Elections Have Consequences; Stolen Elections Have Catastrophes

posted by J.B. Shurk at American Thinker 

"Put the adults back in charge," they whined.  "Donald Trump will break the world," they lied.  Well, they manipulated election rules to certify suspicious vote totals that preposterously portrayed senile Joe Biden as the most popularly elected president in history; censored and locked up anyone who complained; and covered up their crimes with J6 show trials drenched in untruths meant to hide from history the Uniparty's underhanded machinations in outright stealing a presidential election.  The whole mess was so banana-republic-yucky that Biden was inaugurated behind barbed wire and a show of military force befitting the small junta who attended the successful coup's celebration.  And as a result of the Uniparty's installation of Dementia Joe as White House marionette, the American people have been plagued with crime, inflation, political persecution, COVID tyranny, deadly battlefield retreat, open borders, staggering drug deaths, proxy wars, bankruptcies, bank runs, endless new regulations, a plummeting standard of living, economic panic, and social volatility.  Elections have consequences, but stolen elections have catastrophes.

For over two years, the State-controlled press and the permanent political class have accused anyone who challenges the ruling regime's legitimacy of being an "election denier" pushing the "big lie" that the 2020 race was rigged.  That resort to low-minded name-calling always seems like the "big tell" that they know that the people know that they're full of it.  Never mind that Time ran an exposé shortly after the election diagramming in great detail how "a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, work[ed] together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information."  Never mind that the American people later learned that Facebook CEO "Mark Zuckerberg and other left-wing actors commandeered election operations in blue hubs of swing states in 2020" by "strategically bankroll[ing] and staff[ing] local government election offices, which are in charge of voter registration, voting, and vote counting."  Never mind that leftist agitators had spent months in the run-up to the election threatening to unleash mayhem if Biden "won" the so-called "national popular vote" but lost the Electoral College.  Never mind that those same leftist agitators also spent months seeding a public narrative that a "red mirage" would show Trump winning before days of ballot-hunting eventually overturned those ephemeral victories.  Nope — put all those public admissions and "color revolution" propaganda campaigns aside, you dumb deplorables, and blithely accept the authorities' assurances that Biden's election was on the up-and-up.  People with power crossed their hearts and promised they were telling the truth; what more could Americans without power possibly require?  

Here's an idea: when more than half the country believes that "cheating likely affected the outcome of the 2020 presidential election" and that future election outcomes cannot be trusted, then that crisis in confidence reflects catastrophic government failure.  In functioning republics with reliable voting systems, allegations of electoral malfeasance are a "big deal."  When nothing less than the people's faith in the democratic process is at stake, then representative government will not survive unless the people perceive that process to be fair, transparent, and above reproach.  When they instead judge elections as corrupt, manipulated, and unverifiable, the blame for such disastrous public perception lies entirely with government officials.  The burden of ensuring secure elections, swift results, and trusted outcomes rests with those in power, and loss of public confidence reflects government abrogation of its own civic and legal duties. 

In 2020, when COVID's ongoing "state of emergency" conveniently provided a pretext for making sweeping changes to the ways in which votes were cast and collected, irrespective of binding statutory law, mail-in ballots with scant security checks or signature verifications flooded battleground states in Democrat-controlled zones that tilted Trump victories to Biden victories days after the actual election.  During that days-long window, ballots were lost and found; election workers inexplicably stopped and started their work; and numerous allegations of improper collection, derelict verification, unlawful voting, mixed sorting (where suspect ballots were separated from mail-in envelopes before verification but nonetheless included with good ballots), and double counting were never resolved.  Still, pundits pretended everything was perfectly normal, despite the reality that, among global peers, America alone is incapable of tabulating its elections promptly or providing results that can be transparently verified and reproduced.

Rather than investigating any of these issues, Secretaries of State looked past clear violations of election law and testimonial evidence alleging various instances of fraud to certify vote counts; state and federal courts, deferring to those bureaucratic certifications despite deficiencies, refused to investigate the matters any further; and the Supreme Court ran like a frightened child when a "case or controversy" of the highest national concern finally reached its doors.  So fearful, apparently, of replaying some version of the contentious judicial events that settled the 2000 election between Bush and Gore (or so terrified of the left's certain campaign of terror arriving outside their own families' homes), the courts threw up their hands and permitted perhaps the least trusted election in American history to be rubber-stamped as valid.  

