I Told You So, Jerks ~ Kurt Schlichter

posted by Kurt Schlichter at TownhallVIP 

Let me begin by saying to all you leftists that I told you so.

Lots of leftists are supporting raping, mass-murdering Seventh Century semi-humans, and they are mad that they are now being treated like people who support raping, mass-murdering Seventh Century semi-humans. Apparently, this is a terrible attack on free speech and McCarthyism and probably Islamophobic and transphobic and is the worst thing ever since the last thing that was the worst thing ever. 

Well, I think it’s kind of funny.

They are mad and accuse us conservatives of now embracing cancel culture. You can argue about the definition of cancel culture, but I’m not going to bother because I am totally indifferent to anything leftists tell me. Maybe it’s cancel culture and maybe it’s not. I don’t care. I just want supporters of raping, mass-murdering Seventh Century semi-humans to be driven from civilized society for supporting raping, mass-murdering Seventh Century semi-humans. I think that’s a reasonable position to take in light of all the circumstances.

Of course, one of the key circumstances is the existence of the New Rules. Now, understand that I was against the New Rules where people’s political views would cause them to be driven from their jobs and relationships and polite society in general. I strongly supported the notion that people should be free to be able to say whatever they thought with no organized, systematic repercussions. It was called tolerance, and it worked pretty well.

Obviously, if you’re a black guy and a job applicant comes in wearing the form-fitting pointy cap of the Democrat-founded KKK, I’m thinking you probably wouldn’t hire him. But I’m thinking that society would have been better off if we had continued to honor the norm that what you think about politics should generally be put aside from what you do on the job and in your interpersonal relationships. I thought this was a really good way to do things and I thought we should keep doing it that way.

But I lost that argument. I was overruled. People on the left decided that no, we have a lot of trouble supporting our terrible and gross ideas, so we’re going to try to intimidate people by taking action against their jobs and ability to live in our society in order to get them to conform to our communist worldview. I thought this was a terrible idea. I argued long and hard that our society should not embrace this paradigm. I said that we should keep the Old Rules and not substitute these New Rules. I also pointed out, very specifically, that the New Rules would end up biting the left on their collective Schumer.

But I was ignored. I was outvoted, to the extent there was a vote and not just sort of a consensus decision by the elite imposing the New Rules upon the rest of us. I tried.  I argued long and hard against it. I warned people that there would be consequences and they might not like how it ended up. But I lost.

Our culture decided to embrace the New Rules, where economic and cultural power would be leveled against people whose views were determined to be repellent by the cultural curators. And the leftists loved it. They thought it was the greatest thing ever. They enjoyed their petty tyranny over normal people. Normal people got fired for questioning, for example, the utter nonsense of alleged systematic racism. People got driven out of jobs for making political contributions to designated bad causes, which were always conservative causes. One guy, some kind of lineman for a power company, even got fired for making the OK symbol with his fingers. Apparently, this meant he loved Hitler somehow, though apparently loving Hitler is currently cool with the leftists.

They just enjoyed the power that they were able to leverage to make people afraid and conform. They enjoyed the New Rules because it was fun to hurt people who they didn’t like. Until the New Rules got applied to them. Then it was not so fun. Then it sucked, for them.

It’s probably petty to point out that I told you so, but I told you so.

Normal people are disgusted by the sight of leftists supporting raping, mass-murdering Seventh Century semi-humans, and they are applying the applicable rules, which are the New Rules. Oops. Suddenly, the leftists are experiencing what leftists have been imposing on other people – except leftists actually deserve the treatment. Normal people see leftist celebrating savagery and are thinking, “You know, these people suck, and I want them to suffer.”  So leftists supporting raping, mass-murdering Seventh Century semi-humans are getting exposed and fired. There are Twitter accounts devoted to identifying the leftists who are supporting raping, mass-murdering Seventh Century semi-humans, including the spoiled jerks who rip up pictures of kidnapped kids because they don’t like having the reality of what they support made public. 

They are losing their gigs, and it’s got to be a sigh of relief for the rest of us. You have doctors talking about how Jews are awful, and I’m not sure those are the kind of people you want treating patients. And you have other people too, models and artists and other schmucks, and they’re losing their gigs too. They are very sad. 

