Saturday, January 28, 2023

BREAKING. Iranian Defense Facilities Under Drone Attack



Multiple blasts were reported in Iran Saturday night, as drones of an unknown origin carried out attacks on critical Iranian defense production facilities. At the time of this writing, there are no confirmed details on the number of attacks and the targets other than the major ammunition plant at Isfahan. Isfahan is Iran’s third largest city and located about 270 miles south of Tehran.

The below map shows the unofficial tally of strikes.

Tehran’s Mehrabad airport is closed, and some are reporting military aircraft over Tehran. Presumably these are Iranian, but who knows.

Iran has been in the grip of “mostly peaceful” demonstrations for several months (see the story at Iran’s World Cup Team Refuses to Sing Their National Anthem as Deadly Riots and Repressions Sweep the Country). The confusion caused by the drone strikes has triggered unrest again.

A couple of other points. On Friday, the Azerbaijani embassy in Tehran was attacked.

The Azerbaijan government reacted by evacuating their entire embassy.

Two of the attacks were very close to the Azerbaijan border.

Wednesday, Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, urged NATO to take a more confrontational stance against Iran. On the same day, former commander of the Israeli Navy, Admiral Eliezer Marum made this statement in an interview on Israel’s i24NEWS television program.

“In my understanding, I think Israel has to attack, because the situation right now is that Iran is a threshold country – 100 percent,” he said.

“When does Israel need to attack? Currently? Or to wait for something to happen?” anchor Yoav Limor asked. “Because Iran stops from going to the 90 percent of enrichment in order to prevent other countries from attacking.”

“We know parts of the intelligence in Iran… they have disconnected the cameras and they are still enriching uranium in a very high percentage and besides that, we don’t have a clear understanding of what is going on with their weaponry group,” Marum said. “And when those two will be close one to the other, the moment to jump from threshold to holding nuclear weapons will be very, very short… and therefore I think the time to attack… the clock is ticking and we will have to do it sooner rather than later, sooner it means in the upcoming year.”

“We have to stop this program sooner is sooner is better than later,” he added.

As this is breaking, everyone is encouraged to add to the story in the comments



Why Preserve a 'World Order' without Freedom?


Senator Lindsey Graham desperately wants more money and weapons for Ukraine.  Recently standing in Kyiv alongside two (other?) Democrat senators — one who repeatedly lied about his service in Vietnam and another who repeatedly lied about President Trump being a Russian spy — Graham demanded American tanks on the ground immediately.  "World order is at stake!" he declared.  Something serious must be at stake over there; having thrown over a hundred billion dollars to a nation that was known universally as one of the most corrupt in the world before Russia crossed its borders last year, the U.S. government has become "pot committed" to a European war, whether financially struggling Americans care or not.

Just what is this "world order" that keeps Ol' Lindsey up at night?  Surely he means some combination of American hegemony, military dominance, dollar-denominated financial supremacy, and command over the vaunted "rules-based international system" so-called Western leaders love to defend.  You never hear anything about the importance of defending Western rights and liberties, though, do you?  Senator Graham-nesty isn't worried about protecting America's borders.  He says absolutely nothing about securing Westerners' freedoms from threats of tyranny.  Why?

Because America has relinquished its status as "leader of the free world."  That is not because dementia-addled Joe Biden is merely a figurehead under the unelected Deep State's control.  It is because there is no "free world" right now — at least not within the jurisdiction of political governments.  The political persecution of J6 protesters for "thought crimes," the authoritarian COVID-1984 lockdowns and mandates, and the confirmation through the "Twitter Files" that the U.S. government is heavily invested in censorship and public manipulation all make this damning statement soberingly clear.

Friedrich Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom, "We shall never prevent the abuse of power if we are not prepared to limit power in a way which occasionally may prevent its use for desirable purposes."  American independence and the U.S. Constitution embraced this principle.  The "American experiment" was not devoted to creating a vast administrative State in which the expertise and benevolence of "public servants" would usher in a future Utopia.  "Once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness," Ludwig von Mises observed, "no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments."  Arguing otherwise has been the fool's gold of both idealists and tyrants for millennia.  "Freedom is indivisible," Mises argued.  "As soon as one starts to restrict it, one enters upon a decline on which it is difficult to stop."  The American system broke with tyrannies of the past, and for doing so, an unelected, mercurial, deceptive, and vicious Deep State has spent decades breaking the American system.

