The Anti-Freedom Far-Left is Nothing More Than a Squawking Minority

posted by D. Parker at American Thinker 

“We’re surrounded. That simplifies our problem.”

Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller of the United States Marine Corps uttered the above words during the Korean War’s battle of Chosin Reservoir as Puller’s marines found themselves surrounded by 120,000 enemy troops under the command of Mao Tse-tung.

We’re being made to feel like we’re in a similar situation: “surrounded”.  Yet, the opposing forces aren’t nearly as overwhelming because we make up the majority — the anti-freedom forces of the far-left are better known as the tyrannical ten percent.  But if you look back in time, that’s usually how they play their little scam on the rest of society.  As in every other slow-motion coup down through history, they take over the means of communication, the media, and the government indoctrination system — the schools — to make it seem like they have total control.

So, it’s time to fight back with what we’re calling cultural guerrilla warfare, using asymmetric tactics.  With our advantages versus their disadvantages, we can push back against what they’re trying to do to our country.  Keep in mind that this isn’t the first time a small far-left minority tried to take over a society with these kinds of underhanded maneuvers.

At the beginning of the last century, similarly, small groups of the anti-freedom far-left were using the same tactics to take over their societies.

As in the case of Russia when a relatively small band of revolutionaries that labeled themselves the Bolsheviks (‘majority’) displayed the usual leftist predilection for inverting reality to their advantage.  This ‘majority’ was led by the infamous Vladimir Ilich Lenin, who used the state police apparatus to silence the actual majority by initiating a campaign of terror:

A state-sponsored wave of brutality that was decreed in Russia on September 5, 1918, and lasted until 1922. Intent on maintaining their control of a country in the throes of a civil war, the Bolsheviks used terror tactics to silence their enemies and dissuade others from resisting them. Tens of thousands, and possibly more than a million, people were branded ‘class enemies’ and detained in concentration camps or summarily executed. The terror cleared the way for decades of Soviet rule and state-sanctioned violence.

Thankfully, we haven’t reached those extremes yet, but you’ll notice that our ‘Bolsheviks’ are beginning the same process.  They’ve taken over the major cultural powerhouses and are now metastasizing, trying to remake our free society into their version of Utopia.

They began their long march through the institutions. and now they’re trying to spread their insanity to the rest of our society and at times it feels like we’re “surrounded”.

The national socialist media spews out pure lies and propaganda that we’re supposed to accept without question.  The “entertainment” (we’re using that term loosely here) industry churns out content that no one of sound mind wants to consume.  The government indoctrination system — public schools — has gone from teaching children foundational academics to sexualizing and dividing them by race.  Meanwhile, corporate enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction of production in a public/private partnership: the true definition of fascism.  So, while it seems like they are omnipotent, we’re starting to see the tide of insanity ebb, and the pro-freedom forces of Team Normal are beginning to push back.

This is what we call cultural guerrilla warfare, it is asymmetrical warfare on the cultural field of battle using our advantages against their disadvantages.  While the situation is somewhat dire, you have to take a sober look at the two sides to see how the contest is going to shape up.  Just consider some of the advantages of the pro-freedom forces of Team Normal: we outnumber them, we value liberty and limited government, and we are imbued with plain, old-fashioned sanity.

We often refer back to the Hidden Tribes study that shows that ideologues of the far-left are at best, 19% of the population; the hard core number is around 8%.  They have the advantage in that they dominate the media with that 8% to 10%, so it seems larger.  However, the poll and a great deal of real-world experience tell us that the folks of Team Crazy are a small minority (even though they love to lie with language and label themselves the majority like the Bolsheviks).

We also have the advantage of truly valuing liberty and limited government, compared to how the far-left only exploits these precepts until they attain power.

We can easily prove this by illustrating which side is censoring free speech and the press and working overtime to confiscate guns.  And no Dr. Jill, keeping pornographic material away from kindergarteners isn’t censorship.

Then, there is this problem: the fascist far-left has an aversion to having fun.  Sure, they like to pretend they have a corner on the market on humor, but who are they kidding?

Is anyone still watching the late-night “comedy” shows that are a mere shell of their former glory?

Part of the fun of comedy is going after societies’ sacred cows.  The far-left has so many sacred cows they need their cadre of Australian shepherds just to keep them managed.  We’re not even sure if it’s verboten to use the term ‘sacred cow’ anymore or not.

Remember, these people want to ban the words “male” and “female”.  