X22, And we Know, and more- March 17

4 years ago today, on March 17th 2019, Marty Deeks and Kensi Blye, otherwise known as Densi, got married!🤍#NCISLA pic.twitter.com/BbalaP3g4F

— NCISverse Updates (@NCISVERSEUPDATE) March 17, 2023

 

What was really special about that episode wasn't just Densi, it was Hetty. What she pulled off in that episode was the greatest thing I had ever seen. She quite literally crashed the wedding, married her 2 agents (and as you can see above, the bride and groom kissed her!!), and had a nice conversation with her 2 boys at the end.

That was an absolutely special hour, and I want to see similar things with Callen's wedding in the 2 part finale.

Here's tonight's news:

The Right Is Still Afraid to Fight the Culture War

Contemporary society rests atop a bedrock of deviancy that few, even the right-wing culture warriors, dare disturb.

by Matthew Boose for American Greatness

Republican culture warriors have devoted considerable energy to subjects like “drag queen story hour” and “protecting women’s sports.” While these battles must be fought, they are oblique ways of addressing the real problem. Drag shows are low-hanging fruit. It doesn’t require much courage to denounce them. What does take some courage is to say, “so-called transgender individuals are mentally ill, and their dangerous delusions must be rejected for the sake of our children, and our personal dignity as rational beings.” 

Few elected officials are willing to go that far. Instead, they pick the easy fights, leveraging society’s disgust with the most extreme, freakish obscenities. Disgust, being an arbitrary standard, is not a useful way to measure these things, however. The problem is that today’s obscenity easily can (and frequently does) become tomorrow’s “normal.” We wouldn’t be fighting about drag queens in the first place if yesterday’s conservatives had done their job. 

Nor can we place all of the blame on mushy Republican politicians. A majority of Republican voters now accept the revolutionary, erroneous notion of “gay marriage.” And yet we are surprised to find ourselves pressed against the wall, pleading for children to be protected from predators in the name of “parental rights.” The phrase “parental rights” has a “family values” ring to it. It’s weak. 

Forget “parental rights.” In a healthy society, the sacred authority of the family (that is, with a father at the helm) is not even questioned. 

The paralyzing sickness of “tolerance” has made decent people timid. There is nothing cruel about acknowledging that a man cannot be a woman or vice versa. It’s just the truth. By refusing to give my assent to the delusions of a mentally ill person, I am not causing any distress to said person that the condition already has not. If anyone has been victimized, it is me. I am being coerced to play along with absurd nonsense. And so are you.

Coerced? For too long, rational people have yielded the truth, and therefore power, to a deranged fringe. One sees this in the language that conservatives use to defend their positions: “Biological male” and “biological female” are redundant terms. Is there any such thing as a nonbiological male? According to the Bolshevist cult, there is. In reality, no such distinction exists. Before Republicans were defending “biological sex,” they were caught up in protecting “traditional marriage.” They ended by giving up the definition of marriage and family to people who value neither, and look where it got us. 

Things are now so out of control that the very concept of “normal” is attacked as an imposition on that loud minority of LGBTQIAs who have seized the driver’s seat.

To the contrary, the LGBTQ agenda is an imposition on normal people, and until it is rejected at the root, we will live with its poisonous effects. Families (with a mom and a dad) must assert their primacy once again over sexual deviants. This requires “intolerance,” which is a blasphemous act in the regime of “diversity and inclusion,” but it is the only way back to a decent country. Until then, the rights of normal people, including the right to go about one’s business without being harassed over “pronouns,” or smothered with obscenity, or to have one’s child groomed in school, will not be secure. 

Contemporary society rests atop a bedrock of deviancy that few, even the right-wing culture warriors, dare disturb. The Right has to set a higher moral horizon than merely reacting to the latest perversities of the Left. As things stand, the Right’s agenda comes across as a hodgepodge of sound bites and grievances, rather than a vision of beauty and truth.

Biden's New Budget Would Hike Taxes and Wage Class Warfare

Biden's New Budget Would Hike Taxes and Wage Class Warfare

The higher taxes on small businesses and entrepreneurs could slow growth. Less opportunity means more tribalism and division.

Veronique de Rugy for Reason.com

President Joe Biden gives a speech about his new budget (Bastiaan Slabbers/Sipa USA/Newscom)

Budgets are about priorities. In President Joe Biden administration's new budget, its apparent priorities are marred by problems. Here's the cheat sheet version: Rather than containing explosive growth in spending, it would use a bunch of new taxes to wage class warfare.