It is increasingly obvious that the Intelligence Community has used the PATRIOT Act and other patently unconstitutional tools at its disposal to spy expansively on American citizens here at home for their "own good."  Social media accounts, private email, search engine histories, banking transactions, location tracking, and countless other pieces of personal data are collected and monitored by the U.S. government with neither warrants nor established probable cause while politicians, judges, and private companies willingly participate in these grotesque violations of Americans' privacy and maintain the cynical pretense that Americans' rights and freedoms remain protected.  It has become fashionable now for lawmakers to demand accountability for the social media site TikTok because it is finally being correctly acknowledged as both an intelligence-gathering net and propaganda fire hose for the Chinese Communist Party.  The irony, though, is that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google Search provide the U.S. government with identical tools.  The D.C. Deep State does not mind if Americans are spied on and psychologically manipulated by government actors; on the contrary, it seeks a total monopoly on such influence operations.

To enjoy personal liberty free from the arbitrary intrusions of government nosy-bodies, you have to get pretty far away from the shadow of State authority.  Even then, because the national security surveillance structure is pervasive, an isolated campfire in a remote wood is still most likely being caught by somebody's overhead satellite for some unknown reason.  If you are unable to escape from the watchful eyes of the government's complex monitoring system, then the inner mind becomes the last refuge for any freethinker — so long as those personal thoughts are not communicated out loud.  Under the West's new aversion to free speech, "politically incorrect" words have become a physical evidence trail potentially leading to prosecution for promoting "hate" or "misinformation."  In a particularly odious example of doublespeak, the New York Times argues that communist China's regime of censorship and mass surveillance offers a healthy "kind of freedom."  And you cannot even pray outside in the U.K. these days without the Old Bill demanding to know whether or not your spiritual conversations with a higher power concern the well-being of helpless babes.  

So freedom is chased farther and farther away from hubs of government tracking, farther and farther into the recesses of one's mind, until it can be exercised only in the silence of one's imagination.  Make no mistake: the imposition of "silence" is intentional.  Governments understand that the best way to prevent the spread of ideas that might threaten their grip on power is to prevent those ideas from ever being spoken out loud.  To silence dissent is to squash opposition.  To criminalize thought is to enslave the mind.  That's the "freedom" enjoyed by a prisoner, not a living, breathing citizen of any "free world."  If you have been corralled into a mental prison against your will, though, then the best question to ask is this: what would you be willing to do to escape?   

Cameras, computers, artificial intelligence — there's just no way out!  Do you know that every generation of humans confronted with new technological weapons has said the same thing?  Their cannon are too powerful!  Their ships are too many!  It is futile to resist!  Yet people do resist, and over time, they realize that it is ultimately not the technology that threatens their freedom, but rather the governments that would choose to use that technology without respect for human rights or natural liberties.  

To create and sustain a "free world," citizens actually have to be willing to stand up to their governments and say, "No, you cannot do that; you do not have that power; now go away."  Usually, governments (which exist purely because they assert a monopoly over the legitimate use of force) then load their cannon and surround rebellious ports with an overwhelming number of ships as a demonstration of how their "legitimate" force somehow justifies the theft of others' freedoms.  For the citizenry on the receiving end of such violence, this translates to nothing more than "might makes right."  What they learn in the process is that government power untethered from principle is neither righteous nor worth preserving.  The harsher and more unjust governments become toward their citizens, the more likely movements for freedom take hold.  When scrappy underdogs prevail over unbeatable foes and "turn the world upside-down," they do so with tremendous help from their tormentors' hubris. 

Lindsey Graham is right about this much: the world order is at stake.  Freedom around the world is under attack from those governments sworn to protect it, and their betrayal imperils peace.  I saw a headline recently that blared, "Rogue Hog Turns Tables, Kills Butcher."  Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the news had nothing to do with politics.  Although, given that the homicidal hog had been repeatedly shocked with a stun gun and kept in a tiny enclosure on his way to becoming BBQ, his story could be a prudent allegory after all.



