As such, I was surprised to see the dubious wisdom of mask mandates questioned in the pages of the progressive Left’s favorite “mainstream” rag, The New York Times.
It’s another weekend full of questions here at The Portly Politico, as we continue our review of posts that pose a question in their titles. Each of this Sunday’s posts were written during the heady, violent days of Summer 2020, when the nation was aflame with lawlessness and disorder. Naturally, they reflect the fears and anxieties of those days, when it seemed like everything was coming apart at the seams:
“SubscribeStar Saturday: Civil War?” (post on SubscribeStar) – Perhaps one of my most powerful essays (if it’s not too much to give myself such accolades), “Civil War?” spells out the irreconcilable differences at the heart of the United States today. I wrote it at a time when local governments in progressive urban centers refused to put a stop to the looting and rioting, and instead tacitly encouraged the destruction. That mental and physical divide between progressives and conservatives is so profound and deep, I expressed pessimism of any kind of peaceful resolution—though I continue to pray I am wrong.
“Law and Order?” – Just as urban progressive mayors failed to address the violence in their cities, so President Trump—who I love as a president—dropped the ball on quelling riots and the ridiculous CHAZ/CHOP experiment. As I wrote at the time, it seemed that his strategy was wise—give the Left rope with which to hang themselves, allowing CHAZ to fizzle out under the weight of its own insane contradictions—but also undermined the legitimacy and authority of the government, and Trump’s own calls for “law and order.” Here was a moment where President Trump could have acted decisively with a legitimate display of power, and give proof to his claims to want law and order. That only comes with the firm smack of power.
“What is Civilization?” – As progressive mobs continued to burn cities, Milo Yiannopoulos argued “that by abandoning our cities, we are, essentially, abandoning our greatest cultural products.” Milo was engaged in a discussion with Steven Franssen and Vincent James, who countered that Americans who fled the cities were not abandoning their civilization, but something that had become alien and foreign. I tend to favor the latter argument, but the post is worth reading as my summary of the discussion between such intriguing thinkers.
That’s all for this weekend. Here’s hoping everyone is doing well and staying safe. Christmas is almost here!
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It looks like President Trump will make his Supreme Court nomination pick later this week, and that Senate Republicans will deliver the votes he needs. Lindsey Graham, who is in a surprisingly tight race here in South Carolina, came out with full-throated support for confirming a nominee, even this close to the November election.
What came as a major surprise was Mitt Romney‘s willingness to vote for a Trump nominee. He did qualify his support by stating that he intends “to vote based upon [the nominee’s] qualifications,” which still leaves open the possibility of his characteristic perfidy. Even with Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins demurring, that gives Senate Republicans some cushion in confirming the president’s choice.
Of course, the Left is in a full-scale, apocalyptic meltdown. They’d turned Ruth Bader Ginsburg into a symbol for their preferred style of judicial activism, and saw her as a crotchety, sleepy champion for their pet causes. Ginsburg never saw an abuse of judicial power she didn’t like, and was a guaranteed vote for the progressives on any case.
The prospect of replacing her with a constitutional conservative is the Left’s worst nightmare. RBG’s refusal to step down into a peaceful (and, surely, lucrative) retirement during the Obama administration has not cost the Democrats—potentially—a reliably Leftist seat for probably another forty years.
It’s little wonder, then, that the Democrats are pulling out every trick imaginable to stall or prevent confirmation hearings, and to otherwise scuttle Trump’s eventual nominee. That includes threats of impeachment.
Perhaps one of President Trump’s most enduring achievements has been his Supreme Court nominations. He’s managed to tip the Court, however slightly, towards the conservatives. With the death of Justice Ginsburg, Trump has the opportunity to secure a solid conservative majority on the highest court in the land for at least a generation.