Well, I told you so.

College professors and regime media hacks are complaining that we have a new McCarthyism. Good! McCarthy was right. The American government was riddled with communists, and there should be a giant statue of 'Tail Gunner Joe' in DC with flowers strewn upon it. When these commies cry “McCarthyism!” I don’t think of bigotry against dissenting points of views. I think of being brd and seeing how a lot of people in positions of authority are either leftists supporting raping, mass-murdering Seventh Century semi-humans or are tolerant of leftists supporting raping, mass-murdering Seventh Century semi-humans.

If McCarthyism means seeing that there are bad people in positions of power in our culture, society, and government, and that they must be driven from it, count me in. If cleansing public life of the Hamas toe-suckers is the goal, I wish to score. 

This gets me called a “hypocrite” on social media, but it’s technically wrong. I’m not a hypocrite, because I was always against what was called “cancel culture.” But I lost that argument. I’m just going with the flow. All hail the New Rules! 

Now, just as I predicted, the people behind the New Rules are taking this like a five pointed suppository. I just want to say to them, as they cry, that I told you so. 

I told you so. 

I told you so. 

Your tears amuse me. 

I told you so. 

X22, And we Know, and more- November 8

After 6 very tiring months, the last of the Hollywood labor disputes finally comes to an end. 🎉

Source: https://deadline.com/2023/11/sag-strike-ends-actors-studios-deal-contract-1235566470/

After 118 days of the actors guild being out on strike, SAG-AFTRA and the studios have reached a tentative deal on a new contract that could see Hollywood up and running again within weeks.

The strike will be over as of 12:01 am PT November 9, we hear.

Coming just less than a month after Writers Guild members overwhelmingly ratified their own agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, SAG-AFTRA’s deal is the culmination of the latest round of renewed negotiations that began October 24. Indicating the seriousness and stakes of the negotiations, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos, Disney’s Bob Iger, NBCUniversal’s Donna Langley and Warner Bros Discovery’s David Zaslav frequently directly participated in the talks.

The tentative agreement follows the studios responding on November 3 to the guild’s last comprehensive counter with a self-described “historic” package. That was succeeded less than 24 hours later by an expanded group of studio leaders — including execs from Paramount, Amazon, Apple and more — joining the Gang of Four to brief SAG-AFTRA on the AMPTP’s new offer, which was said to include big gains in wages and bonuses as well as sweeping AI protections.

“We didn’t just come toward you, we came all the way to you,” Sarandos told guild leaders Saturday before SAG-AFTRA brass began digging into the fine print. Further talks between the two sides began earlier this week as the guild poured over the studios’ latest set of proposals.

Now, if all goes as planned, eligible members of the 160,000-strong actors guild will vote soon to ratify the new agreement. Also, if things move like they did with the WGA in late September, we could see SAG-AFTRA end its strike before the ratification vote is completed to get people back to work sooner and production restarted quickly.

Exposing many of the shifts and divisions in the industry over the past decade, today’s tentative agreement comes at the end of a long road filled with diversions and potholes.

Overall, the six months of Hollywood strikes is estimated to have cost the Southern California economy more than $6.5 billion and 45,000 entertainment industry jobs after production ground to a halt with the WGA hitting the picket lines in early May and SAG-AFTRA following in mid-July. On an individual level, the labor action garnered passionate unity among guild members. At the same time, a fact not lost on the studios and their strategy, many guild members have suffered crippling financial hardship, as have below-the-line workers, going months without work.

After calling the strike July 14, it took the guild and the studio CEOs’ Gang of Four around 80 days before their first official face-to-face talks at SAG-AFTRA headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard. For all the optimism and momentum coming out of the completed WGA deal, those new deliberations between SAG-AFTRA and the studios that began October 2 blew apart on October 11, with the AMPTP leaving negotiations early after the guild tabled an alternative to its contentious revenue-sharing proposal. A few hours later, expecting more scheduled talks the next day, SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland received a call saying deliberations were “suspended.”