X22, Badlands Media +Rallies- Jan 28

 



Before I begin tonight, I just want to say a little something: 

I believe in giving second chances when they are deserved. And I am very glad that GAF is giving a second chance to this amazing woman tonight! Anyone who doesn't think so, you're the ones with a problem, not me or anyone else. And also:


This is 1 very cool tweet!

Now, hope you enjoyed today's rallies!



Steel Yourselves, Conservatives

The American Right is in for a hell of a ride. 
Patriots need to promote and focus within themselves 
the habits of resistance.


The Democratic Party’s remarkable midterm election performance—arguably the best for a first-term president since FDR in 1934—despite Joe Biden’s declining popularity, economic headwinds, and growing social and political divisions, portends a dim future for the Republican Party. 

In the lead up to 2022, Democrats not only refused to moderate their support for unlimited abortion up to the moment of birth, transgender surgery for minors, critical race theory, criminal justice reform, and illegal immigration, they doubled-down. Voters rewarded them with additional governorships, four flipped state legislatures, an increased Senate majority, and minimal losses in the House.

The Left has zero reason to take the foot off the gas. Elections, legitimate or not, have consequences. 

The most likely outcome of the 2024 election is that Democrats retake the House, keep the Senate, and retain the presidency, regardless of who they run or what the economy looks like. As Joe Biden and Jon Fetterman proved in 2020 and 2022, respectively, Democrats don’t need to actually campaign in order to win political office. Nor do they need to be able to string together a coherent sentence.

In the wake of the Trump presidency, the Left has reached a new fever pitch of political intensity. The Left’s access to nearly unlimited money, total control over the media narrative, and an unparalleled national vote-harvesting operation make campaigning and candidate quality of only tertiary importance.

A recession likely won’t change these dynamics either. The economy boomed under Trump and experienced severe dislocations and inflation under Biden. But Democrats won big in both 2020 and 2022. Taking the state of the economy as a useful metric for political prognostication is largely a thing of the past. Liberal voters’ religious commitment to abortion and anti-racism is infinitely more important to understanding their political habits than measuring their material self-interest. 

So, is it simply over? Should conservatives pack it in and go home? Jump off the nearest bridge?

No to all three.

That the Right has lost (or may soon lose) the ability to win national elections is not an end but a beginningIt requires a fresh view of our true political reality.

Forming Majorities Through Demographics

In thinking about our current political position, the American Right should recall that the vast majority of successful political movements in human history have not come to power through electoral majorities. America’s current ruling class certainly did not. The Left didn’t seize power in the media, Hollywood, or Wall Street by holding a vote! Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates didn’t gain the ability to censor tens of millions of Americans and make COVID policy because they had popular backing. 

The Democrats believe in democracy as long as they get to choose the demos. That is why they have relentlessly supported mass immigration from the Third World to the United States. Under 1965 demographics, the Democrats would be a political non-entity, blown out by double digits in every national election. 

In 1965, Congress overhauled the nation’s immigration policy by radically reducing immigration restrictions from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The Pew Research Center estimates that without the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, the American population in 2015 would have been only 252 million. In other words, the Hart Celler Act introduced 72 million more people into the country in the 50 years after its passage. Those 72 million new Americans overwhelmingly support the Democratic Party. 

The top-10 sources of immigration between 1965 and 2015 were Mexico, China, India, Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, El Salvador, the former Soviet Union, and the Dominican Republic. Latino and Asian countries dominate that list. Two-thirds of Latinos favored Joe Biden in 2020, compared to just 32 percent for Donald Trump. Asians favored Joe Biden by 2-to-1, voting 63 percent in his favor compared to just 31 percent for Trump.

Encouraging mass immigration from countries with radically distinct cultures from our own was a mistake. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia, large communities of immigrants “will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty.”

No such miracles were forthcoming in post-1965 America. 

