Category: Ideas and Policy

Belated SubscribeStar Saturday: Oases of Tradition

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

This weekend was full of family time for yours portly (thus the delayed post).  Celebrating my youngest nephew’s first birthday with generations of family members and like-minded friends reminded me not only of the importance of family, but also of how refreshing it is to be among people who share your basic beliefs.

I’ve written about this phenomenon a number of times in my vast archives of blog posts, but it’s a topic that could use a longer treatment.  A major struggle facing conservatives and traditionalists today is a sense of social and cultural isolation that can be downright suffocating at times.  But we should avoid the black-pilled mentality of nihilistic despair, not only because it’s what our enemies want, but because it’s simply not true.

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Lazy Sunday XLIX: Family

The Portly Politico24 Comments

It’s been another busy weekend for yours portly.  SubscribeStar readers, I have not forgotten about you, even though I’ve failed to deliver on yesterday’s still delayed post.  I will have a post up this evening, after I’ve logged this edition of Lazy Sunday.

I’m actually on a glorious four-day weekend from school, so you’d think I’d have loads of time to get posts done.  In fact, this Sunday has been anything but lazy, with church, four piano lessons, and a jazz band rehearsal now in the books.

This weekend has seen a great deal of time with my family, however, as my youngest nephew celebrated his first birthday yesterday.  Time with family is always rejuvenating, and helps maintain the closest of bonds and the most basic unit of human organization.  Our excessive focus on the individual has, at times, come at the cost of the older, stronger emphasis on the family as the basic unit of society.

To that end—and in the spirit of one-year olds’ birthday celebrations—here are some old posts, all throwbacks to the original TPP Blogger page, about family:

  • “Family Matters” – a lengthy post detailing the decline of the traditional family structure, and arguing for the benefits of family-formation.
  • “Family Matters Follow-Up Part I: Divorce and Marriage; Sex Education” – the “Family Matters” post generated a good bit of discussion on Facebook (back when I had the guts to post these to my personal profile page), especially among the sorts that don’t understand what a generalization is.  So this piece detailed some of the questions, comments, and objections that came up in the wake of the original.
  • “Family Matters Follow-Up Part II: The Welfare State and the Crisis of the Family” – the welfare state has had an extremely deleterious effect on the family, particularly black families, which are barely anything such, with nearly 3/4ths of black children born out-of-wedlock.  Much of that decline is cultural and social in nature, but it also derives from bad government policy and perverse economic incentives.  Even worse, it’s spreading:  over half of children born to women under thirty today are born without a father present.

That’s it for this weekend, folks!  Be sure to hug your parents, grandparents, children, nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc., and keep outbreeding the childless progressives.

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

Phone it in Friday VI: Valentine’s Day

The Portly Politico3 Comments

Happy Valentine’s Day, readers!  Don’t try going out to eat tonight—it’s going to be a mad house.  Sensible couples will probably wait and dine out on a less sexy night, like Tuesday, or pick up Taco Bell.

We’re in the midst of a glorious four-day “Winter Break.”  The great thing about teaching is all the bogus holidays.  Valentine’s Day and President’s Day just happen to bookend the weekend, so why not turn it into a slightly-extended holiday?

In the spirit of Jay Nordlinger, today’s post is going to be a series of barely-related reflections, as well as some links to the stuff you should read or watch.  Speaking of Nordlinger, how do I land a gig getting paid to write about classical music in exotic parts of the world?

But I digress.  Here are some reflections on this Day of Love:

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Long Live Rush Limbaugh

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For conservatives, one of the most powerful moments of last week’s State of the Union Address was when President Trump awarded talk-radio legend Rush Limbaugh with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor a president can bestow.  This morning, NEO at his blog Nebraska Energy Observer has a piece up, “The Era of Limbaugh,” which is a must-read summary of Rush’s legacy.

It’s hard to understate El Rushbo’s influence.  For many of us, he was our first exposure to conservative talk-radio (I even named the microphone we used for announcing football games “The Golden Mic”).  He is a tent pole in the 12-3 PM time slot—unwavering, unshaking.  I remember back in 2012 when a local Florence, South Carolina radio station dropped Rush—and he was unavailable in the Pee Dee for a few days (until another station picked him up a few days later).  It was pandemonium!  Well, at the very least, listeners were quite irate.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: What is Political Moderation?

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

With the Iowa caucuses more or less in the books (did they ever actually get a final count?), the scuttle-butt around America’s Power Bottom, “Mayor Pete” Buttigieg, is heating up like a crowd of bejeweled dudes at a Miami nightclub.  He’s cast as the “moderate” alternative to Bernie Sanders, the self-avowed “democratic socialist” who honeymooned in the Soviet Union and who continues to lure gullible Millennials with the promise that this time, it’ll work—honest!