“Last night, they introduced a levy on subscribers on top of [other] areas,” Sarandos said the next day at an industry conference, calling the proposal a “bridge too far” and blaming the guild for the talks ending. Later, SAG-AFTRA accused the studios of “bully tactics” and using the “same failed strategy they tried to inflict on the WGA.”

On October 18, after Netflix stated in its Q3 earnings report that talks were “ongoing” and Sarandos said the guild “really broke our momentum” towards a deal, Crabtree-Ireland called BS. “The best way to reach a deal and end this strike is for him and the other CEOs to end their walkout from the bargaining table and resume negotiations,” the SAG-AFTRA national director and chief negotiator told Deadline. “We have been and remain ready to continue talks – every day.”

After an appreciated but DOA bid by George Clooney and other A-listers to intervene in getting talks restarted, it looked like the actors strike would pass the 100-day milestone with no end in sight. Then, on October 21 , after Drescher hit out at the “AMPTPs strategy of non-negotiation” and “a blatant propaganda attempt to discredit union leadership and divide our solidarity,” Bob Iger made a call to Crabtree-Ireland and asked to start a new round of talks.

Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, Fran Drescher, Ted Sarandos, Bob Iger, David Zaslav & Donna Langley

At 3 p.m. PT on the strike’s 100th day, SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP put out a joint statement that they were heading back to the bargaining table on October 24 at the guild’s headquarters. That first day of negotiations between the parties was “not great,” according to a well-positioned source. As the studios put forth a new offer they hoped would end the stalemate over “success-based compensation,” the guild proved unmoved, but also open to further discussion.

Although the parties had agreed to meet on October 25, the guild asked that morning to take the day to go over the studios’ proposal of increased bonuses based on the success of streaming shows and movies and a further rise in minimum rates. “It’s a step in the right direction and the negotiating committee is taking the time to do a deep review,” a guild source told Deadline.

The two sides sat down again face-to-face around noon on October 26 with Crabtree-Ireland telling Deadline he was “cautiously optimistic” about deliberations with the studios. The guild slide across the table a self-described “comprehensive counter” that attempted to move the two sides closer together, sources said. As open letters from both supportive and impatient guild members flew around town, the AMPTP and SAG-AFTRA’s negotiating committee were back in active talks on October 27. With both sides taking October 30 to be “working independently,” virtual deliberations bled into the weekend with the parties trying to bridge their differences.

On Halloween and in the early days of November, the parties met again. As the parties got “closer and closer,” as a guild source told Deadline, on issues, Crabtree-Ireland and Lombardini continued conferring directly, with breakout groups of lawyers and other specialists huddled in search of a deal – successfully we now know. Followed by two days of consultation by the guild, the November 3 delivery of the studios’ response to the guild’s latest counter and SAG-AFTRA’s November 6 counter response saw the two sides find an AI compromise and began moving things into what we now know was the final phase.

It took an unexpected strike by actors guild (who many studios execs thought were bluffing despite an overwhelming strike authorization mandate), a lot of moving pieces, guild solidarity, and some hard negotiating sessions to get there.

The actors union joined the WGA on the picket lines when it went on strike July 14, creating Hollywood’s first joint strike in more than 60 years. There were a lot of hot summer days when the labor battle remained at a stalemate.

But things shifted after Labor Day. The WGA reached a deal with the AMPTP on September 24 after five months on the picket lines and a final five intense days of deliberations that included the CEO Gang of Four for most of those last sessions. The WGA leadership approved the tentative agreement and ended the strike at 12:01 a.m. PT on September 27. WGA members ratified the deal by a wide margin October 9.

As exclusively reported by Deadline on September 26, the studios and SAG-AFTRA intended to ride the wave of the WGA deal to set meetings within a week or so on their own talks. However, as the goodwill of the WGA’s successful negotiations faded into bitter public call-outs from leaders on both sides, many feared, even with a new round of talks, the actors strike could last well into the holidays, ruining any chance at a partial broadcast networks season and hobbling the 2024 movie slate.

That catastrophe seems to have been averted now.