Without mass immigration, the Democratic Party could not electorally sustain its wild leftward turn. Immigration therefore is the single most important issue facing America. A nation is indistinguishable from the people who inhabit it. They are the raw material out of which lawgivers create regimes. Mass immigration radically transformed the American people and thereby radically changed the political possibilities available. 

Now, it has become clear that immigration hasn’t just changed the country’s political order, it has completely undermined it. The Democrats learned a useful lesson over the last 50 years—if you don’t like the way the vote turns out, just import more voters. Then hold the election again. If this cycle isn’t broken, we can expect our national decline not just to continue, but to accelerate. If nothing is done, this subversion of the political order will be fatal.

It doesn’t matter how hard the Right wants to fight on cultural issues like gay marriage, abortion, and gender ideology. Even if conservatives could win on these issues today, they will lose tomorrow if nothing is done to push back against the destruction of the nation. We cannot fight the culture war without a country.

The conservative grifter class spent the entire postwar period ignoring the radical byproducts of open borders. They believe that as long as immigration is legal, it will be enough to maintain good old fashioned American values. With the right combination of think tanks, charter schools, and online publications, we can ensure America’s Afro-Chinese Latinx future respects the Constitution. 

This vision is a pipe dream wired to a pipe bomb. We have run this experiment for almost 60 years, and the results are obvious. The Constitution isn’t in force now in large part because of both illegal and legal immigration. You can have open borders or you can have a country. You cannot have both.

We are living through our own cultural revolution. We have our own Red Guard, made up of students, professors, and journalists who “cancel” those who violate the woke orthodoxies. We have our own leftwing paramilitary organization, Antifa, that terrorizes the regime’s enemies. We have our own struggle sessions where ordinary Americans must confess their white privilege as oppressors of the new and improved BIPOC proletariat. 

The new American Left, in short, is communist in its thrust and direction. Instead of the old material dialectic, however, the new Left weaponizes a racial dialectic. Leftists replaced the struggle between capitalists and workers with a new struggle between oppressors and oppressed in which a coalition of “BIPOC,” women, and gays aligns itself against the exploitive white heteronormative patriarchy. This is why the Left tears down statues, drenches our children’s schools in anti-American propaganda, and commands the fealty of every corporation in America preaching a commitment to “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.”

The liberal goal is a universal, homogenous, anti-racist world state in which all peoples live in perfect harmony and equality. It is supposed to be a world without exploitation, colonization, or bigotry. The ideal liberal regime is John Lennon’s “Imagine” come to life: “Imagine there’s no countries / It isn’t hard to do / Nothing to kill or die for / And no religion, too / Imagine all the people / Livin’ life in peace.” After all of this is achieved, the “world will live as one.”

“Imagine” is the right title to the song because that is all this vision will amount to—a dream. But it, like all utopian dreams, is dangerous precisely because it is unrealizable. Once the reality sets in for liberals that some human beings actually cherish their faiths, families, and countries—no matter how much propaganda they spew—that realization will flare into an all-consuming spiteful rage. If the Left cannot have its perfect world, then it will deny the rest of us our imperfect but decent one.

We live, unfortunately, already in the midst of this last, true “Great Awokening.” 

Liberals no longer hide who they are. They do not have to. The openly racial character of their political program and the vicious resentment that animates it is widely, even ubiquitously, broadcast. Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock, in a sermon delivered in 2016, argued America needed to repent of voting for Trump and the “worship of whiteness.” Joe Biden has claimed that America’s law enforcement is “absolutely” systematically racist. The state of California is openly pondering reparations payments for blacks amounting to $500,000 per qualifying individual. 

“Come and Make Me”

Leftist hegemony isn’t guaranteed, however. For one, despite the American Left’s power, it lacks the hard-edged character of its Soviet predecessors. Stalin and Lenin were tough—more than willing to slaughter their political and class enemies in cold blood. Modern leftists are soft in comparison. They aim to perpetuate their cultural revolution through their control of Human Resources departments. This isn’t exactly intimidating. What good is a vaccine mandate if you won’t back it up with real force?

The Right’s response to the Left’s demand to submit should be, “come and make me.” 