While this budget is dead on arrival in Congress, it's worth reviewing some reasons why this is so. The president aspires to spend around $6.9 trillion next year, a 55 percent increase over pre-pandemic levels, and $10 trillion by 2033. While Biden hopes to raise an extra $4.7 trillion over 10 years in taxes, the debt would nevertheless grow over the next decade by $19 trillion as the debt-to-GDP ratio increases from 98 percent to 110 percent. All this debt in a high interest rate environment would have Uncle Sam fork over $10.2 trillion in interest payments alone over that time.

Adding to this fiscal calamity is that Social Security benefits could be automatically cut by some 20 percent within the next decade or so if the program is not reformed. Biden does propose to reform Medicare, but his means are class warfare taxes, price controls, and transfers from the general fund. There are no improvements to the program's own finances. So Biden's seemingly aggressive plan fails to solve one of the biggest budgetary challenges we face as a country going forward.

Instead, the budget suggests all kinds of ways to raise tax revenue, many of which would fail to do even that.

In our system, no matter how high tax rates have been, the federal government has never managed to capture more than 19 percent of GDP for long. This constraint means that if Washington decides to spend over 25 percent of GDP, American taxpayers are being committed to major deficits to cover the difference.

Yet, someone in the Biden administration believes that facts like these don't apply today. For instance, the budget raises corporate income taxes from 21 percent to 28 percent. Economists have shown that most of the burden would fall on workers in the form of lower wages.

Further, Biden would roughly double the official capital gains tax rate for investments to 39.6 percent. But according to Americans for Tax Reform, "The U.S. currently has a combined capital gains rate of over 29 percent, inclusive of the 3.8 percent Obamacare tax and the 5.4 percent state average capital gains rate. Under Biden, this rate would approach 50 percent." What does the administration think this will do for investment in the green energy innovations it wants to unleash?

Even more concerning, the administration wants to impose an annual 25 percent minimum tax rate on the unrealized capital gains of individuals with income and assets exceeding $100 million. These gains aren't income; they're assets that have gone up in value on paper—something that might disappear overnight. More importantly for everyone else, this wealth tax would reduce the amount of capital invested in productive, job-generating projects—meaning economic growth, innovation, and wages would all decline.

Next, the budget would raise Medicare taxes by 32 percent for individuals earning over $400,000 annually. The tax would apply to business and investment incomes, wages, and self-employment incomes. As a result, it will hit many small businesses, going against Biden's pledge to spare them from his efforts to expand Leviathan.

There are even more tax hikes in this budget, but you get the idea. The higher taxes on small businesses and entrepreneurs, as well as less capital funding, would slow growth and hence put downward pressure on tax revenues.

This is not just some quirk to be corrected in the American tax system. Wealth taxes have been tried on large scales in Europe and have ignited such intense incentives to escape to friendlier tax environments that they've rarely raised much revenue. They do, however, have significant administrative and economic costs—costs that would only further dampen American economic growth.

Economic studies have shown the negative impact that large increases in government spending and the debt burden have on economic growth. Obviously, further hindering our already-subpar growth rates would severely impair people's ability to climb the economic ladder. But the most unfortunate impact—even in a relatively rich country—is that too sluggish of an economy can bring out the worst in us. Indeed, less opportunity means more tribalism and division. That can threaten the peace, democracy, and liberal values we take for granted.

In that sense, this budget is not only a commitment to less growth because of its taxes and spending, but a missed opportunity to give a little more economic hope to a divided and hostile America.

COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM.

President Trump Releases Agenda-47 Policy Statement on Ukraine and America First Foreign Policy

In a new Agenda47 video released yesterday {Direct Rumble Link Here}, President Donald J. Trump explains the difference between the globalist establishment class, and those who are truly committed to stopping the Ukraine war and dismantling the entire neo-con nation-building industrial complex in Washington, D.C.  WATCH:

[Transcript] – “We have never been closer to World War III than we are today under Joe Biden. A global conflict between nuclear-armed powers would mean death and destruction on a scale unmatched in human history. It would be nuclear Armageddon. NOTHING is more important than avoiding that nightmare. We will avoid it. But we need new leadership.

Every day this proxy battle in Ukraine continues, we risk global war. We must be absolutely clear that our objective is to IMMEDIATELY have a total cessation of hostilities. All shooting has to stop. This is the central issue. We need PEACE without delay.

