meet, some quite effective. Let me put it in a different way. We need a movement to restore traditional liberalism (philosophical, not political). That has to have a face to face and bottom up component
Absolutely! This reshuffling is challenging, but it's an opportunity to discover those who continue to employ critical thinking and stand for what liberalism actually means. Sadly, most people follow the "leaders" right off the cliff.
We tried that here. Met a bunch of like minded patriots from truth social. Except we truly weren't like minded. There were two conservative couples, who we are still friends with. Then was the nuts. The scammers. The victims of conservatism that didn't know what truth meant. Then the hangers on that I think were libretards, trying to infiltrate. We broke up.
Sounds like it wasn’t a total loss. You gained friends. Good for you for trying also. Just because that particular effort fell apart, doesn’t mean that another would, also. I would prefer discussions that go deeper than partisan politics, sort
Of like the people here
This is how I feel, too, especially after reading the Chris Hedges Report.
Hang in there, Dave, lots of us feel the same way. But moderating the nausea on a daily basis comes with the task of staying informed. My solution, among others, is bourbon, lol.