Kurt Fliegel
Yes, Trump set himself on fire yesterday. But this self-immolation wasn’t an accident and it wasn’t crazy. It was exactly what he wanted.
[from The Bulwark]
Almost back to medieval times but not quite.
“When the Supreme Court’s Ohio v. EPA decision blocked Environmental Protection Agency limits on Midwestern states polluting their downwind neighbors, a sad but telling coda came in Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion. In five instances, it confused nitrogen oxide, a pollutant that contributes to ozone formation, with nitrous oxide, better known as laughing gas.
You can’t make this stuff up. This repeated mistake in the 5-4 decision exemplifies a high court not just indifferent to facts but contemptuous of them.”
[from Scientific American]
Finally finally finally, the issue of gun violence will be front and center in a presidential election campaign. The Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions is a first-rate source of current evidence-based information on how gun violence affects public health, and offers risk-based solutions for how to turn the tide. If you need to quote information in your discussions with others, this is where to go. Also consider taking their free (modest price if you want a certificate) Coursera course, Reducing Gun Violence in America: Evidence for Change.
When they try to subvert the public school system—and they’re trying real hard—everyone ends up paying a very real price.
[from ProPublica]
The brilliance shown by the Harris campaign in making Freedom the major theme of her speeches and materials is astonishing and long overdue.
In 2017, when MAGA first took over our country and warped its values and symbols, I participated in a number of protests against the new president and his followers making certain that when I did, whenever I carried a flag that said “RESIST” or a sign calling out people for what they were, I also carried an American flag—because I was not willing to cede one inch of symbolism or patriotism to those vile manipulators and treasonweasels.
When my flags shot up simultaneously in the video on the news desk’s monitor (0:07 second mark) during this CBS Chicago coverage of the March for Truth in June 2017, I was unintentionally echoing the premise of a book written by George Layoff a decade earlier. Why we didn’t all get on this sooner, I don’t know, but we’re all on it now. Whose freedom? OUR freedom. Every last one of us.
Starting a compilation, will add as time goes on. Will do the same for the top of the ticket soon. There is video or print to back up every one of these quotes.
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“We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”
— Introduction to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ new book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, to be published September 2024“In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR [Human Resources], college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people.”
— Endorsement for Jack Posobiec’s book Unhumans, July 2024“We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power… I don’t think there’s a compromise that we’re gonna come with… Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re gonna keep losing.”
— Interview on Federalist TV, 2024
“If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there. That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020. I think that’s what we should have done.”
— interview with NBC News, 6 February 2024“I think that what Trump should do, like if I was giving him one piece of advice, fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And when the courts – because you will get taken to court – and then when the courts stop you, stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it,”
— Jack Murphy podcast, September 2021
“We are effectively run in this country … by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too. It’s just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.”
— appearance on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” July 2021“When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power. You should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don’t have kids. Let’s face the consequences and the reality. If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.”
— address to Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 24 July 2021“Trump’s biggest failure as a political leader is that he sees the worst in people, and he encourages the worst in people.”
— TIME Magazine interview, 2016“Mr. Trump, like too much of the church, offers little more than an excuse to project complex problems onto simple villains. Yet the white working class needs neither more finger-pointing nor more fiery sermons.’
— New York Times, 26 June 2016“Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office.”
— New York Times, April 2016“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.’”
— Hillbilly Elegy, 2016
With that soundtrack and that message, these ads are gonna go viral every time.
“Rudeness is the weak man’s imitation of strength.”— Eric Hoffer
Direct link to the full version of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. As always, if you don’t read the source material, whether it be indictments, articles of impeachment, or policy platforms, you don’t have an opinion—you only have what someone else told you to say. Memes are for children. Even if you don’t read the entire 900 pages, the 16 page foreword outlines enough of their mission to get an idea, and you can always skip to chapters on policy issues you’re most interested in. Full PDF is available for download by clicking the READ THE MANDATE button.
Because it’s important to know what’s driving policy aside from MAGA prejudices, I’m resharing this from a while ago because this vile philosophy of longtermism is front and center in the 2024 presidential election in the form of money and influence from Silicon Valley cretins including the apartheid-raised South Africans Peter Thiel (bought J.D. Vance’s place on the ticket), Elon Musk (hijacked X into the GOP’s most important propaganda platform), and David Sack (a keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention). Article is a long read but worth the effort.
Longtermism: “A giant massacre for man, a small misstep for mankind.”
She was on fire. If this is what the campaign will be, we have more than a fighting chance, both as a political party and as a country.
Pay no attention to the unnecessarily inflammatory CNN headline–listen to the build to the future.
Separating political content and discussion from Commonplace posts, starting with the 2024 US presidential election. This is mostly a reference channel and parking lot for me, but also a safety valve that will spare my friends on other social media.