In addition, there must also be a complete commitment to dismantling the entire globalist neo-con establishment that is perpetually dragging us into endless wars, pretending to fight for freedom and democracy abroad, while they turn us into a third-world country and a third-world dictatorship right here at home. The State Department, the defense bureaucracy, the intelligence services, and all the rest need to be completely overhauled and reconstituted to fire the Deep Staters and put America First. We have to put America First.

Finally, we have to finish the process we began under my Administration of fundamentally reevaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission. Our foreign policy establishment keeps trying to pull the world into conflict with a nuclear-armed Russia based on the lie that Russia represents our greatest threat.

But the greatest threat to Western Civilization today is not Russia. It’s probably, more than anything else, ourselves and some of the horrible, U.S.A. hating people that represent us. It’s the abolition of our national borders. It’s the failure to police our own cities. It’s the destruction of the rule of law from within. It’s the collapse of the nuclear family and fertility rates, like nobody can believe is happening. It’s the Marxists who would have us become a Godless nation worshipping at the altar of race, and gender, and environment. And it’s the globalist class that has made us totally dependent on China and other foreign countries that basically hate us.

These globalists want to squander all of America’s strength, blood and treasure, chasing monsters and phantoms overseas—while keeping us distracted from the havoc they’re creating right here at home. These forces are doing more damage to America than Russia and China could ever have dreamed.

Evicting the sick and corrupt establishment is the monumental task for the next president. And I’m the only one who can do it. I’m the only one that can get the job done. I know exactly what has to be done.” [LINK]

Student Loan And Big Bank Bailouts Won’t Help When The National Debt Crisis Comes

The losses will pile up, and American taxpayers will foot the bill until they no longer can.

A.F. Cronin reporting for The Federalist

As Congress considers raising the debt ceiling again, the nation must realize that, unlike the Biden administration’s swift response to the student debt crisis and Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) failure, American taxpayers will not receive a bailout from a national debt disaster.

Government employees, media pundits, and politicians often note the hardships people will suffer if the federal government does not make taxpayers pay off their student loan debts or cover their financial losses due to a bank failure, but they rarely mention the burden the growing national debt puts on Americans.

Last week, depositors rushed to withdraw their funds from SVB as it swiftly and spectacularly crashed into insolvency. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation now controls the bank. SVB fell largely because it sold the low-interest government securities it had held in reserve at a staggering loss. SVB’s collapse is the largest bank failure since 2007.

Now, at the same time SVB has come under FDIC control, the debate about whether Congress should raise the debt ceiling roils in Washington, DC.

Truth be told, the roiling is mild. There is a consensus among most members of Congress, the Biden administration, and the punditocracy that the debt ceiling should and will be raised. The modest debate primarily concerns how much to raise the ceiling and where to cut the budget to appease the deficit hawks. Very few officials, representatives, or talking heads question whether the ceiling should be raised at all.

Budgetary experts in our nation’s capital claim it would be catastrophic if the treasury cannot continue to borrow money to cover budgetary shortfalls. They predict global financial meltdown, the collapse of entitlement programs, and the replacement of the Petro-dollar with the “Petro-Yuan,” which seems to be happening anyway.

Some so-called experts even insist that, to stop the recurrent panics that flare up whenever Congress approaches its borrowing limit, the debt ceiling must be removed altogether. They claim the nation can maintain budgetary and financial stability only if Congress can assume debt without constraint.

As the debt ceiling debate proceeds and SVB sits on the auction block, the Supreme Court considers the legality of Biden’s student loan bailout. That case depends upon whether a president can unilaterally wipe away government-guaranteed student loans (or a portion of them) without the consent of Congress. The impetus of the loan bailout is, ostensibly, that too many student debtors feel unduly burdened and cannot service the debt they have incurred.

The administration presents the program as “…a three part plan to help working and middle-class federal student loan borrowers transition back to regular payment as pandemic-related support expires.”

In the program’s announcement, the Biden administration dubiously boasts: “Due to the economic challenges created by the pandemic, the Biden-Harris Administration has extended the student loan repayment pause a number of times. Because of this, no one with a federally held loan has had to pay a single dollar in loan payments since President Biden took office.”

The administration presents the fact that “no one with a federally held loan has had to pay a single dollar in payments” as an accomplishment. But when the nation’s college graduates cannot pay back their loans, guaranteed by American taxpayers, the administration has nothing to celebrate. After all, educations financed by student loans should have prepared student borrowers for jobs that pay well enough to service their educational debts.

