Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
1. Next
2. Situation
3. Analysis
4. Purge
5. Opportunities
6. Lisa
1. Next. Now that congress considered challenges to the 2020 Electors and certified the election for Harris – Biden, what’s next? While I’ve enjoyed reading Rex and Thomas Wictor on QuodVerum over the last couple months, time does get short, and the hourglass completely runs out of sand Weds, Jan 20, meaning whatever is gonna happen needs to do so Tuesday night. What does President Trump do next? While being a Trumpist, I would never deign to think for him. OTOH, if it were me, over the course of the next week, I would do the following:
- Declassify everything possible and release it to the public. Think dumptrucks full of documents, which is why social media is doing everything possible to make sure whatever is declassified is never published in any meaningful manner.
- Issue pardons for everyone you think the vindictive democrats, media and social media would target in the upcoming years.
- Do everything humanly possible to protect your family from what you expect to come.
But what do I know? Time is short for President Trump. He has to do whatever he is going to do sometime this week, as he will no longer have the ability to declassify anything once he is out of Office on Wednesday, though his appointees retain that power until they are replaced, which sets up an interesting timing issue. Congress will be out on vacation for a couple weeks following the inauguration, leaving the Trump appointees a few weeks to run wild, some of whom will, most of whom won’t. This is seemingly Good News, right up until you remember that Trump’s friends all abandoned him on Jan 6. Note to self: Whatever you plan on doing, don’t plan it trusting your supposed friends to step up and put their sorry backsides on the line for you. Final thoughts: There are several writers on QuodVerum who still believe Trump may be able to pull a rabbit out of this hat. Should that happen, nobody will be happier than I. But never confuse hope with action. The clock keeps on ticking and the remaining days are few and it takes actual time to do things like packing the house for a move.
2. Situation. Following the joint session of congress to approve the results of the Electoral College on Weds, we had the violent attack on the Capitol by members of the protesters. Some may have been AntiFa. Some might have been idiots on our side. On that same day, Big Tech started an aggressive censorship program for everything conservative, going so far as to remove one of their Twitter competitors, Parler, from the internet food chain. At week’s end, democrats and their media cheerleaders were talking about taking a second bite from the impeachment apple, with a second impeachment of President Trump ostensibly for fomenting the Wednesday festivities.
3. Analysis. At first (and last) glance, these are not the actions of people who are now Masters of the Universe. They are not the actions of people who think they won the election fair and square. Rather, they are the actions of cornered rats, scared spitless that they are about to be outed. And they are doing their level best to make sure that nobody, absolutely nobody, publicly says anything that either disagrees with or interferes with that narrative. The question becomes: what do we do about it? I don’t want to minimize anything as this is deadly serious, for it is one thing to get punted off FakeBook or Twitter, but it is entirely a different thing when the cancel mob gets you kicked off a Delta flight for talking about Trump in public, or the Lincoln Project enters your name in their database to ensure you will never be employed again, or worse of all, Cancel Culture turns off your banking based on social media bans, which it can and is doing. All of this is done without any recourse at all. It’s coming, so be ready for it, as our market-based response will take a while to put in place. Here’s where it gets fun, as Our Side has been in Nuclear Winter mode following the GA Senate final, with some version of the REM End of the World and We Know It now in play. But it’s not the end of the world, as we now have 50 democrats and a couple Republicans who want to be the most powerful person in government, the one who chooses not to go along with their party. As the system is now skewed toward democrats, Schumer will organize a 50-50 majority with a Harris tiebreaker, this means that ANY democrat (think Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema or Mark Kelly) can step up and derail the highly anticipated and media celebrated leftist steam roller over our nation. Likewise, so can Mitt Romney or Lisa Murkowski cross the aisle in a self-righteous fit of bipartisanship to screw over those who put them in office. Any (or all) of these will put speedbumps in the road of total world domination by the newly ensconced socialists and O’Bamaoids. If nothing else, it will be good viewing. Bring popcorn. Final couple of thoughts. Although the O’Bama-ites are about to infest the WH once again, they don’t have a free reign, as we have one each issue Dr Jill Biden, who wants to do her best Edith Wilson impression for the next four years, wanting to run the country in the stead of her soon to be incapacitated husband. She will not be easily removed by Kamala Harris or the O’Bamaoids. Lastly, while O’Bama talked the good talk, he was famously lazy, watching ESPN when he should have been nominating federal judges. He likes to be stroked. Work, not so much. While this might work in our favor, it is not worth planning around. Expect the worst. If anything else happens, it is indeed a Good Day.