The true test of a regime’s staying power is this: Does it have the strength of will, and the capacity, to kill its existential enemies in order to preserve itself? One need look only at the legacy of Louis XIV and Czar Nicholas II for examples of what happens to rulers who lack these qualities.

We may also ask: Does Biden command this loyalty? Will the military and federal law enforcement gun down civilians en masse for our current, senile, leadership class of corrupt gerontocrats? I harbor a growing suspicion the answer to that question is “no.” 

This opens up a wide field of political possibilities for the Right. Instead of relentlessly focusing energy on winning elections, conservative political leaders should concentrate on developing other forms of power. The mass rally, general strike, and paralyzing public protest are all powerful tools the Right could leverage against our current regime. Our rulers cannot tamp down on societal distress forever. In the right moment of weakness, bringing the American supply chain to a screeching halt could cause a leftist government to capitulate. 

If Donald Trump had called for a joint trucking and rail strike before the election in 2020, it is possible he could have used that economic pressure as leverage against the administrative state and Democratic Party in their efforts to illegally change election law, lock American citizens in their homes, and encourage political riots in order to remove him from power. The Canadian truckers’ freedom convoy protest in 2022 is the model. It nearly caused Trudeau’s government to implode, despite mainstream Canadian conservatives leaving the protestors out to dry. Only by implementing authoritarian emergency measures could Trudeau put down the challenge to his power. 

Future liberal rulers will not be so lucky. 

The looming electoral annihilation of the Republican Party is not cause for despair. For a long time, the GOP has been unserious about politics and the interests of its voters. It took Donald Trump’s comet blazing across the political sky in 2016 to focus the party, if only in part, on the issues of national sovereignty and existence: immigration, fair trade, war, and law and order. 

Outside of Trump, the machinations and petty maneuverings in America’s imperial capital are of little importance to the Right. It should concentrate its energy toward the cultivation of its political base—the white middle class. Straight, white, married, gun-owning, Christian men and their wives (and their allies, like black “white supremacist” Clarence Thomas and others like him) are the backbone of both the conservative movement and the country itself. Every day, crowds of middle class, morally decent, and hard-working men clock into work at power plants, water treatment facilities, and train yards across America. Without them, the American way of life would not be possible. 

Conservatives should focus on mobilizing this faction. 

Our regime depends on the competence and compliance of these people in order to function. The regime especially depends on such types within the military and law enforcement. They are, whether liberals admit it or not, their most important servants. 

The Democratic Party would love nothing more than to deploy federal forces against its political enemies in the very near future. Eisenhower, for instance, used federal troops to force the Southerners to submit to school desegregation. In the liberal mind, there is zero difference between recalcitrant Little Rock residents fighting against racial integration and today’s Trump voters. Biden, in a speech earlier this month, criticized opponents of gender transitions for minors as antisemitic. It won’t be long before the Left will declare simply possessing a middle-class lifestyle a sign of fascism and white supremacy. 

Spiritual Warfare

The Right can prepare for this eventuality by laying the groundwork for a counterrevolutionary political movement now. Spiritual warfare against America’s leftist ruling class is a must. Communism is a Christian heresy. Atheistic liberalism is an offense against God. Christians should resist it on those grounds alone. Believers and their allies should take every opportunity to disobey, reject, and delegitimize the ruling class whenever and wherever they can. 

Elon Musk’s liberalization of free speech on Twitter is crucial in this regard. Our regime has a massive propaganda arm, but its very scope and scale have made it weak. The ham-handed character and hubris it elevates does not compel a significant portion of the population, especially young men. 

Good humor and mockery are anathema to our scowling schoolmarm rulers. The Right needs to focus even more energy in an information insurgency against our decrepit ruling class. It should emphasize just how profoundly uncool, boring, and morally preening the Left really is. These people are not liberated in any meaningful sense. Smoking weed, giving lectures about how bad racism is, and joining a polycule are profoundly loser activities that appeal primarily to the obese and the ugly. Hammer that point home over and over again and the propaganda value of the Left’s control of Hollywood will fall. 