A trope attributed to J. Paul Getty applies here: “If you owe the bank $100, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.” Although Getty’s $100 million is penny ante compared to the $30 trillion or so of debt on the nation’s books today. And the bank whose problem the bad loans have become is the United States Treasury.

The U.S. Treasury’s student loan debt brings us back to the Silicon Valley Bank failure. Savvy depositors at SVB began yanking their money — large amounts of money — from the bank a few weeks ago. These withdrawals cascaded into a run on the bank.

SVB had insufficient funds to cover its depositors’ demands. To make matters worse, Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve have been raising interest rates, causing the government-guaranteed mortgages SVB had held in reserve to fall in value. These older securities have lost significant value because newer bonds have three times the return.

In 2007, bundled government-guaranteed mortgages failed spectacularly and spawned the biggest market crash since 1929. Like last Friday, the federal government stepped in and bailed out the failed financial institutions. The cost of the bailouts in 2008 was, according to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study, close to $500 billion.

The federal government proposes to forgive about $400 billion in student loans. SVB’s losses, and the losses of its depositors, will cost billions.

All of these bailouts have one thing in common: American taxpayers guarantee them. Taxpayers pay interest on the debt and, when the financial instruments fail, have to cover the disaster clean-up, too. Also, since the federal budget runs a deficit, the federal government covers the failed loans with borrowed money.

It’s a circle game, and not a very fun game at that. And there is no end in sight.

The national debt is more than $30 trillion. The Treasury paid approximately $475 billion in interest on the national debt in 2022. This figure will increase as the debt grows, interest rates rise, and the federal budget balloons. Older debt, now commodified and used as cash reserves, will only lose value as rates continue to rise. The losses will pile up, and American taxpayers will foot the bill until they no longer can.

The largest lenders to the U.S. Treasury are intergovernmental agencies: the Federal Reserve, the Social Security Trust Fund, and the Federal Disability Trust funds. Together they hold almost $7 trillion dollars of the national debt. The other $25 trillion is held by China, Japan, the U.K., other nations, privately held insurance companies, pension funds, and state and municipal treasuries.

If these securities fail, the fallout will be enormous. And the fallout will land squarely on the shoulders of American taxpayers.

Unlike the administration’s concern for student loan borrowers, the idea that the national debt might be too great a burden for the American taxpayer rarely enters into the conversation. After all, Congress’ attitude seems to be that taxpayers exist to pay taxes and support whatever they deem necessary, no matter how ill-considered, redundant, or wasteful it may be. The administration’s plan to hire 85,000 new IRS agents shows how determined they are to collect their due.

The White House wants to suspend student loan payments and cover SVB’s losses while borrowing trillions to cover budget shortfalls. Having gone through a similar scenario in 2008, it is clear that all government debt has one thing in common: American taxpayers must pay the bill when financial instruments fail.

And fail they do. Spectacularly. Far more often than they are supposed to.

Who knows what the real cost is or will eventually be.

Bye, Mike

Bye, Mike

Scott McKay for Spectator.org

Pence completes the transition from valued conservative to irrelevant loser.

While giving the keynote speech at the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa last year, Tucker Carlson offered an interesting bit of advice to conservative voters more and more alienated from the political class even in the Republican Party.

Carlson offered a number of items, some of which were a bit off the beaten track — support politicians who pursue beauty in public life was one. But perhaps the most salient of his offerings was this: “You need to be really wary of candidates who care what the New York Times thinks.”

Carlson’s remarks were mostly intended, people thought, as a shot at Nikki Haley — and rightly so.

But it turns out they hit home most of all with respect to Mike Pence, who made a political brand more than a decade ago as a politician who legitimately couldn’t care less about the propagandist legacy media.

That seems so long ago, doesn’t it?

Over the weekend, Pence showed up at the Gridiron dinner, one of the hoity-toity events in Washington in which the nation’s elite news media figures gather to congratulate themselves for another year of slavery to conventional wisdom and diminution of journalistic ethics and credibility, and sucked up to the audience in ways a John McCain or Mitt Romney would be envious of.

“History will hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6,” Pence told hundreds of journalists at what is typically a jocular white-tie affair. “Make no mistake about it: What happened that day was a disgrace, and it mocks decency to portray it in any other way. President Trump was wrong. His reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day.”

Pence had used similar words to talk about Trump in his book — writing that his former boss’ “reckless words had endangered my family and all those serving at the Capitol.”