 ------------------------------------------------

Additional notes: As with when the writers strike ended last month, my happiness to this is strictly related to this: I'm getting my shows back, I'll be getting new rom coms next year, and I will get closer to that NCIS LA closure that I have been needing since May. And I will get to post new BTS content. That's that.

What I have witnessed in these nearly 6 months is nothing short of mob rule and mob mentality. I'm not saying the AMPTP is perfect, but both the striking unions hold equal blame in the longevity of all this. If they hadn't been so unreasonable and beyond unrealistic in their demands from the start, and if they had much, much better negotiators, this never would've lasted for so long. And now thanks to both unions, many people are now suffering, most of all the Below the Line workers (you know, the OTHER people on a production set that always get overshadowed by the actors and writers) who never asked for this. And the consequences from all this, will be very long lasting.

Other then that, a huge thank you to all those who listened to me grumble all these months, and who kept me sane. You are all amazing people, and I can't wait to get to report on new NCIS Verse content in the coming months. 🤗

Only Kamala Harris Can Save Democrats In 2024

Eddie Scarry reporting for The Federalist 

David Axelrod is now the most influential Democrat to date to have called for Joe Biden to reconsider his run for reelection. But in doing so last weekend, he did the same thing that pretty much every other Democrat has done. Which is to say, he refused to acknowledge the party’s real problem.

The real problem isn’t Biden. It’s Kamala Harris.

Biden is certainly borderline comatose, his brain a clump of blackened rot, but I truly believe there are enough synapses still flickering inside for him to be aware that he can’t and shouldn’t be running for a second term. He knows he’s too old. He knows his tenure has been a wreck. And he knows that with each passing day he’s in office, nothing is getting better, and everything is getting worse.

But what he also knows is if he says he withdraws from the campaign, the only option party leadership has is to back his vice president. What’s the opposite of “brilliant”?

To be sure, there would technically be other, better options, like Gavin Newsom or even Dean Phillips, who is formally running against Biden. But that’s not how national party politics works. It works by protecting incumbents. Or, in the event that there isn’t one, backing the next best thing. As vice president, that’s Harris.

Compounding the problem is that Harris is one of their precious affirmative action hires, shielded from criticism by nature of being not just a woman but a Woman of Color™️. To deny her ascent would be to go against everything Democrats profess to believe — that nothing is more important than diversity, equity and inclusion.

They’re stuck. Every serious Democrat, including Biden, knows that Harris can’t be their nominee, which, in effect, would make her the party’s leader. She doesn’t know anything. She can’t talk. Voters hate her.

It’s the sweetest irony that the Kamala problem is Biden’s own doing. He put her on his 2020 ticket after boxing himself in with the promise to elect a woman. And in the Year of Patron Saint George Floyd, there was no chance it wouldn’t be a black one. (So plain was that fact that even an unemployed plus-sized black lady from Georgia openly, shamelessly, and repeatedly put forth herself as Biden’s potential running mate.)

To be fair, it did the trick. Biden won the nomination, and thanks to Harris, he satisfied the Jim Clyburn-Joy Reid faction of the party, ensuring the high black voter turnout that would be crucial in landing him on his rickety knees in the Oval Office.

But then we got to see her perform, and, well, let’s just say she’s no Beyonce.

Ultimately, if there were any way for Biden to retire, as I’m surer than anything he wants to do, Harris would have to be the one to make it happen. She would have to say publicly that should her boss withdraw, she has no interest in seeking the nomination and that she will support a different Democrat instead.

It’s then another sweet irony that the only person who can possibly save Democrats in 2024 is Kamala Harris.

President Chaos Not Likely to See Second Term

Biden is in trouble with voters as he looks ahead to next year’s election

by James Piereson for American Greatness

Many Americans heaved a sigh of relief in 2020 when Joseph Biden won the presidential election, thus ending four years of drama, investigations, and scandals during the Trump presidency. Biden, they thought, would restore a degree of calm and stability after the upheavals of the Trump years.

Think again. Those voters are beginning to look back with nostalgia on the peace and prosperity that prevailed during the years Trump was in the White House.