The Right is the only realm of real cultural and political freedom. It is the home of real rebels, taboo-breakers, and humorists. Promoting joy, youth, strength, and beauty should be the aesthetic and political aim of the Right. “We are pro-nature, pro excellence, pro-happiness, and pro-LIFE in the highest sense” is a winning message. The Left has no match for it. They offer only resentment and seething hatred in response. It is a bad look! 

Promoting healthy living, exercise, and a nourishing diet serves the mission of making clear how degenerate the Left really is. It will also promote the kind of vital energy necessary to mobilize successful political action. Better still, it will strengthen the bodies and souls of men of good will.

America is in for very turbulent times. The best way to prepare is through spiritual and physical training. Daily prayer, like daily exercise, is a must for both men and women of the American Right. It is especially critical for young men. We must break them from the shackles of pornography, marijuana, and general lassitude. We must liberate our youth from the belief that piety is weakness. These men need meaning again, the promise of a brighter future, and of more. They deserve more than to be dominated by ugly screeching losers. They deserve more than an America reduced to a global shopping mall and tax collection entity—they deserve to have a real country. But to have one, they will need to fight.

At core, it all boils down to this. Too many conservatives simply want to “make policy.” This isn’t enough. Guiding a corrupt system is little better than being guided by it. In the end, it amounts to the same thing. Much better to dismantle the system altogether.

True patriots should dedicate themselves to fighting utopian and tyrannical communism wherever they find it. They should promote and focus within themselves the habits of resistance. 

We will not submit. Let this phrase never depart from your lips or from your mind. We will not submit. Bury it in your heart. We will not submit. 

When we have done this, and only when we have done it, will victory in this spiritual war come within reach.



What Is Normal?


One of the American Left's primary goals is to convince us that we are not normal if we do not affirm its ideology, a well established tactic among totalitarians. One of the best examples is the psikhushkas of the old Soviet Union. If you did not agree with Soviet Communism, you were not normal so you’d be placed in a psikhushka, or psychiatric prison.

Few were more clear in articulating this principle than former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev who said of those with whom he disagreed, “Of those who might start calling for opposition to Communism on this basis, we can say that clearly their mental state is not normal.”

The growing militancy of domestic authoritarians who harangue and berate as abnormal those who believe something different begs a simple but important question: What is normal?

The online Merriam-Webster Dictionary provides many definitions of normal. Among them, in descending order, are: “conforming to a type, standard, or regular pattern, characterized by that which is considered usual, typical, or routine; according with, constituting, or not deviating from a norm, rule, procedure, or principle; occurring naturally; approximating the statistical average or norm; and generally free from physical or mental impairment or dysfunction,” to name a few. 

If we contrast these accepted definitions of normal with many policies and practices of the American Left, a trend emerges. Much of what today’s Left promotes does not comport with what is recognized as normal. 

Instructing children how to think and behave like racists, as happens in many government schools through variants of Critical Race Theory, is not normal. Teaching children to judge people by the content of their character is.

Grown men dressed as women and performing provocatively before preschoolers is not normal. Reserving adult entertainment for adults is.

Deliberately depriving people of available energy needed to heat their homes is not normal. Making such resources abundantly available is.

Promoting obesity is not normal. Promoting a healthy diet and living is. 

People pretending to be a sex they are not is not normal. Recognizing people for what they are is.

Taking money from people and giving it to other people, otherwise known as wealth redistribution, is not normal. Reaping and keeping the fruits of one’s labor is. 

Men using the ladies room is not normal. Men using the men's room is.

Letting criminal suspects out of jail with no restrictions or repercussions is not normal. Keeping criminals locked up is. 

Boys playing sports against girls is not normal. Boys playing against other boys is.

Giving away military weaponry to the extent that one’s own military is degraded is not normal. Maintaining a strong defense is. 

Surgically mutilating healthy human tissue is not normal. Preserving healthy tissue is. 

There are many things actively promoted - often demanded - by the Left that are simply not normal. But if somebody notices and says so, they are marginalized. That is what is happening right now.