The far-left does have its advantages, but they aren’t as formidable as someone might think.  They are perfectly willing to lie which is a requirement for their survival.

We call them the anti-freedom far-left for a reason, given that whenever they gain power, they start going all authoritarian on everyone and then project that onto us.

Of course, our comparison wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the advantage of their commanding positions in the culture.  But even that is a negative for them because that makes them The Man.  They are the empire of the Star Wars saga and we’re the Rebels.  We’re the cool people fighting the oppression of the empire — the far-left.  They can try to use their perceived power but that’s not going to be a good look for them.  We have them right where we want them.

X22, Christian Patriot News, and more- Feb 20

 

The Toxic Racialist Obsessions of Joe Biden ~ VDH

Somehow Biden has transferred his own checkered history of racial disparagement onto the white working class. 

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness 

Joe Biden ran on “unity,” which is critical in a multiracial America. He vowed to heal the divisions supposedly sown by Donald Trump. Instead, he is proving to be the most polarizing president in modern memory. Often his racialist rhetoric and condescension have proven demeaning to both blacks and whites. In a volatile multiracial democracy that demands tolerance and restraint, a highly unpopular Biden, for cheap political advantage, continually proves incendiary and reckless. 

Last week Joe Biden snarked after watching a White House screening of Till:

Lynched for simply being black, nothing more. With white crowds, white families gathered to celebrate the spectacle, taking pictures of the bodies and mailing them as postcards. Hard to believe, but that’s what was done. And some people still want to do that. 

 Exactly who are these “some people”? Who fits Biden’s innuendos of contemporary “some people” who, he alleges in 2023, still wish, as “white crowds, white families” of the past, to mail celebratory postcards after they lynch black people? The Ultra-MAGA villains of his recent Phantom of the Opera speech? Have his current targets ever echoed anything like Biden’s own racist past warning that busing would force people to “grow up in a racial jungle”?

What current data might support Biden’s absurd charges? Is Biden referring to federal interracial crime and hate crime statistics charting violent white propensities against blacks? None exist. In fact, they continually reveal that so-called whites are underrepresented as perpetrators in both categories, while overrepresented as victims in interracial crimes—dramatically so in the case of black-on-white violent crime.

In our sensationalist YouTube world, are we suffering an epidemic of Internet-fed, white-on-black incendiary crimes that might have prompted the president’s demagogic accusations? Not at all. Most of the most recent publicized interracial violence—a woman in a gym fighting off a would-be rapist, a bicyclist doctor stabbed to death in an intersection as his attacker spewed racial hatred, a 26-year-old mother lethally shot in the back in front of her children in a parking lot over a minor argument, a young boy violently choked on a bus, a small girl on a bus beaten repeatedly by two teenage boys—have involved black perpetrators and apparent white victims. So, what contemporary evidence or widely publicized anecdotes prompt Biden’s recent charges of “white rage”-fueled violence?

Yet simultaneously with his blanket and unsupported charges of racism, no president since Woodrow Wilson has offloaded more racialist verbiage than Joe Biden himself. In an eerie example of psychological projection, never has a president accused others of racism more, while freely revealing himself either to be a racist or non compos mentis, or both.

Stranger still, Biden’s latest accusation comes from a president who once eulogized the former racist, Exalted Cyclops, and segregationist Senator. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) as “one of my mentors” and lamented that “the Senate is a lesser place for his going.” That was no isolated fluke.

During his campaign for the presidency, Biden in 2019 praised segregationist Senator James O. Eastland for not labeling a younger Biden with the derogatory term “boy”: “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland. He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son.’” 

How odd, then, that Biden, as president no less, has used just that derogatory insult “boy” for distinguished blacks. Indeed, the very day before Biden leveled his “some people” slur, he was back at it with his racist “boy” reference to the black governor of Maryland: “You got a hell of a new governor in Wes Moore, I tell ya,” Biden told an audience of union workers on Wednesday. “He’s the real deal, and the boy looked like he could still play. He got some guns on him.” 

Such condescension was consistent with Biden’s past usage of “Negro” and his earlier August 2021 similar “boy” trope of referring to one of own top aides: “I’m here with my senior adviser and boy who knows Louisiana very, very well and New Orleans, Cedric Richmond.” 

In Biden world, blacks seem to be a collective to whom he can pander in stereotypical terms, as opposed to Latinos, whom Biden feels can think for themselves. Or so he said on the campaign trail in 2020, “Unlike the African American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community with incredibly different attitudes about different things.”