After three years of Biden’s presidency, the world is on fire with wars raging in Europe and the Middle East and China plotting to take advantage of the situation, while inflation, federal debt, rising crime, and a porous southern border are turning the United States into a third world country. Americans voted for calm in 2020 but got disorder instead. Sadly, things are unlikely to improve over the next year under the direction of President Chaos.

The first thing Biden did upon entering office was to reverse President Trump’s immigration policies at the southern border. Trump adopted a “remain in Mexico” policy which required asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their applications to enter the United States were reviewed. That policy slowed the flow of migrants into the country, and went a long distance toward solving the problem. But Biden threw out that policy so that migrants could cross the border and melt into the country while their asylum claims were being processed. At the same time, he invited would-be migrants from around the world to enter the country via the southern border. Many accepted the invitation. As a result, an astounding 4 million migrants have entered the United States since 2021 under Biden’s asylum protocols.

Many of those migrants eventually moved into New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other large cities, with predictable results: housing shortages, rising crime, and budget shortfalls. Mayors of those cities once boasted of their status as “sanctuary cities,” but now complain that they lack the resources to care for the migrants descending on their jurisdictions. Naturally, they are calling on President Biden to send more federal money to address the crisis that he caused.

To add to these problems, Biden went on a spending spree when he took office, adding a record $3.4 trillion in new spending in 2021 and 2022 and increasing the federal debt to more than $33 trillion. These were payoffs to interest groups and voting blocs that supported him in 2020. But his policies soon led to inflation, reaching 9 percent in 2022, along with rising interest rates, which were close to zero in 2021. Mortgage rates increased from 3 percent when Trump left office to 8 percent today, imposing new burdens on home buyers and effectively killing off the housing market. In the meantime, the stock market, which advanced by 60 percent during Trump’s term in office, reached a peak in 2021, and has declined by more than 10 percent since that time. Those losses will cause pain for millions of seniors who have invested their savings in stocks and pension funds, and depend upon generous returns to support their retirement.

The economic and financial troubles have not run their course. In the face of growing deficits, bond buyers will demand higher interest payments on U.S. bonds, forcing the federal government to spend and borrow even more to cover those rising interest charges. In addition, those rising interest rates have created the conditions for a recession next year, with more unemployment and more declines in stocks to follow. American workers, looking at their take home pay, are not happy with their situation.

On the international scene, President Biden set the stage for more troubles through a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, which allowed the Taliban to regain control over the country. U.S. military forces left behind $7 billion in military equipment in the rapid exit, which the Taliban seized and distributed to terrorist groups in the region. On top of that, thirteen U.S. service members were killed by a suicide bomb in the midst of the confused and disorderly exit. Biden declared afterwards that the withdrawal was justified and necessary, then blamed it on Donald Trump.

Vladimir Putin undoubtedly took notice of this sign of American weakness, though some suggest that he had already decided to invade Ukraine after Biden entered the White House. In any case, he sent his troops into Ukraine in early 2022, with the goal of seizing control of the country, much as he had annexed Crimea (part of Ukraine) during Barack Obama’s presidency. The U.S. responded, along with her NATO allies, by sending arms of arms to Ukraine, which Ukrainians used to block Russia’s advance but without restoring pre-invasion borders.

The war has caused immense destruction in Ukraine, with hundreds of thousands of casualties in the country, along with significant damage to Russia’s military operation, but with no end to the conflict yet in sight. Meanwhile, Americans are increasingly divided about further expenditures in support of the conflict. How does it end? The United States, along with NATO allies and leaders in Ukraine, is resisting a negotiated settlement because it will be seen as a victory for Putin and a defeat for NATO because it will allow Putin to keep the territorial fruits of his invasion. Yet that may be the only way the stalemate can be resolved. In the meantime, the war will continue.

In the midst of this, Palestinian leaders in Gaza planned a savage attack on Israel, which they carried out on October 7 in the southern part of the country, leaving more than 1,400 Israelis dead, hundreds more wounded, and more than 200 taken as hostages. President Biden visited the country, and (appropriately) promised support for Israel in its expected attack on Hamas strongholds in the Gaza strip. The war will probably conclude with a military victory for Israel, but at a high cost in terms of international opinion.

