Scales Falling from Democrat Eyes

The scales are rapidly falling off of the eyes of many people. They are now free to talk about the Democrat party cult of ideology. You are invited to start saying what you are really thinking. Join me in doing this. You'll find it refreshing, healthy and invigorating. Unlock the door to your own mental prison and come on out into the sunlight. Politics is corrupted when it is treated like a religion. Up is again up. 2 + 2 = 4 again. Lindy Li is a recent example:

From this post by Bad Hombre:

Kamala campaign advisor Lindy Li quits the Democrat Party: "I don’t want to be part of this tent anymore. I don’t want to be part of this craziness. I want to be part of the team that treats me with common decency."

Li says she’s been the target of a smear and cancel campaign because she dared to ask questions about Kamala’s mismanagement of donor money that Li helped her raise.

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Coleman Hughes Misfires on Tulsi Gabbard as DNI

I very much admire Coleman Hughes. He bravely stood up to the race-hucksters over the past five years and advocated for the type of color-blindness embraced by almost all classical liberals. But on CNN he naively stepped into an area in which he is not well informed: National Security. Almost everything he says in opposition to Tulsi Gabbard is incorrect and it wouldn't have taken much time to get informed before going live. Very disappointing, but this illustrates something ubiquitous. Everyone I know (even myself) who gets a lot right sometimes falls off the rails. The causes are many: tribalism, hubris, fatigue and failing to be self-critical. It happens to all of us, some of the time and free speech is the best approach we know to limit these missteps. So here is Glenn Greenwald speaking freely about Coleman's embarrassing moment on CNN:

Glenn Greenwald:

There was a panel discussion about why Tulsi Gabbard is this great evil, and the opposition to her was led by Coleman Hughes, who--I don't really understand when he became an expert on foreign policy. He became known speaking, I think, quite insightfully, about things like race and class and the intersection of them. I've been on his show before. He's been on mine.

Suddenly, though, he's now a great expert in the Middle East, he's a vehement supporter of Israel--as much as Barry Weiss or Sam Harris or people like that are. And here he is on CNN, maligning Tulsi Gabbard, who knows 10 million times more about foreign policy in her toenail than Coleman Hughes has in his entire arsenal of knowledge. But here he is expressing why she's such a terrible choice as DNI [Director of National Intelligence].

Coleman Hughes:

It's a very confounding. Look, call me crazy, but I think the Director of National Intelligence should be a person who, A) trusts US intelligence, and B) likes US intelligence. What do we know about Tulsi Gabbard? We know that when Assad gassed civilians in 2017 and our intelligence agencies determined that and Trump decided to strike those facilities, Gabbard doubted that. She doubted the findings of our own intelligence and she went to go visit Assad. And we know that she defends Julian Assange, who released classified informations that imperiled the people we were working with in Afghanistan and the Taliban went out there and were able to kill them one by one. And so, you know, this is exactly the opposite of the person you would want leading national intelligence.

Glenn Greenwald:

He's saying that the only kinds of people you want to lead the intelligence agencies are people who A) trust what they tell you and B) like how they operate. How can any sentient human being who knows anything about the last 25 years of American history, --and even if you want to go back much further--and it's the same thing. But just going back to the last 25 years since the war in Iraq and the run up to it, going all the way through things like Syria and Libya and Russiagate and the Hunter Biden laptop, and all the different ways that these intelligence agencies have interfered in our politics, improperly and based on lies--It's not disqualifying to distrust the intelligence agencies or to dislike how they operate and want to change it. What's disqualifying is to trust the intelligence agencies. How mindless must somebody be to say, "Yeah, I really trust the CIA. I think their pronouncements are all correct."

Oh, the audacity of her to question anything that the CIA was saying about the war in Syria, when the CIA was leading, one of those dirty wars that they love to fight at a billion dollars a year that Obama unleashed them to fight in order to remove Bashar Al Assad from power and replace [him with] someone else they wanted. Oh no, questioning the intelligence agencies. Tulsi Gabbard questioned what they said, doubted some of their pronouncements, and now she's somehow ineligible to lead them, because she doesn't have blind, mindless faith in them.

This is conventional wisdom in Washington. Coleman doesn't know anything about the topics of which he's opining, including what he said about WikiLeaks. And the idea that WikiLeaks is supposed to be considered some sort of nefarious group that nobody can defend when they've done more than anybody to bring transparency to our government, including the lies they told about the wars in which Tulsi Gabbard fought and the corruption of our allies, and all the lies that we've been told as the public about what our government was doing.

The idea that defending Julian Assange for bringing transparency is somehow disqualifying? I'm sure he would say the same thing about Edward Snowden, who Tulsi Gabbard also supports, is just mind-blowingly dumb. But this we showed you this because it's so reflective of how Washington thinks. Coleman Hughes--what he does when he doesn't know what he's talking about, is--he just picks up on conventional wisdom and the world in which he resides with Bari Weiss and those kind of people, he just repeats what that world thinks without an even an inch of knowledge. But it's nonetheless worth seeing, because that is the opposition to Tulsi Gabbard: "Oh, she's not a fan of the CIA. She's not a fan of the NSA. She doesn't think the intelligence agencies like Homeland Security have been doing a good job, have been honest with the American people. This is what Donald Trump ran on. He didn't run on appointing the kind of people that Coleman Hughes thinks should be appointed: people who think the intelligence communities are so trustworthy in whatever they're doing.

[Trump] ran on a campaign promise to uproot them, to fundamentally drain their swamp and to rebuild them into more ethical and trustworthy institutions, and Tulsi Gabbard represents that. The only people scared of her are the people who should be scared, the people who want to keep those institutions in place, despite all the lies they told and the corruption they've imposed, precisely because they're the ones who benefit most from it. But they don't want any one questioning, let alone changing, how Washington works.