These were “gaffes” only if one believes Biden’s frequent racialist smears and slurs are more the symptoms of senility than bias. Again, as a 2020 candidate, Biden gave us his absurd racist “Corn Pop” fables. In these concocted, He-Man sagas, Biden stood down purported ghetto gangster with his own custom-cut chain, while often showing his tanned legs’ golden hairs to curious inner-city black youth.

Biden also smeared two black journalists who had the temerity to ask him a few tough questions, one with the now infamous slang ad hominem, “You ain’t black” and the other with the personal dismissal “junkie.”

A consistent trope in these insults is his lifelong condescension of accomplished black Americans, such as his long-ago infamous talk-down to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas during Biden’s travesty of conducting his 1991 Senate confirmation hearings. In that context we also remember Biden’s idiotic warning, replete with his accustomed affected black patois, to black professionals in 2012 that Mitt Romney would “put y’all back in chains.”

Like Bill Clinton, who reportedly uttered of supposed 2008 upstart Barack Obama, “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee,” Biden was especially bewildered by Barack Obama. He apparently seemed, in Biden’s racialist view, an aberration from Biden’s own usual stereotyped views of blacks of limited ability: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” That assessment came from a candidate, who, even predementia, could never string together more than a few coherent sentences. 

Biden, remember, explained top-performing states in education as attributable to fewer minorities: “There’s less than 1 percent of the population in Iowa that is African American. There is probably less than 4 or 5 percent that are minorities. What is in Washington? So, look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you’re dealing with.”

In a world of law schools turning out record numbers of black lawyers, and billionaire entrepreneurs like Bob Johnson, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Oprah Winfrey, or Michael Jordan, Biden opines, “The data shows young black entrepreneurs are just as capable of succeeding given the chance as white entrepreneurs are. But they don’t have lawyers. They don’t have, they don’t have accountants, but they have great ideas.”   

The reason we do not associate Biden with characteristic racist stereotyping and tropes, other than with raw political demagoguery, is the same reason we give passes to liberals who say overtly racist things, which might otherwise suggest that their loud progressive rhetoric serves as some sort of psychological mechanism to square the circle of their own discomfort with the proverbial other.

Do we remember the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s quickly hushed up and contextualized confession that abortion was targeting the proper people. (“Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”)? 

Do we recall liberal icon and former Senate Majority Harry Reid, who eerily dovetailed Biden with similarly racist assessment of Obama (“a ‘light-skinned’ African American with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one”)? 

Somehow Biden has transferred his own checkered history of racial disparagement onto the white working class. Fact checkers assure us that when Joe Biden libeled Trump supporters as “chumps” and “dregs” he really meant the Ku Klux Klan or white nationalists who gravitate to Trump. But most took his blanket smears as they were intended. And they fit the larger patterns of his more recent “semi-fascism” smears, and indeed, the genre of tired leftwing demagoguery that earlier gave us Obama’s “clingers,” Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables,” or the smelly who stink up Walmart in the Peter Strzok-Lisa Page joint text trove: “Just went to a Southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support.”

In occasional opportunistic moments, Biden transforms into “ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton” to accentuate his middle-class roots. But he has a repugnant propensity for using racial terms of condescension and disparagement and for projecting his own unease onto a supposedly racist white middle class and poor even as he seeks to win support from the very minority communities he has so often crudely characterized. 

What is the concrete result of this now common Bidenesque schizophrenia?

Reflect for a moment. Consider the toxic plume that has polluted the skies over East Palestine, Ohio, a working-class small town that is 98 percent white, with a median income of $26,000, sits amid the Pennsylvania borderland. That very region once rejected in its 2008 primary Barack Obama—and in turn was blasted in stereotyped fashion by him: “And it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” 

Ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton resonates that same contempt for the convenient target of the white poor and lower middle class. Rather than send in FEMA on day one of the toxic release with tents, mobile kitchens, and supplies and medical personnel to care for the evacuated, the federal government waited two weeks and then acted only when even the liberal media was confused by Biden’s deliberate neglect. 

Amid the disaster, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in his now tired boilerplate, was on record instead railing against supposed white hardhats who supposedly do not look like the communities in which they work. For a Biden or Buttigieg, the fish and animals dying from toxic air or water were insignificant artifacts, as were the complaints of burning lungs and allergic reactions to the black chemical cloud.