With that, it looks like a good opportunity to review some posts about the Supreme Court:
“Breaking: Trump Nominates Judge Brett Kavanaugh to Supreme Court” – The nomination of Brett Kavanaugh was a major shift in American politics. His confirmation hearings saw the entire fury of the Left unleashed, and it was during those hearings that I believe many of us realized that the old playbook of compromise among competing parties was no long valid or useful.
“SCOTUS D&D” – This post was a fun one—looking at the Supreme Court justices (from 2018) in terms of the Dungeons and Dragons alignments.
“Logic Breakdown and the Kavanaugh Hearings” – As noted above, the Kavanaugh hearings were a turning point. I was blown away with the number of arguments people were making on social media that boiled down to “I was raped/sexually assaulted/abused, therefore Brett Kavanaugh assaulted Dr. Blasey Ford.” The complete embrace of emotionalism and illogical thinking braced me to this stark reality.
“Screwed by SCOTUS” – One of my more recent posts on the Court, this piece explored the tendency of conservative justices to make surprisingly bad decisions in league with progressive cause du jours.
That’s it for now. Here’s hoping President Trump and Senate Republicans can get it done and slam in a super conservative appointee ahead of the election. We’ll see.
Lazy Sunday is rolling on with some more “Forgotten Posts” (check out Volume I and Volume II). Again, the criteria for selection is pretty loose—I scroll through my archives and find posts I don’t link to very often, or which I’ve largely forgotten that I wrote. Even that’s not a hard-and-fast rule.
This week’s selections come from June 2019. The summer is always a slow month for new; ergo, it’s a slow month for blogging. But with a self-imposed daily post requirement, I’ve gotta come up with something. Here’s a taste of those somethings:
“The Price of Freedom: A Good Attorney” – This post explores the concept “that the process is the punishment.” For conservatives, that usually means blowing tons of cash on attorney’s fees to prove one’s innocence in a justice system that increasingly assumes guilt, tainted as it is by social justice bromides. Lawfare is, more and more, how the Left imposes its agenda on an unwilling population, so it’s good to see the Right fighting back. Owen Benjamin’s recent victory against Patreon is one excellent example. But freedom isn’t free; it bills at about $200 an hour.
“FreeSpeech.TV Lineup Announced” – Gavin McInnes’s excellent video subscription service is now called Censored.TV, because another company apparently had the trademark or copyright or some such to “FreeSpeech.TV.” The new name is really even better, as many of its contributors—Laura Loomer, Soph, Milo, and Gavin himself—have been banned from YouTube and other platforms (Loomer continues to struggle with Big Tech censorship, even as she’s the front-runner in her Florida congressional race!). It’s definitely worth $10 a month to subscribe (my younger brother and I split the $100 annual subscription).
“SubscribeStar Saturday: Christians Protect Other Faiths” – While we’re talking about subscriptions, why not subscribe to my SubscribeStar Page, hmm? I’m no Gavin McGinnes, but you get exclusive content every Saturday (and Sunday, if you’re shelling out $5 a month). If you’re subbed for $1 a month or more, you can read “Christians Protect Other Faiths“—one of the earliest subscriber-only posts. In this post, I was addressing the big split in conservatism in 2019 between the David French-style neocons of National Review and the Sohrab Ahmari traditionalists at First Things, specifically Ahmari’s powerful critique of noodle-wristed neoliberalism/neoconnery, “Against David French-ism.” I also looked at a now thirty-three-year old piece by a Jewish rabbi arguing that American Jews were wrong to denigrate American Christians, as the latter were the protectors, not the enemy, of the former. Upon rereading my scribblings, I think it’s definitely worth a buck to read!
There’s another Lazy Sunday in the books. Speaking of books, I’ll be cracking them pretty hard this week, as school resumes this Thursday. It’s going to be an interesting year. Wish me luck.
It’s an election year, in case you’d missed that point, and our man Trump is up for reelection. Trump is not doing well in the polls at the moment, but George H. W. Bush was similarly down against Michael Dukakis at this point in 1988, and won in a blowout victory. Of course, Dukakis was an exceptionally feeble and excessively nerdy politician, and Lee Atwater’s Willie Horton ad was a gutsy, effective attack on Dukakis’s program of weekend release for prisoners.