But his advisers saw the Gridiron dinner as an opportunity not just to echo those sentiments but to amplify them. They also believed it would help Pence win over his most skeptical audience these days: Washington insiders and journalists who have given him short shrift in the early 2024 primary.

“This was a different audience for him,” said Marc Short, Pence’s former vice presidential chief of staff and his senior adviser.

Pence world has long believed that the former congressman and Indiana governor could occupy the adult-in-a-room 2024 lane, in that he is uniquely positioned to speak truth to power now that he is free of the constraints of the vice presidency.

“Mike is in a different place where he can be sort of free and liberated in ways that I don’t think others in the field are,” Short said. “And so I’m not looking at it as to where he is at this moment. I believe that he’s got a good pathway forward.”

We’ll go ahead and dispense with Marc Short, who’s obviously exactly the sort of failure as a political adviser we’ve come to know and hate in the Republican Party. Now that Pence has taken his advice, it’s only a matter of time before Short resurfaces as the Lincoln Project’s newest associate and we’ll be able to contemplate all of the ways, beyond the obvious contempt for the GOP base, that he might also find similarity with John Weaver.

Or at least Rick Wilson.

Because Mike Pence has immolated himself in the same way that Weaver’s clients John McCain, John Huntsman, and John Kasich turned off their own party’s base: by treating them as America’s biggest problem.

The Politico piece excerpted above even has Pence’s camp quietly modeling him after John McCain, making one wonder just how stupid these people are. Even Mitt Romney generated more excitement in the GOP than McCain did — and thanks to McCain’s flaccid, pathetic 2008 effort, the country has been subjected to the Babylonian captivity that is the Barack Obama political era, which hasn’t just lasted the eight years of Obama’s term but in many ways has continued through Trump’s term and has fully metastasized during the current Obama Redux administration of Joe Biden.

To want to emulate McCain in any way given the destructive shame of his 2008 campaign isn’t just a sign of stupidity but insanity and even perhaps treason.

Mike Pence was not this political eunuch a decade ago. What on earth has happened to him?

To be blasting Donald Trump over Jan. 6 in the same weekly news cycle in which hours and hours of footage from that unruly demonstration has surfaced to implode much of the false media narrative of that day is a tone-deafness of a sort far beyond the borders of malpractice. And yet there Pence was.

Saying this: “We were able to stay at our post in part because you stayed at your post. The American people know what happened that day because you never stopped reporting.”

Actually, the American people know what happened that day because of Tucker Carlson. The propagandists and hacks in that room lied about Jan. 6. They led Americans to believe that Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick was beaten to death with a fire extinguisher, when in fact Sicknick died of a stroke the next day. They styled Jacob Chansley, the eccentric Navy veteran the media dubbed the “QAnon Shaman” for his primitive costume, as a domestic terrorist when footage shows that Chansley attacked no one, was not violent or even impolite, and in fact stood at the Capitol door exhorting his fellow protesters to leave the premises after President Donald Trump called for them to go home via tweet.

And Pence is sucking up to these liars and bums as though he thinks they’re his real constituency.

He didn’t even make any progress on that score. Pence cracked wise about Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary so awful that a recent Rasmussen poll showed that a majority of Americans are now demanding his resignation, and made a somewhat funny joke about how Buttigieg is the first person to go on “maternity leave” and in so doing give everyone else “postpartum depression.” And for his trouble, he was trashed as a “homophobe” by presidential spokeslesbian Queen Karine Jean-Pierre.

Shockingly, none of Pence’s pals at Politico or the New York Times took up for him.

We should remember that it’s Mike Pence’s fault, perhaps more than anyone else’s, that Jan. 6, 2021, happened at all. It was Pence, you’ll remember, whom Trump put in charge of his administration’s COVID-19 response. And instead of thinking for himself and showing any initiative or leadership, he turned the whole shooting match over to leftist psychotics and Obama holdovers Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci, who whipsawed the country into lockdowns, useless masking, paranoia, and economic chaos for absolutely no benefit whatsoever. The book Birx later wrote was a self-congratulatory tour de force in which she bragged about lying to Pence and Trump to keep the country terrified and locked down into a state of societal collapse. 