One wonders what would have been the immediate reaction of Biden and the federal government had a corporation decided to vent the contents of wrecked rail cars full of vinyl chloride and butyl acrylate and then to light up the escaping gas, birthing a toxic black plume over Martha’s Vineyard or Malibu, as opposed to East Palestine or, say,  South-Central L.A. or Ferguson, Missouri. 

Biden would have sent legions of aid workers in to ensure social justice for the marginalized and performance-art reassurance to his donor class.

Whether Biden spouts racial bombast to curry favor with his Democratic base or to project onto others his own habitual racist put downs is not quite clear. But Biden’s utter contempt for white poor and lower middle classes, who are were deemed not worthy of the prompt federal attention customarily accorded to others in times of disaster, is self-evident.

Otherwise, Biden would have sent help immediately rather than smear “some people” as 21st-century lynchers.

McCarthy Begins To Build Case For Mayorkas Impeachment

‘This has got to stop,’ McCarthy said.

 ‘And it starts with the secretary of Homeland.’

Tristan Justice reporting for The Federalist

TUCSON, Ariz. — Kevin McCarthy began to build the case for Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ impeachment this week with the California lawmaker’s first trip to the border as House speaker.

Talking to reporters, with the southeast Arizona border wall serving as his backdrop, McCarthy outlined the myriad crises plaguing the nation due to unchecked migration and charged the DHS secretary with lying to the public.

“Our border, we don’t even have operational control of it anymore,” McCarthy said. “This is why I will continue to investigate what has gone wrong here and we will hold people accountable. And that includes Secretary Mayorkas.”

In an exclusive interview with The Federalist after the press conference, McCarthy offered no timeline for a potential impeachment inquiry and maintained that the process depends on what lawmakers find over the coming weeks.

“You never do impeachment for political purposes,” McCarthy said. “If something rises to that level,” he explained, “we will follow it wherever it goes.”

McCarthy led the congressional delegation with four GOP freshman, kicking off what will be a top priority for the new Republican majority under the second half of President Joe Biden’s term. Every House committee is expected to visit the southwest border in the ensuing months. Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., already introduced an article of impeachment against the DHS chief on Feb. 1.

In November, McCarthy demanded that Mayorkas resign over the border crisis or face impeachment in the lower chamber once Republicans took over. Mayorkas has remained defiant while the cartels run rampant. A coalition of 21 attorneys general sent a letter to the Biden administration last week demanding that Mexican drug cartels be designated as terrorist organizations.

Days before the speaker’s border trip this week, DHS staffed up to face House impeachment proceedings, entering a multimillion-dollar contract with a liberal law firm that has a history of left-wing donations.

“You cannot tell us this is secure when more than 42 percent of gottaways come through here,” McCarthy said on Thursday. “You cannot tell us this border’s secure when now there is enough fentanyl in this country to kill every single American more than 20 times over.”

“This has got to stop,” the speaker added. “And it starts with the secretary of Homeland. Stop lying to the American public. Tell them the truth [about] what’s happening and change back the regulation that we had before so our border can be secure.”

The White House hit McCarthy’s border trip as a partisan publicity stunt with a Wednesday statement. “Solutions are what President Biden is focused on, and his is plan working,” said Ian Sams, a White House spokesman. “House Republicans would be wise to join him to work together to strengthen our immigration system and fund border security.”

Biden’s first border visit was a sanitized tour in January, with officials clearing the camps in El Paso before the president’s arrival. Biden proceeded to call on Congress to pass immigration reform at his annual State of the Union last week and claimed his border measures were working.

“We’ve launched a new border plan last month. Unlawful migration from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela has come down 97 percent as a consequence of that,” Biden said. “But American border problems won’t be fixed until Congress acts.”

Contrary to his claims the border is secure, data from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) shows otherwise.

Law enforcement reported more than 156,000 migrant encounters in January. While lower than the record of nearly 252,000 encounters in December, 156,000 is still higher than the almost 155,000 in January last year and the 78,000 the same month in 2021 — and way higher than the less than 37,000 in FY 2020. In fact, it’s an all-time high for the coldest month of the year. Even bundled-up reporters shivered under cloudless skies in the high desert winds when lawmakers ran late on Thursday.

A Deadly Crisis

While the Biden administration tries to argue there’s nothing to see on the southern border, Alex Espinosa, the director of a funeral home 15 miles east of McCarthy’s press conference, says otherwise.