1988 was also a very different America. Even 2016 seems like another world. Trump’s election was the paradigm shift of our age, spawning four years of constant resistance from progressives and neocons alike. Joe Biden, like Hillary Clinton before him, enjoys the full support of the media and the institutions; even in his advancing senility, they are determined to drag him into the White House, where he will serve as a dull-witted, mentally-diminished puppet for every crazy Left-wing policy ever concocted in the faculty lounge of a women’s studies department.
One of the harsh realities for conservatives these days is that the only true guarantee of your rights is deep pockets and a good attorney. With the direction things are heading, that’s even truer today than when I wrote this post one year ago.
Indeed, I think the Masterpiece Cakeshop guy got sued again, but at this point, I’m not even sure. There are endless combinations of protected and preferred identities at this point, so I’m sure refusing to bake a cake for a Wookie Life Day banquet will result in fines from the Colorado Civil Rights Commission.
The commentary from the Left boils down to, “But he plead guilty!” Yes, he plead guilty, out of desperation, to spare his son from a similar witch hunt—a father taking the fall to save his son.
More importantly, the entire investigation was based on FISA warrants obtained under false pretenses. If your local police department bust into your house without a warrant and went through your underwear drawer, every judge in the country would throw out the case, even if they found bags of cocaine tucked away with your Fruit of the Looms.
The entire Mueller probe was a farce. James Comey is a sanctimonious a-hole who self-righteously mismanaged the FBI because of his own apparent moral superiority. Two agents involved in an extramarital affair—presumably our moral betters, or least smarter than the rest of us—plotted the overthrow of President Trump.
And yet they all waltz about, consequence-free, while a military man who served his country was facing five years over a guilty plea for something that AG Barr says wasn’t even a crime! Per Barr:
[P]eople sometimes plead to things that turn out not to be crimes. … And the Department of Justice is not persuaded that this was material to any legitimate counterintelligence investigation. So it was not a crime
It’s the same situation with Roger Stone, who is literally facing four years in prison for forgetting he sent an e-mail, while other, actual convicts—like slick extorionist Michael Avenatti—are being released from prison because of The Virus. Stone mixed up some dates while being interrogated as a part of—again—the bogus Mueller investigation.
In both cases, the FBI withheld exculpatory evidence—a clear violation of the right to a fair trial, in which the defense is supposed to have access to all the same evidence as the prosecution.
Our federal justice system is a farce. Barr made this point in a CBS News interview:
I was concerned people were feeling there were two standards of justice in this country. … I wanted to make sure that we restore confidence in the system. There’s only one standard of justice.
But our elites are content to destroy due process and rule of law in order to get Trump, or anyone near him. They’ll violate the spirit and letter of the law with impunity whenever it suits their purposes.
If there was any justice in this world, the Clintons would be in prison, Ilhan Omar would be deported, and James Comey would be dime-store philosophizing on third shift at the 7-11.
The unintended theme this week has been back on immigration, particularly the kind that swamps small communities and results from one-sided tolerance. Since I’ve already uncorked that bottle, I figured I’d like the wine flow with this week’s TBT feature.
This piece, dating back to late May of this year, was a full-throated screed against the manifold injustices of illegal immigration. Few topics make my blood boil more: the flagrant violation of the rule of law, the entitled attitude (“we have it tough, so we have a right to be here”), the two-tier system of justice—all are make my stomach turn.
So, here’s my prescription to cure our ills: a healthy dose of “Deportemal“:
Then there’s the matter of the vast gulf between mainstream American culture and the virtually premodern peasant cultures from which most illegal migrants come. Child rape is serious problem among men of certain Latin American cultures, as a recent piece from The Blaze demonstrates. A twenty-year old illegal immigrant impregnated an eleven-year old.
The Portly Politico 