But Buttigieg’s alleged “moderation” is a lie.  On the issues, he’s far to the Left on many issues.  Granted, that’s the overall trend in the Democratic Party, as everyone has had to embrace increasingly Leftist positions to remain electable in the activist-heavy primaries.  Indeed, there’s no such thing as “conservative” Democrat anymore; such a creature is just a Republican who hasn’t taken the leap yet, for whatever reason.

Of course, this brings up a question:  what exactly is political moderation?  And a sub-question:  does such a thing even exist?

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TBT: Best SOTU Ever

The Portly Politico1 Comment

Trump delivered an amazing State of the Union address Tuesday night—the best I have ever heard in my own lifetime, as well as the most entertaining.  That incredible, lively address—a celebration of America and her greatness—was followed Wednesday by Trump’s acquittal in the Senate on both of the flagrant, fallacious impeachment charges.  President Trump and the American people are riding high.

Before Tuesday night’s address, I thought the 2019 SOTU was the “Best SOTU Ever.”  Now it’s fallen to a respectable second place slot—perfect for this week’s TBT feature:

I was wrong, as were most conservative (and some progressive) commentators:  President Trump was right to hold out for a real State of the Union Address, rather than reviving the Jeffersonian tradition of the written address.

The president’s State of the Union speech was a tour de force:  he spoke eloquently of America’s role in advancing civil and human rights; the sanctity of human life, born and unborn; the economic development of the United States in the last two years; and the crisis at the border.

It was an address that was optimistic and accurate.  Unlike most SOTU addresses, which tend to be tedious attempts to inflate small bits of good news beyond all reasonable proportions, Trump’s 2019 address described, in detail, just how great America is, and how far we’ve come in two short years.

It’s little wonder Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi wanted to cancel the speech:  how do Democrats respond to that?  The first part of the speech was full of positive economic news, news that can’t be ignored or denied.  The president detailed explosive wage and job growth, including the lowest unemployment rates for black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans in history.

Beyond the economic good news—and the vow that the United States will never be a socialist country—it was a fun speech (well, it was a bit long, and dragged a smidge, but not much).  Even Democrats started getting up and dancing around at one point!  Congress sang “Happy Birthday” to a Holocaust survivor.  President Trump cut some jokes, and was clearly having a blast.  As any performer knows, if you’re having fun on stage, the people in the audience will have fun, too.

If you missed the speech, go to YouTube, shut the office door, and fire that baby up while you file TPS reports.  You won’t regret it.

Lazy Sunday XLVII: Winning

The Portly Politico27 Comments

Need a soundtrack to go with all the winning conservatives are enjoying under President Trump and Prime Minister Johnson?  Download Contest Winner – EP for just a few bucks, or download the legendary title track.

As I wrote yesterday, it’s been a good week for populism and national sovereignty.  It’s easy to get caught up in the myriad defeats on our side, and it’s frustrating that we seem to rally only at the last possible moment to prevent total catastrophe, but it’s worthwhile to look back at our victories from time to time.

To that end, this edition of Lazy Sunday is dedicated to looking back at some conservative victories.  One of the pieces looks back at our greatest Secretary of State, who although was a part of the totalizing New England faction that dominates progressive thought today, also helped created our national borders with his diplomatic finesse.

  • “Independence Day” – This post was a brief celebration of Great Britain’s final exit from the blight that is the European Union.  Hip, hip, hooray!
  • “Trump Stands for Us” – This piece linked to an essay from my blogger buddy photog, “The Unique Value of the Trump Presidency“; both photog’s original and my commentary are worth reading.  There’s a popular meme that shows President Trump sitting sternly, pointing directly at the viewer, with a caption that reads something along the lines of, “They’re not after me, they’re after YOU; I’m just in the way.”  Boy, does that speak volumes.  As photog points out, President Trump truly does stand with us, the American people.  In part, he does that simply by not despising us the way our elites do.
  • “Mueller Probe Completed, Trump Vindicated” – Before the Ukraine impeachment hoax, there was the Russian collusion hoax.  How soon we forget.  While Mueller declined to write in his report that Trump could be fully vindicated, he also couldn’t make a case for Russian collusion.  Trump did nothing wrong!  After the Senate acquits GEOTUS this week, I wonder what scary Slavic country they’ll pick next.  Maybe they’ll allege that President Trump is in league with Viktor Orban in Hungary?  That would make me support him even more!
  • “#MAGAWeek2018 – John Quincy Adams” – A bit of an outlier here, but I wrote a fairly lengthy rundown of John Quincy Adams—probably our best Secretary of State, and one of our worst presidents—back in summer 2018 as part of #MAGAWeek2018.  JQA and his New England Puritan ilk can probably be faulted for many of the one-size-fits-all solutions progressives plague us with today (although he would have recoiled at what progressives want), but he was a genius in terms of foreign policy, and he was a sincere nationalist, in the best sense of that amorphous term:  he wanted to make American great, physically and economically.  It’s a worthwhile read to get some more insights into a largely forgotten historical figure.