“During Trump’s administration, I picked up four border crossers,” Espinosa told The Federalist in his conference room overlooking the border wall. “Right now, I can’t even tell you how many. There’s more deaths. Way more deaths.”

Most, Espinosa said, die from exposure to the elements or fentanyl. He explained the numbers picked up “right after Biden won.”

“Never, never, never, ever have I seen it this bad,” Espinosa told The Federalist. “I’ve probably buried 40 kids.”

A reformed ex-convict himself, Espinosa, 61, served time behind bars for drug smuggling 30 years ago. He now hands out free Narcan, a medication known to save lives in the case of opioid overdose, at services, saying it has become a hot commodity. The local health department replenished his stockpile after it ran out during a single funeral for a recent 23-year-old who overdosed. His own son has also struggled with opioid addiction.

In Naco, a town on the border five miles south of Espinosa’s funeral home, locals were shy about the crisis. A ranch hand working in a field with a pair of day laborers from across the border offered only his first name, Greg, and said he often sees helicopter activity but described the overall area as tame. Another pair of women operating a local nonprofit in the community denied the area even faced issues.

Espinosa, however, who conducts the funerals for the border crisis victims, said locals often feel too intimidated to speak openly about the dangers their neighborhoods face. Despite his Mexican heritage, Espinosa has been tarred as a racist, and his truck was burned after he challenged the mayor of Douglas over the leader’s plans to declare the border town a sanctuary city.

“They need to finish the wall,” Espinosa said frankly, warning that until then, the area would not be safe to walk around at night.

McCarthy told The Federalist on Thursday at the conclusion of his congressional tour that DHS needs to complete the wall with modern technology as originally planned.

“You gotta finish this,” McCarthy said, pointing at the wall. “Finish the technology you haven’t hooked up — the lights, the sensors. There’s places in the wall that’s not done yet.”

Mayorkas Apparently Thinks It's His Job to Decide 'Nation of Immigrants' Narrative Supplants U.S. Law

Mike Miller reporting for RedState 

So, turns out Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is not only a serial liar; he also appears to think he has the authority to decide which U.S. laws he enforces and which he doesn’t.

Even more incredibly, the DHS head apparently believes his misassumption extends to immigration law pertaining to U.S. borders and by extension, the security of the United States. 

Should we tell him? Yes — but we’ll do that, later.

Let’s begin with the “Nation of Immigrants” narrative, or more precisely, the mid-20th-century revisionist version of the narrative, which reads, in part:

[The nation of immigrants mission statement] secures America’s promise as a nation of immigrants by providing accurate and useful information to our customers, granting immigration and citizenship benefits, promoting an awareness and understanding of citizenship, and ensuring the integrity of our immigration system.

On George Washington’s birthday in 2018, the Trump administration’s director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, L. Francis Cissna, changed the agency’s official mission statement (emphasis mine):

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services administers the nation’s lawful immigration system, safeguarding its integrity and promise by efficiently and fairly adjudicating requests for immigration benefits while protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our values.

Mayorkas has smugly looked directly at members of Congress and the media and declared unapologetically that America’s southern border is “secure,” a laughable declaration, given the border crisis intentionally created by Joe Biden two years ago continues to surge with no end in sight, with more than five million illegal crossings detected and untold numbers of “gotaways.”

During a recent interview with former Fox News host Chris Wallace on CNN’s “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?” Mayorkas’s familiar arrogance and authoritarian view of himself and his job as DHS secretary were obvious with virtually every word he uttered — beginning with his view of the responsibility of the Homeland Security Department, as reported by Breitbart. Again, emphasis mine:

Our goal is to achieve operational control of the border, to do everything that we can to support our personnel with the resources, the technology, the policies that really advance the security of the border, and do not come at the cost of the values of our country.

Hold up a sec.

What values are we talking about, here, Mr. Secretary? And who gets to decide what those values are and whose job it is to uphold them? Better yet, who gets to decide when our border “policies” (congressional laws) should be enforced and when they shouldn’t be?

Mayorkas then went way over the top, actually telling Wallace:

The law needs to be changed if it does not either meet our highest ideals or actually proves to be functional in the service of those ideals.

Yeah, he really said that. And again, Mr. Mayorkas, whose “highest ideals”?