People who believe in normal things are under attack in America. They are assaulted on a near continuous basis by Leftists who practice and promote behavior that is clearly abnormal, behavior that deviates from the statistical norm, that does not conform to regular patterns, that does not approximate statistical averages. Frighteningly, some of this behavior is not merely abnormal, it's evil. 

People need to reclaim normalcy. 

But ordinary people are often intimidated into going along with abnormal ideologies because it’s easier than being screeched at by somebody who demands we affirm their abnormal behavior.

This intimidation prompts many people to tip-toe around the fact that much of what we see in America today just isn’t normal and sometimes, we keep quiet even though we know it’s not normal. This is how normal becomes redefined. It’s how Soviet Communism found a way to imprison and torture those with whom they disagreed; they just weren’t normal. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn knew that all too well.

None of this is to suggest we should be mean to or discriminate against people with such beliefs. Many of these people have been deceived, coerced or extorted into affirming abnormal behavior and ideas, and they deserve our compassion.

By the same token, other Americans have every right to withhold their acquiescence of abnormal behaviors without fear. A little more ‘live-and-let-live’ would go a long way. 

But live-and-let-live is a two-way street. As long as ordinary people are under attack, we have an obligation to recognize and call out the abnormal behavior of those who demand we agree with their misguided ideology. 

It’s time to stand up and say, “That’s not normal,” when something abnormal is being foisted upon us. Promoting normalcy is the only way to prevent normal from being perverted and redefined. The best defense against the abnormal is to call it what it is, and to elevate normalcy at every opportunity. 



The Republican Party Hates You

The Republican Party Hates You

Bonchie reporting for RedState 

As RedState reported, Ronna McDaniel has been re-elected as the chair of the Republican National Committee. That followed a contentious, months-long battle with notable GOP lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, who ultimately ended up well short of the number to overtake McDaniel.

McDaniel is now the longest-serving party chair in modern American history. What did she do to deserve that honor? She and her party lost the 2018 election, lost the 2020 election, and severely underperformed in the 2022 election. Apparently, being a consistent loser is all it takes to win the blessing of the GOP’s party elite.

Why? Because the Republican Party hates you.

As a GOP voter, you only serve two purposes for the GOP’s guiding lights. You provide the party’s leadership with lots of money to shower upon themselves in various schemes, and two, you give them political power via elections. Other than that, you are an afterthought and are a despised means to an end.

And before you assume I’m just talking about the popular definition of the “establishment,” understand those lines became blurred long ago. While Donald Trump pretended to not endorse anyone in this race, he had his top advisors (including Susie Wiles) whipping for McDaniel behind the scenes. Guess who is suddenly happy about the result at the RNC?

The RNC is one giant grift at this point. It’s an organization that exists to keep a certain group of people loaded down with cash and power while the desires of the voters are completely ignored. For Trump, he gets preferential treatment going into 2024. For McDaniel, she gets to use Trump to help fundraise, ensuring she is paid exorbitant bonuses for hitting certain goals. As for the RNC members, they continue to get money shoveled into their states in exchange for their loyalty.

All the while, there’s no ideological core to the Republican Party anymore. It stands for absolutely nothing, and certainly, it accomplishes nothing in the process. Winning elections doesn’t even factor in as long the money keeps rolling in. Again, this isn’t just a fight between the “establishment” and the conservative base. It’s a fight between the conservative base and the entirety of the GOP leadership class, and that leadership class includes many, many wings of the party now.

That’s an unfortunate reality that needs to set in with a lot of people who still think it’s 2015. The old, clearly defined battle lines no longer apply. You can’t just slam Mitch McConnell (who deserves it) and call it a day anymore. The national Republican Party leadership has become an incestuous cabal of varied ideologues all chasing the almightly dollar, and they all deserve ridicule.

You can’t “drain the swamp” by promoting the swamp, no matter how many soundbites you put out. That’s a critique of every Republican, including the RNC members, who talk the talk but refuse to walk the walk. When faced with a perfect opportunity to change course, they chose to spit on their own GOP voters and keep the gravy train rolling.

There’s a solution to that, though. Stop giving them money, and stop listening to them. They only hold power as long as you give it to them.