Biden, now seeing the blowback from his support for Israel among progressive and pro-Palestinian groups within the Democratic Party, is now looking for a way out that will satisfy both the pro- and anti-Israel segments of his party. One approach is to pressure Israel for a humanitarian “pause” in the fighting – which Israel’s leaders have rejected. Arab and Moslem voters, who did not like Trump the last time around, are reconsidering their options. In this situation, Biden is beginning to look like a man driving an automobile with his feet on the brake and gas pedals at the same time.

China is watching these developments at a distance, and may be planning its own operations in the region, whether against Taiwan or another target. Any such moves would pose difficult challenges to the United States already tied down by two wars and ill prepared for still another encounter in the Far East. Chinese leaders are well aware of America’s difficulties, and are keeping their own counsel. It is a good question whether they will take advantage of Biden’s troubles, or perhaps follow the ancient rule that there is no point in taking on an adversary already in the process of committing suicide.

For all of these reasons, Biden is in trouble with the voters as he looks ahead to next year’s election. It is no surprise that recent polls find him trailing Trump in the battleground states, notwithstanding his administration’s efforts to sideline Trump with courtroom prosecutions. Some Democrats, fearing that Biden will lose next year, have asked him to step aside in favor of another candidate. They fear that he is sinking because voters see that he is too old for the job, but in fact he is in trouble because voters see that he is sowing chaos wherever he steps, both at home and abroad.

No one knows who will win the presidential contest next year, but it is now clear that it is unlikely to be “President Chaos.”

2024, Joe Biden, and Catastrophic Failures

Ward Clark reporting for RedState 

If the Democratic Party is smart, they'll already be looking for ways to ease old Joe Biden out the door. President Biden grows more befuddled by the day, his (handlers') economic policies are a disaster, the southern border is an open wound, and he spends more time on the beach in Rehoboth than doing any actual work. But of all that, it may be the combination of the Israel-Hamas war and that southern border that does him in at last.

The question is not whether Joe Biden will drop out of the 2024 White House race, but when? At least, so believe a growing number of observers as various negative and campaign-damaging “straws” pile up on the president’s already fragile political back.

At a certain point — arguably, any week now — these negative issues will become completely untenable to the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Party, the Democratic powerbrokers behind the scenes, and even for many in the liberal media who appear to have been trying to protect Biden since he first ran against then-President Donald Trump in 2020.

Leaving aside the growing concerns about Biden’s age (he will turn 82 after the November 2024 election) and his perceived cognitive issues, the brutal attack on Israel by Hamas — which triggered ugly demonstrations at a number of U.S. colleges and in cities here and across the world — has shocked many into suddenly remembering or realizing that we live in a dangerous world where quality of life can be taken away in a flash.

Not just quality of life, mind you, but life itself. We're already seeing rioting in the streets of our major cities and in major cities elsewhere in the world, and now a Jewish man is dead, killed by a pro-Hamas demonstrator. It would be great to think that he will be the last, but he probably won't be. In France, another Jewish person, this time a woman, was stabbed, but fortunately, she survived.

Meanwhile, the southern border is wide open.

Biden's own army of TikTok "influencers" is mutinying over his stated support for Israel, a democratic nation fighting against vicious Bronze Age barbarians.

Biden appears to be more concerned with dealing with the various social contagions, paranoias, and mental issues among some of his nuttier constituents than he is dealing with the sudden rampant hatred for the Jewish people that seems to be cropping up everywhere.

Worse, the President grows more confused and more befuddled by the day. Never an honest man nor a particularly intelligent one, he is now falling apart. The House Oversight Committee seems to be moving with the speed of a glacier on a particularly lazy day, but they are moving, and the President and his family's corruption comes more to light by the moment.

Meanwhile, the southern border is wide open. And that may be Joe Biden's biggest liability.

As reported by Real Clear Investigations and others, hundreds of people on the FBI’s terrorist watch list almost certainly have slipped into the United States amid millions of other illegal migrants during the past three years, according to former federal officials and experts.