The ideals of a majority of the citizens of America who want their border protected from illegal aliens, the majority of whom we know little about, shipment after shipment of deadly fentanyl, and international terrorists intent on picking up where 9/11 left off? Incidentally, Mayorkas, a lawyer, has used countless loopholes to smuggle record numbers of illegal aliens into America, our economy, and our society, often overrunning border towns to the point of humanitarian crisis and economic collapse.

Mayorkas made his astonishing “Nation of Immigrants” claims when Wallace pressed him to justify his repeated claim that “the border is secure,” amid the continuing movement of roughly 3.5 million migrants — including at least 1.2 million unidentified “gotaways” — across the southern border.

It gets even worse. When Wallace pressed the DHS secretary to explain what “secure” meant, in terms of the southern border, Mayorkas absurdly responded:

There is not a common definition of that. If one looks at [Congress’s 2006] statutory definition, the literal interpretation of the statutory language, if one person successfully evades law enforcement at the border, then we have breached the security of the border …

Our goal is to achieve operational control of the border, to do everything that we can to support our personnel with the resources, the technology, the policies, that really advance the security of the border, and do not come at the cost of the values of our country.

I say that because in the prior [Donald Trump] administration, policies were promulgated or passed that did not hew to the values that we hold dear.

I’ll point it out, one more time: Mayorkas’s definitions of “us” and “we” cannot truly be defined as “us” or “we” the American people. What they can be defined as is elitist left-wingers who seek nothing less than the permanent change of American demographics to the point where the Democrat Party enjoys a permanent majority — and nothing less.

And this final spew from Mayorkas:

We, in the United States, have tremendous pride in our country as a country, a place of refuge. We are a nation of immigrants. We are also a nation of laws. Those laws provide for humanitarian relief for those who qualify. They also provide that individuals who do not qualify will be removed. That’s how we do our work at the Department of Homeland Security.

Complete crock of crap. The views that Alejandro Mayorkas and other left-wing elitists claim to embrace and how they embrace those views; that America is a “place of refuge” and also a “nation of laws” are mutually exclusive. And serial liar Mayorkas knows that as much as we do.

Your work, Mr. Secretary, in your eyes, is to subvert the laws of this country for the singular purpose of attempting to remake America as you see fit. For that, you should immediately be removed from office — at the very least.

Ron DeSantis Won’t Be Able to Ignore Trump for Much Longer

posted by Jeff Charles at RedStateVIP 

The 2024 election season is a stone’s throw away and among Republican circles, all eyes are on former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Trump’s next run at the White House was all but a foregone conclusion before he announced his candidacy shortly after the 2022 midterm elections. The jury is still out on DeSantis’ intentions, but it seems almost certainly that he will also throw his hat in the ring.

Around the time of Trump’s announcement, he began pre-emptively lobbing rhetorical grenades at the governor, referring to him for the first time as “Ron DeSanctimonious” at a rally. Since then, the former president has been taking potshots at DeSantis much to the consternation of much of his base, who adores the governor almost as much as Trump.

Most recently, Trump continued his verbal assault by dredging up an old leftist narrative that the activist media used against DeSantis. He resurrected allegations that the governor behaved inappropriately with high school girls when he was a teacher in his early 20s. Trump also appears to have coined a new nickname for his potential rival: Meatball Ron.

On Saturday, Trump took to Truth Social to tell the world that despite the rumors, he is not going to refer to DeSantis by that bizarre moniker. “I will never call Ron DeSanctimonious ‘Meatball’ Ron, as the Fake News is insisting I will,” he wrote. He has also floated the label “Shutdown Ron” and tried to link him to members of the Republican establishment like former House Speaker Paul Ryan and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

So far, DeSantis has largely ignored Trump’s attacks, seemingly preferring to take the high road. When asked during a press conference about the high school allegations, the governor didn’t take the bait.

“I spend my time delivering results for the people of Florida and fighting against Joe Biden,” he responded. “That’s how I spend my time. I don’t spend my time trying to smear other Republicans.”

So far, DeSantis’ strategy has worked. Instead of getting in the mud, the governor has simply ignored Trump like a parent ignores a child having a tantrum. The governor’s approach has made it appear as if he is living rent-free in Trump’s head while not even giving him a second thought. Moreover, while much of the voting base still reveres the former president, they are not happy with his onslaught of attacks against DeSantis, who is also well-loved.

Another benefit for the governor is that it delays what will be a vicious battle between the two men. Right now, he can continue shoring up goodwill with the base before he is ready to go on the warpath. The strategy will continue working for him – but not for much longer.