That’s it for today!  Let’s keep winning in 2020, and KEEP AMERICA GREAT!

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: A Banner Week for Populism

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

It was a banner week for populism and national sovereignty.  At the time of this writing, it appears that the sham impeachment trial against President Trump is headed for a speedy acquittal, with the Senate voting 51-49 against hearing any further testimony from new witnesses.  Here’s hoping that complacent Republican voters get the message:  the Democrats will concoct any whimsy necessary to destroy not only President Trump, but any Republican who dares to challenge their progressive hegemony.  We can’t afford to let these people control a local PTA chapter, much less a chamber of Congress.

Across the pond, the British quest for independence from the managerial-authoritarian clutches of the European Union is finally complete.  After three-plus years of wrangling—and progressive attempts to overturn a fair referendum—Great Britain is finally free again.

The battle is far from over—indeed, it never is—but we could be witnessing a new birth of freedom and national sovereignty around the globe.

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Independence Day

The Portly Politico5 Comments

The day has finally come—after three-and-a-half years, Great Britain is finally leaving the European Union.  The British people are regaining their sovereignty and will begin their way back to enjoying their traditional English liberties.

The European Union is an overweaning, elitist, supranational tyranny.  It is a progressive dream, which is why the Leftists are melting down over Brexit, and attempted to thwart it for so many years.  Progressives today—just like progressives in the early twentieth century—are gaga for technocratic rule and elitist dominance.

It’s not about “democracy”; if it was, they would have accepted the outcome of the 2016 referendum.  Democracy only matters to progressives when it advances their ends.  That’s why progressives hold elections and referendums—repeatedly, if necessary—until they get the outcomes they want—and then the matter is settled forever.  If that doesn’t work, courts or the bureaucracy will effectively veto the voters’ “incorrect” choices.

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TBT: Tucker Carlson’s Diagnosis

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This week’s TBT looks back to a piece I wrote in January 2019 that summarized a segment Tucker Carlson did on his wildly popular show.  That segment really shaped my thinking on some economic and social issues (although other commentators and writers were already influencing my thinking in that direction).

Earlier this week, I wrote a piece about another Tucker segment that applied these concerns into a political platform, of sorts, one that moves beyond economic growth to real improvement for people’s lives.

This blog post was a bit shorter, so I’ll allow it to speak for itself.  It’s definitely worth watching the linked video in the piece, as it is the segment the post covers.

Here is January 2019’s “Tucker Carlson’s Diagnosis“:

A recent monologue from Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program is blowing up the right-wing blogosphere, and understandably so.  Carlson has been a vocal critic of the neoliberal deification of economic efficiency at all costs.  I used to be a member of this cult, until the candidacy of Donald Trump (and lived experience) knocked the idealistic scales from my eyes.

Normally, it bugs me when people send me video clips to watch.  If they’re cutesy videos of the variety that drive clicks—think cats playing piano, or Goth versions of Christmas songs—I usually ignore them, no matter how hyped they are.  That’s not some virtue on my part; I just don’t want to take the time to watch them, especially on a cell phone (a pet peeve:  someone making me watch a video on their cell phone; I will refuse).

That said, I’m indulging in some hypocrisy:  you must watch this video as soon as you’re able.

For those of you that don’t want to take the time, here are some highlights:

  • Elites care only about maximizing economic efficiency, regardless of the human costs to individuals, families, and communities
  • That lust for efficiency drives income inequality, particularly benefiting the technology sector/Silicon Valley
  • “We are ruled by mercenaries, who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule”—a key idea; I’ve read a similar analysis from controversial blogger Z-Man, in which he argues that leaders in a democracy are, inherently, renters rather than owners, and therefore are heavily tempted towards asset-stripping while in office, rather than building and maintaining a nation:  http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=15929
  • Because of the hollowing out of American manufacturing and declining wages (again, due in part to the quest for efficiency), men struggle to find employment or to improve their wages
    • Because of that, rural parts of the country are dominated increasingly by healthcare and education, female-dominated fields
    • While better wages for women is fine, Carlson claims that—whether or not they should—women are less likely to marry men who earn less than them, therefore—

These are just some of the most interesting insights, but Carlson sums up in fifteen minutes what would take a legion of hack bloggers like me hours or weeks to explain.

Again, I urge you to watch this video:  https://video.foxnews.com/v/5985464569001/?playlist_id=5198073478001#sp=show-clips