Imagine if a major terror attack (perish the thought, but one can't help but admit the possibility) happens here, in one of our major cities. Imagine an attack like the one carried out by Hamas against Israel on October 7th. And imagine if it is determined that the attackers infiltrated across that wide-open southern border. There won't be an electoral or campaign strategy in the world that could save Joe Biden or his understudy.

Ay, and that's the rub: They can't have Kamala Harris, she of the grating cackle, leading the ticket either. It will have to be someone new — and Kamala, like old Joe, will have to be put out to pasture.

The Secret To Marxism’s Success? Slowly Infiltrating Existing Structures

Marxists rejected the outward revolution that Karl Marx had planned, and instead opted to subtly shape the way people thought.

posted by Ted Cruz at The Federalist

The following is an excerpt from Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America.

The New Left of the early 1970s knew they could not mount a violent revolution against the government. Not if they wanted to be successful. They could no longer throw bricks through windows, scream at police officers, and hold unruly demonstrations in the public square if they wanted to win hearts and minds to their cause — at least not yet.

For now, they had to take the ideas of Marx, the ones that they had worked so hard to bring to the United States, and quietly slip them into the minds of people in some other way.

The question was: How?

The answer, oddly enough, came in part from an obscure series of political essays called Prison Notebooks, selections from which had just appeared in translation in the United States, in 1971.

These notebooks were written by a man named Antonio Gramsci, who had been imprisoned in the last years of his life, from 1926 to 1937, by Benito Mussolini shortly after Mussolini became dictator in Gramsci’s home country of Italy. For years, Gramsci had been an active member of the Italian Communist Party, attempting to overthrow the government and bring about a worker’s paradise on Earth just as his hero Karl Marx had envisioned.

But he kept hitting walls. The society Gramsci and his comrades were living in seemed especially resistant to the doctrines of communism that they were pushing — not to mention that their Marxist groups kept splitting apart on account of infighting and poor organization.

But Gramsci didn’t blame himself or his fellow communists for their constant failure. He certainly didn’t blame the bad ideas of Karl Marx.

Instead, like so many Marxists before and after him, he blamed society. In his view Italy, and other societies in the West, were especially resistant to Marxism because they were made up of institutions that were not connected to the government: universities, schools, churches, and newspapers, as well as publishing houses and other means of distributing popular culture. This made implementing Marxism, which relied on the central power of the government to control everything, extremely difficult.

“In the East,” Gramsci would write in his Prison Notebooks, describing his moment of epiphany, “the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The state was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.”

According to Gramsci, the only way to truly change society was not by violent revolution, but by infiltrating the institutions that make Western society unique. If Marxists could get inside the universities, for instance, where knowledge is effectively “made,” or get jobs at publishing houses, which were the main avenues through which ideas were distributed at the time, they might be able to change the ways people thought in subtle ways, rather than having to resort to the kind of outward revolution that Karl Marx had planned on.

As the writer Nate Hochman recently described in National Review, Gramsci set out a plan that would require any would-be Marxist revolutionaries to “engage in a longer, more covert counterhegemonic struggle, waged via a ‘war of position’ against the ruling cultural consensus. That war of position would not, as in the East, culminate in a single violent, cathartic victory. It would require a protracted, multifront battle for control of the civic structures that form the social consciousness.”

Antonio Gramsci died before he could begin that struggle in his home country. Unlike many reformed revolutionaries, my father among them, he died without ever seeing the error of his ways. And the writing he had done in prison eventually made it out to the world, where it was picked up by young Marxists eager to conduct exactly the kind of covert war he’d described.

One of these people was Rudi Dutschke, a student activist in Germany who had already achieved considerable success by the 1960s when he encountered Gramsci’s ideas. Using these ideas as well as the work of other Marxist scholars, Dutschke proposed what he called “the long march through the institutions.” According to this vision, Marxist revolutionaries would no longer simply protest in the streets and try to tear down existing structures. They would, rather, infiltrate those existing structures in an attempt to change them from within. Given his talent as a public speaker and a campus organizer, Dutschke was able to spread his ideas quite widely across the globe.