The fact of the matter is that DeSantis can’t afford to keep pretending his possible primary opponent doesn’t exist. In fact, polling shows that Trump’s attacks might be landing. Shortly after the congressional elections last November, polling showed the governor leading Trump by a not-so-thin margin. But now, a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll that was released to The Hillshows DeSantis trailing Trump significantly:

A new Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll released Friday exclusively to The Hill shows Trump leading DeSantis 46 percent to 23 percent. That marks a 5-point drop in support for DeSantis since last month, when he trailed Trump by 20 percentage points in the same poll.

Perhaps more alarming for DeSantis, however, is his standing in a hypothetical primary field without Trump. Thirty-nine percent of GOP voters said they would back DeSantis for the Republican nomination if Trump was not in the race, but that’s still 10 points lower than where he stood in January.

It’s almost getting to the point where DeSantis is going to have to address Trump one way or another. The question centers on what kind of response the governor should run with. This will be critical as DeSantis will have to figure out how to attack his opponent without alienating the base. He cannot afford to keep letting Trump’s attacks go unanswered, but he also cannot afford to strike back in a way that threatens his popularity with Republican voters.

One of the reasons DeSantis became popular was because he is willing to take the fight to Democratic politicians and members of the activist media. Like Trump, he cultivated a rather pugilistic relationship with the press, which is thoroughly reviled by the conservative base. But he has not yet been tested against a brawler like Trump.

“No Republican has ever emerged from an exchange with Donald Trump looking stronger, so the natural tendency is to deflect his attacks and avoid confrontation,” Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist, told the New York Times.

“That’s easy to do, and maybe even wise when his barbs are confined to Truth Social,” Donovan added. “The question is what happens when DeSantis finds himself on a debate stage opposite Trump, and G.O.P. voters want to see whether they are getting what they were promised.”

“It’s a really tough situation for DeSantis,” said Tommy Vietor, a Democratic strategist who worked for Barack Obama during his presidential campaign. “If he starts punching at Trump, he’s going to anger a lot of the people he needs to vote for him.”

He continued: “if you are viewed as weak and cower in response to attacks from Trump, that will be seen as a proxy for how you will be seen as a Republican nominee and how you’ll be as president.”

It will be a delicate dance that DeSantis will have to navigate, even if he has not yet announced his candidacy for the White House. But he better figure it out quickly as he does not have much more time left.

DeSantis Derangement Syndrome

Nothing neutralizes Trump’s attacks

 quite like ignoring him.

posted by Dianny at Patriot Retort

The recent epidemic of DeSantis Derangement Syndrome is turning some folks into sputtering lunatics.

And here I thought Trump Derangement Syndrome was bad.

In fact, DeSantis Derangement Syndrome is making die-hard Trump supporters indistinguishable from the frothing-at-the-mouth Anti-Trump ResistanceLOL.

At this point, if Ron DeSantis jumped into the 2024 race, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if those suffering from DeSantis Derangement Syndrome scheduled a “Scream Helplessly at the Sky” Day.

While Trump remains firmly wedged inside his Truth Social bubble, his most ardent fans are picking up the slack on Twitter, making laughingly absurd “arguments” for why Ron DeSantis is the worst possible choice for voters.

This past week, they even tried to run with “George Soros endorsed Ron DeSantis for President.”

Oh, man. I howled when I saw that.

If someone asked me about the 2024 race and I said, “If Biden runs, he will likely be the Democrat nominee. He is a malleable empty vessel that is easily controlled and because he can play the kindly grandfather routine, he would be less threatening to moderate and suburban voters than, say, Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg. So if Biden runs for reelection, he will win the nomination.”

Is that Dianny endorsing Joe Biden for president?

LOL! Of course not. It’s just Dianny offering her opinion.

But when Soros offers his opinion of the Republican field, the Anti-DeSantis ResistanceLOL, suffering as they are from DeSantis Derangement Syndrome, trip all over themselves to argue that Soros endorsed DeSantis.

Seriously, guys. If you go to the Gateway Pundit for “news,” you’re being just as ridiculous as the slack-jawed anti-Trumpers who fall for Aaron Rupar’s tweets. Be better.

Remember when the anti-Trump ResistanceLOL lost its mind after Trump called the violent Salvadoran gang MS-13 “animals?”

“Trump called undocumented immigrants ‘animals!!!’ OH, THE HUMANITY!!!”