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The Real Reason for U.S. Warmongering in Ukraine

This is the real reason the Biden-Harris Administration is risking the deaths of hundreds of millions of Americans in a nuclear war. Now we are hearing them say it out loud.

For more on this horrifying situation and for a LOT more deep analysis on U.S. dysfunction that you owe it to yourself to hear, consider viewing Tucker Carlson's interview with Amaryllis Fox Kennedy. From this Youtube video description: "She spent ten years as a CIA officer before running Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign. She’s now campaigning for Trump."

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Why Martin Gurri is Voting for Trump

Martin Gurri's thoughtful analysis of the considerable flaws of both candidates. The Founders of this Country must be weeping in their graves.

"Kamala Harris or Donald Trump—the empty pantsuit of elitism or the eternal master of disaster? We must pick one or the other on November 5."

Here is Gurri's overview of the Democrats:

There are only two vital forces in American politics today: those who wish to control everything, and those who wish not to be controlled. The antagonists are roughly equal in number but vastly disproportionate in strength. True to its nature, one side controls virtually all the institutions that hedge the life of the voters. Also true to its nature, the other side spends most of the time fighting with itself.

The forces of control own the White House, the Senate, the media, the universities, the mainstream churches, the federal and state bureaucracies, most corporations, most digital platforms, and the entirety of American culture. Homegrown control freaks can also rely on assistance from Control International, the cabal of like-minded elites that runs the United Nations, the European Union, and any number of nation-states from Britain to Brazil.

Why the itch to control? Nietzsche would explain it as pure will to power, and that’s a perfectly adequate account.

The Democratic Party is the party of control.

Excerpt re Harris:

So here is the most compelling reason I will be voting against Harris and the Democrats in November. I was born in Cuba. I recognize the stench of hypocrisy emanating from those who conceal lust for power behind a buzz of salvationist jargon.

If the control accumulated by the administration had been used for good—if the world were calm and at peace, say, or the American public brought to unity as was promised—we might have been convinced it has some merit. But there’s a reason Biden is no longer on the ballot. There’s a reason Harris is running away from her administration’s policies. At home and abroad, the last four years have been a rolling disaster—and the voters know it. This crowd understands institutional control and nothing else. Out in the world, failure has been habitual, horrendous, epic in its dimensions.

Where to begin? For motives I am hard put to explain, the Biden-Harris people encouraged millions of illegal aliens to swarm into our urban centers. They mismanaged the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, relying (naturally) on harmful school closures, lockdowns, and mandates, all based on contrived falsehoods, and they utterly botched the persuasion campaign for the vaccines. They inflated, indebted, and overregulated the economy. They spent trillions but were unable to build or achieve much beyond a handful of charging stations: We can guess where the money went. They promoted grotesque stereotypes based on race and sexual preference, a policy that sowed division and reaped distrust...

China is aggressively expanding its military, particularly its navy, even as our own military has atrophied because of antique equipment and low enlistment rates. We can’t even deploy all our warships because we lack the personnel to do so.

There are too many leaks in the dike and not enough fingers—not to mention an absolute dearth of strategic thinking to identify where our priorities lie in a dangerous world.

This, then, is my secondary reason for voting against Harris. I’m not sure we can survive four more years of such toxic levels of incompetence.

Harris is not helped by her recent interviews. Brett Baier tells her the numbers: 79% of Americans think the country is on the wrong track and you and Joe Biden have been in charge for the past 3 1/2 years. Harris: It's Trump's Fault.

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Jonathan Rauch: In Support or Traditional Liberalism

Jonathan Rauch gives a full-throated support of liberalism in "Why You Should Feel Good About Liberalism: We need to get better at standing up for the greatest social technology ever devised."

What do we (or at least I) mean by liberalism?

Not progressivism or moderate leftism, as the term came to mean in postwar U.S. discourse. Rather, liberalism in the tradition of Locke, Kant, and the Founders. It is not one idea but a family of ideas with many variants. Its central philosophy is that all persons are born free and equal. Its operational principles include the rule of law, pluralism, toleration, minority rights, distributed authority, limited government, and (subject to the other requirements) democratic decision-making. Its distinctive method of social organization is to rely on impersonal rules and open-ended, decentralized processes to make collective decisions.

Embodying those notions are three interlinked social systems: liberal democracy to make political choices; market capitalism to make economic choices; and science and other forms of open critical exchange to make epistemic choices (that is, decisions about truth and knowledge). By transcending tribe, renouncing authoritarianism, substituting rules for rulers, and treating persons as interchangeable, liberalism achieves what no other social system can offer, at least on a large scale: coordination without control. In a liberal system, everyone can participate but no one is in charge.

In the context of human history, everything about liberalism is radical: its rejection of personal and tribal authority, its insistence on treating persons as interchangeable, its demand that dissent be tolerated and minorities protected, its embrace of change and uncertainty. All of its premises run counter to hardwired human instincts. Liberalism is the strangest and most counterintuitive social idea ever conceived, a disadvantage offset only by the fact that it is also the most successful social idea ever conceived.

Of course, it is imperfect. It does not solve every old problem and new problems always crop up. But all of the big social problems, from poverty and inequality to environmental degradation, war, and disease, are demonstrably better handled by liberal than non-liberal societies.

What are the defects in other political systems. Rauch's article contains sections dealing with each:

First: the challengers are either proven failures or vaporware. Second: the challengers are enemies of equality. Third: the challengers can’t self-correct. Finally: the challengers are authoritarian.

This is an excellent detailed persuasive article. I highly recommend it.

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