At some point in the 1960s, they reached the United States, and by the end of the decade the New Left in America was already beginning to burn out. The primary means of transmission was a professor named Herbert Marcuse, who had done some organizing with Dutschke before coming to the United States and who’d grown to admire Dutschke’s plan for the “long march through the institutions.” In a letter to Dutschke written in 1971, Marcuse said that the long march would be “the only effective way” to bring about a true left-wing revolution in the United States.

Marcuse described the strategy in detail in a book published the next year. He described how leftists would now work “against the established institutions while working within them, but not simply by ‘boring from within,’ rather by ‘doing the job,’ learning (how to program and read computers, how to teach at all levels of education, how to use the mass media, how to organize production, how to recognize and eschew planned obsolescence, how to design, et cetera), and at the same time preserving one’s own consciousness in working with others.”

In other words, the activists who had once planted bombs in buildings and torched cars to bring about revolution would now have to calm down, get jobs, and pretend to be productive members of society (“doing the job”). All the while, though, they would maintain their revolutionary ideas (“preserving one’s own consciousness”) and work to insert those ideas into the work they did, indoctrinating as many people as possible in the process. Those who became university professors would treat figures like Karl Marx kindly while attacking capitalists and other revered figures from American history. Those who went into information technology would design systems with a subtle liberal bias. Those in journalism would work to transform the newspapers — and, eventually, the cable news networks and internet startups — into propaganda organs for the left.

Glenn Greenwald Discusses the Current Status of the Ukraine Conflict

Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson sit down and discuss the status of the current “war” in Ukraine.  The subject of the reality around the war comes as a consequence of several media outlets who have begun writing about the State Dept and CIA looking for an exit from World War Reddit.   WATCH:

According to sources who are speaking to NBC News, U.S. and EU officials are gently beginning to talk to Ukraine government officials about what steps might need to be taken to bring an end to the Ukraine-Russia war. Obviously, for those who do not pretend, we all know the decision to end this conflict comes down to the USA telling Ukraine President Zelenskyy to open peace talks with Russia.

Biden Is Asked About Humanitarian Pause, His Response Is Incredibly Weird and Concerning

Nick Arama reporting for RedState 

With everything that's going on, you might think Joe Biden would have a heavy schedule of dealing with all the chaos. But it's Biden, so not so much. His public schedule had virtually nothing on it. 

It had one event scheduled, touring a White House demonstration event. The event is a campaign ad showing demos of what his administration has allegedly done in things like science and technology. This is what Biden is doing while Americans are being held hostage by Hamas and being fired upon by Iranian proxies. This is what he is doing while the Democratic Party is going off the tracks helping terrorists by pushing for a cease-fire. 

I suppose the lady was fortunate that he didn't sniff her hair. 

But then Biden was asked about his discussions with Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu and if he had asked Netanyahu for a "three-day pause" in the Israel-Hamas war, and even for the master of disaster and gaffe king Biden, his answer was beyond weird. 

"Heat pumps," Biden answered. 

What the heck? What is that an answer to? How far gone is he? He was standing next to a big sign about heat pipes. Maybe he thought that was his teleprompter with the answer he was supposed to give. 

The reporter then tried again with the same question. Then what Biden admitted was concerning: "Didn't get a chance to talk to him today. Did ask him for a pause in the past. Yesterday." So he's admitting that he's been pressuring Netanyahu for a pause. We wrote how Kirby was acknowledging it earlier on Tuesday. A three-day pause is a cease-fire, just with a different term, to make it look like you're not having a cease-fire. It isn't up to Biden, and so far, it looks like Netanyahu is rebuffing him. It sounds like Biden is starting to cave and is doing so to appease the leftist pressure on him for a cease-fire. It was predictable that he wouldn't have the courage to stand up to them. 

It makes one wonder what's worse -- when he's incoherent and says weird things like "heat pumps," or when he is momentarily coherent and admits the bad things he's encouraging. 

But if "heat pumps" wasn't weird enough for you, he wandered off during the demos, to the seeming surprise of the woman who was walking him through it. She appeared to laugh at him. Then they cut the feed, probably trying to stop coverage of any further weirdness. 

He's getting worse. Is it any wonder he's doing so badly in the polls now? I don't see how he possibly makes it to 2024 when he's deteriorating so rapidly.