Yeah, he didn’t call immigrants “animals.” But truth and reality are the first two casualties for those gripped in the throes of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

The same thing is happening with the folks gripped by DeSantis Derangement Syndrome. Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush attends the current Florida governor’s inauguration, and those guys conclude that DeSantis is “palling around” with Jeb Bush, therefore he’s a RINO establishment cuck who is supported by the Bushes.

When your arguments become as poorly thought out as the anti-Trump ResistanceLOL, it might be time for you to take a long hard look in the mirror.

The anti-Trump ResistanceLOL spawned “Twitter influencers” who are so mind-numbingly dumb that they lack the combined brain wattage to power an Easy Bake oven.

Likewise, the anti-DeSantis ResistanceLOL has its own set of so-called “Twitter influencers” whose arguments are so laughingly moronic that they couldn’t even win a debate with Maxine Waters.

What other choice do I have but to point at these weirdos and laugh?

I mean, if Trump’s social media strategy hinges on the mindless verbal dribblings of lunatics like Laura Loomer, his campaign isn’t bringing its A-Game.

It would be one thing if DeSantis Derangement Syndrome was only infecting Trump’s completely deranged surrogates on Twitter. But it isn’t.

Donald Trump is infected too.

Trump is losing his ever-loving mind over DeSantis, mostly because DeSantis doesn’t give him a moment’s thought.

Rita Panahi once pointed out that Donald Trump is blessed with truly moronic opponents. And she was right, until now. DeSantis is the first formidable opponent Trump has ever faced, and it’s making Donald all manner of upset.

Unlike the rest of the people Trump attacks, DeSantis doesn’t take the bait. Rather than howl in indignation and attack Trump back, DeSantis just keeps plugging along as if Trump doesn’t exist. Trump’s silly name-calling rolls off DeSantis like he’s been Scotch-Guarded.

And Donald Trump isn’t used to that, at all.

His power is derived from goading his opponents into responding. The goal is to burrow under his opponent’s skin until, in a fit of pique, his target can no longer take it and lashes back. The defensive, angry response then feeds Trump’s attacks all the more. And when the opponent is left in a sputtering puddle on the floor, Trump walks away triumphant.

It worked for Trump every time. For heaven’s sake, he needled Liz Warren with his Pocahontas attacks to the point where she was goaded into taking a DNA test that proved she wasn’t Indian. LOL!

But then along comes the unflappable Ron DeSantis whose indifference to Trump deprives Donald of the very fuel he needs to win a fight.

And when DeSantis refuses to take the bait, rather than give up, Donald Trump doubles down, launching even more outlandish, petulant attacks that DeSantis ignores. In the end, Trump is left looking so wounded and desperate that he is the one who ends up in a sputtering puddle on the floor.

Rush Limbaugh often said if you want to know whom people fear, look at whom they attack.

Donald Trump and his die-hard fans on Twitter fear Ron DeSantis. You can almost see the flop-sweat flying off of them every time they flog their latest DeSantis attack.

But they aren’t the only ones suffering from DeSantis Derangement Syndrome.

You know who else is?

Well, for starters:
The Democrats
The Biden administration
Hollywood
The corporate news media
The unhinged “woke” Leftists
And Academia

Personally, I would love it if Ron DeSantis ran for the 2024 nomination, if for no other reason than to delight in the thermonuclear-sized meltdown that it would trigger.

But that’s not the only reason. DeSantis would be an excellent 2024 primary candidate. The other Republican politicians considering a presidential run are just pathetic.

Asa Hutchinson? Larry Hogan? I mean, come on!

For heaven’s sake. Nikki Haley seems to think she’s running for president in 2008.

Most of the people teasing about running are the 2024 equivalent of Lincoln Chaffee running against Hillary in 2016.

Republican voters deserve a raucous, healthy primary season where viable, serious contenders battle it out for the privilege of earning our votes. Ron DeSantis fits the bill whereas the clowns currently flitting to Iowa and New Hampshire between regular appearances on “Meet the Press” do not.

But just pointing out that I would love it if Ron DeSantis runs in 2024 will cause the DeSantis Deranged to lose their marbles. I’ll be called a “turncoat,” a “shill,” and “disloyal” simply for wanting to see the most popular elected Republican in the country run for president.

It makes no sense to me. It really doesn’t.

Then again, I don’t suffer from DeSantis Derangement Syndrome.