And without those lockdowns and the failed Trump administration COVID response that Mike Pence was fully responsible for, there would have been no improbable and even implausible Joe Biden presidential election victory or any reason why furious conservatives, and federal informants and other agents provocateurs, would have wanted to show up at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

But Mike Pence fancies himself a dark-horse presidential candidate next year, and that closes off the kind of introspection and mea culpas that would make him even remotely interesting to the average Republican voter. It seems he and his savant political advisers like that fine. Because after all, Pence has Politico and the New York Times as new constituencies.

For all that’s worth.

Mollie Hemingway took one look at this farce of a sellout and shook her head.

“How many decades of political history have taught everyone with a pulse that Republican pandering to the media is a fool’s errand?” she asked. “In what world does this strategy make sense?”

In Bizarro World, Mollie. That’s where.

What Mike Pence is going to find, probably sooner rather than later, is that very few GOP voters live there.

But of course, there are donors who do. And since grifting the rich is the bulk of the game in politics — and it’s certainly Mike Pence’s game now that he’s turned his coat and gone over to the “pet conservative” side — it all makes perfect sense.

Bye, Mike. You once were interesting. Now you’re just another has-been pol hustling media appearances and checks from rich dunces who don’t know what time it is.

Professor Uncovers the White Supremacy of Organized Pantries

Alex Parker reporting for RedState 

Is your kitchen closet a racist room? Per a professor: Possibly.

Loyola University Chicago marketing instructor Jenna Drenten has penned a piece for The Conversation on pernicious pantries. “‘Pantry Porn’ on TikTok and Instagram,” the title tells us, “Makes Obsessively Organized Kitchens a New Status Symbol.”

According to the academic, those uncluttered areas represent radical ills.

Jenna points to the prized appearance of countered culinary chaos:

Neatly aligned glass spice jars tagged with printed white labels. Wicker baskets filled with packages… Rows of flavored seltzer water stacked in double-decker plastic bins.

In today’s consumer culture, “a place for everything and everything in its place” isn’t just a mantra; it’s big business. Nowhere is this more evident than the kitchen pantry.

Indeed — she’s “noticed an uptick in glamorized, stylized and fully-stocked pantries on TikTok and Instagram, giving rise to…’pantry porn.’”

Among the online influencers prompting our pretty-pantry craze: the Kardashians. Another named offender: Real Housewives star Yolanda Hadid, who enjoys “social media fan pages dedicated to her fridge.”

The web is hot with hoity-toity hashtags:

• #pantryrestock
• #pantryASMR
• #pantrygoals

But bottom line, the enterprise is evil — at least in origin…

Storing spices in coordinated glass jars and color coordinating dozens of sprinkles containers may seem trivial. But tidiness is tangled up with status, and messiness is loaded with assumptions about personal responsibility and respectability.

Cleanliness has historically been used as a cultural gatekeeping mechanism to reinforce status distinctions based on a vague understanding of “niceness”: Nice people, with nice yards, in nice houses, make for nice neighborhoods.

What lies beneath the surface of this anti-messiness, pro-niceness stance is a history of classist, racist and sexist social structures.

Some things are alright; others are all-white:

In my research, influencers who produce pantry porn are predominantly white women who demonstrate what it looks like to maintain a “nice” home by creating a new status symbol: the perfectly organized, fully-stocked pantry.

Caucasian complication isn’t exclusively a kitchen item. Aryan issues have recently been uprooted all over:

State University to Nonwhite Students: Report Professors for Racism if Not Calling on You

Experts Warn of the Racism of 3-Month-Olds, Recommend Antiracist Training

Astrophysicist Warns Against ‘Exceptionalism’ — It’s White Supremacy

Math Professor Says Math Education Is Racist — and Sexist and Homophobic

In Order to Attack ‘Systemic Racism,’ a School Eliminates Failure and Time Constraints

Arizona State Dean Pens 350+ Page Book on How Grading Writing Is White Supremacy

Science Journal: Racism in Geology, Black People Are Too Scared to Hold Hammers

Back to Jenna and sinister symbolism near your stove, she notes that increased organization takes weight off of women. And also, it’s a recipe for oppression:

Pantry porn, as a status symbol, relies on the promise of making daily domestic work easier. But if women are largely responsible for the work required to maintain the perfectly organized pantry, it’s critical to ask: Easier for whom?

We’re living in tricky times — watch your step, or you’ll find your foot in insidious -isms. Male chauvinism maliciously lurks; maybe trash your kitchen to prove you love ladies.

As for pale-people-produced prejudice, does an organized area adjacent to the oven encourage free-range white supremacy? It would seem not — after all, a pantry is where you contain crackers.