4. Purge. One of the problems with the political left is that they take cautionary tales as instruction manuals. 1984 and Animal Farm being two most obvious. Last week, the added the revenge porn Purge series of moves as another example, with Big Tech executing a purge of conservatives from their platforms. All the Big Guys participated: Goolag, Apple, Amazon, FakeBook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube. First up was President Trump, who was permanently banned from Twitter and a number of other social media platforms ostensibly for causing the Capitol invasion on Wednesday. They were closely followed by an orchestrated, coordinated assault on Parler by Goolag, Apple and Amazon. Goolag and Apple removed the Parler app from their app stores. Amazon punted Parler off Amazon Web Services, all for some bogus accusation that they were trafficking in hate. For its part, Parler thinks they can be back up in a couple days rather than the week down originally anticipated. A wide number of conservatives followed Trump off Twitter, deactivating their accounts on their way to Parler. Apparently, the Purge is not universally popular in Silicon Valley, as Citizen Free Press Sunday reported that senior engineers from Big Tech were contacting Gab and other platforms looking for employment. As usual, there is no reporting of the impact of Big Tech telling half their customer base to go straight to a Very Hot Place. No matter, as those customers are about to take your stock and half of your market share to a Very Hot Place with them as they leave. Citizen Free Press was down for about a day as it swapped servers. Don’t know if they were similarly targeted. There has been a lot of speculation about Trump becoming the next media mogul. Given this opening, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Trump kids weren’t the next Big Tech moguls as this all shakes out.
5. Opportunities. With all that in mind, what are the opportunities following the ongoing purge? In order to discuss that, a short side trip down the decoupling bunny trail is in order. Decoupling from China has been talked about for a few years, with increasing seriousness following their transmission of the Wuhan Flu. Note that even the normal flu also comes out of that part of the world, so even if the CCP wasn’t involved, decoupling from China is somewhere between justifiable and vital on simple public health grounds all by themselves. Similarly, I have started decoupling from the political left. Left the subscription to the local paper lapse after 28 years. Deactivated my Twitter account over the weekend, likely disappointing the whopping 5 followers I had. Moved off Drudge after 25 years a couple months before the election. Moved off Fox after the early Arizona call for Biden as they slow-rolled solid Trump wins in other states. While I still use Goolag for most searching, anything political in nature starts and usually finishes with Duck Duck Go. The only reason I am still on FakeBook is because I have adult children who live their lives on it. There are more, but you get the idea. Lefties love lists, especially hit lists of people to destroy. We conservatives can also create lists, especially lists of people to no longer do business with. Apple and Google should be on that list with their assault on Parler. Amazon Web Services just put themselves on that list for punting Parler as did Delta Airlines for kicking a couple passengers off a flight late last week who were talking about Trump using approving terms. Limbaugh, Levin and Guttfeld all deactivated their Twitter accounts and decamped to Parler. While there are alternatives to Big Tech, those alternatives are about to be inundated in new users as 100 million Americans make the move. This will be both good news and bad news. New business is always good news. But too much new business inundating platforms that are not currently sized to handle the new customer base will cause disruption that will take a while to sort out, so please be patient. But all of those alternatives are going to be hiring, looking for new owners and investors, opportunities for anyone who wants to play. The danger here is the cancel culture the political left is using with impunity. Essentially, they are using corporations, banking, and Big Tech to do their dirty work and as of today there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Be prepared for personal and investment banking going away at the drop of a hat based on little more than a social media ban. Have a plan. Finally, a thought about Section 230. Scott Adams is of the opinion that a repeal of Section 230, opening Big Tech to lawsuits is a Bad Thing. Rationale? The political left is fully invested in lawfare. They use it ALL the time. They are good at it, so the alternative platforms who engage in free speech are more likely to have something offensive posted, and in turn become lawfare bait much easier to kill than Big Tech. Should Section 230 be repealed, the alternatives will be destroyed first, and rather quickly. Rather, Big Tech ought to be regulated like a set of public utilities.
6. Riot. Our Senior US Senator, Lisa Murkowski was particularly irate at the riot and invasion of the capitol, to the point where she is threatening to leave the Republican Party if it doesn’t remove Trump from office. Sooner would be better than later. To a lot of us in Alaska, that isn’t necessarily a Bad Thing. The problem is that Lisa is so self-righteous, arrogant and self-important that she will likely refuse to do what Phil Gramm did in 1983. Gramm at the time was a democrat congress critter from Texas who supported Ronald Reagan. He was stripped of committee membership by the House leadership in early 1983. He resigned congress and ran for reelection as a Republican a couple months later. He won and won a second election to the US Senate in 1984. If Lisa wants to not be a Republican anymore, then she needs to resign and run for reelection in a special election. She is up for reelection in 2022 under a new ranked choice scheme. What do I think she will do? I expect a reprise of Jumping Jim Jeffords, and a party switch in return for committee chairmanship.
More later –
- AG