Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Populism
2. Reframing
3. Embryos
4. Rigged
5. Letitia
6. Ford
7. Indigenous
8. Loans
9. Alito
1. Populism. From the land of “The enemy gets a vote” comes Deep State (and its various supplicants, strap hangers and leeches) success redefining the notion of populism. They have defined populism as the face of the political threat to their very existence and want to end it as harshly and completely as possible. They spent a lot of energy constructing the structure that today feeds, clothes and pays them. In return, they get nearly unlimited power in the western world. And they will do everything humanly possible to maintain and extend that power, up to the point where they are busily mowing down the entire US legal system and all the unwritten rules this society used to operate under. Populism, which manifests itself today in the various trucker’s strikes, Trump / MAGA, and similar movements today in other nations. Here in the US, it can be traced back to the TEA Party under O’Bama or Nixon’s silent majority half a century ago. Populism is organic, and unlike the Deep State, growing everywhere in reaction to the excesses of their governments in the political world while being fought every step of the way by very same entrenched government’s respective Deep States. As part of their battlespace preparation for the 2024 election, the Deep State has damaged the notion of populism, mostly by tying it to mythical white supremacy running rampant, so that it is no longer a net public positive. This means a rebranding is immediately necessary. What that rebranding ends up being is anybody’s guess.
2. Reframing. One approach would be to reframe populism as a re-founding of the nation. We are not aiming at damaging the nation. Rather, we are trying to return it closer to where we started, not repeating history, but echoing it. This is essentially a persuasion reframe of the anti-government movement underway today. Battlespace preparation for the 2024 election is being done in the persuasion world, so we might as well understand the weaponry, tactics and strategy of that world. Reframes are powerful tools in the persuasion world. Done correctly, a reframe will put the Deep State in a position from which they cannot recover, not unlike an aircraft that has flown out of its performance envelope. We saw a recent reframe with Trump after he played around with the notion of dictatorship and revenge in the early days of his next administration. Those statements were red meat for the Other Side, and they breathlessly ran around for a week accusing Trump of wanting to do to America what the Dementia Hitler regime has done since 2020. Trump let that ride for a bit, allowing them to extend themselves to an untenable position and corrected it last week, noting that the best revenge is success, moving the nation toward his notion of MAGA, essentially a play on the old saw that the best revenge in life is living well. This reframe may very well have fallen out of his growing collaboration with Vivek Ramaswamy, who is helping take the rough edges off Trump. The Other Side latches onto the rough edges as a vehicle to demonize him and everyone who supports them. AWFLs (Affluent White Female Liberal), the passionate beating heart of the democrat party these days react particularly badly to Trump’s rough edges. Once that excuse disappears, what do they do next?
3. Embryos. Last week’s exchange in abortion wars came courtesy of the Alabama Supreme Court which found that frozen embryos were unborn children under state law. The case has the Center for Reproductive Medicine being held liable under the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act for destroying after a patient accessed, dropped and destroyed frozen embryos of several couples in 2020. The embryos were created for in vitro fertilization (IVF). Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act allows parents to recover punitive damages for the death of their child. The justices noted that the language of the Act was sweeping and unqualified. Politically, this was a Gift from God for the left, planning on running on abortion once again. They immediately responded with their best reproductive freedom rants which was echoed for a couple days by their water carriers in the media. President Trump also responded, calling on Alabama to change state law so that IVF would not be shut down by this ruling. I do expect the Alabama legislature to respond and do the right thing. An alternative would be for someone who destroys an IVF embryo to compensate for costs associated with the process of creating it plus some sort of penalty. Somewhere along the line, we are going to have to define where we think life begins. Pro abort states will come down somewhere a week or two after birth, while pro-life states will end up somewhere closer to conception. This ruling is merely another step in the ongoing process. Expect democrats to do what they do best, demagogue the heck out of everything that doesn’t completely go their way.
4. Rigged. Leftist lawfare aimed at all things Trump is their ongoing attempt to deny him victory in the 2024 election. In doing what they have been doing to Trump at the state and federal levels, they are busily constructing a structure they will be able to use on any Trump supporter who sticks their head above their line of sight in the future. Given the interconnectedness of everything these days, a person in Alaska who does something noticed by online AI can be arrested, sent to the DC Gulag, and tried in front of a DC jury for his or her particular sin. We know that DC and NYC are decidedly democrat trial venues, and anyone (everyone?) on the political right will never get a fair trial in any of those courts. In the spirit of mutually assured destruction, we need to start doing the same thing to leftists in rural courtrooms in rural America. Other than Vigilance Committees, I don’t think there is any other way to stop it.
5. Letitia. Donald Trump is not the only scalp taken by NY Attorney General Letitia James. She also went after the NRA in another conveniently timed, politically motivated lawsuit filed in 2020. This effectively took the NRA out of the political wars that year as they were fighting for their economic lives. The jury finally found that NRA and three former and current leaders were liable for financial misconduct and corruption managing the organization. Think of this lawsuit as a test run for her assault on Trump and the Trump organization. Like the Trump verdict, she is publicly crowing about the result. Say what you want about James, while she is an undeniable evil woman, she also understands the court system she is operating in and the juries who are hearing her lawsuits. Once the left comes up with an effective tool, expect it to be used time after time until the pain of using it is far greater than not using it.
6. Ford. When corporations embrace DEI, there is never a positive outcome other than increasing the number of DEI employees. Generally, the business suffers, sometimes catastrophically. Last week’s example of this was Ford, the only major US automaker who didn’t take a chunk of O’Bama’s $80 billion bailout following the 2008 financial crash. Chrysler and GM took both the bailouts and democrat strings that came along with the bailout. Ford was briefly a public hero. It only took a decade for the wheels to fall off, with Ford joining the corporate CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion Pledge, an industry-wide collective to embrace all parts of DEI. They weren’t finished with this action, also joining up with an outfit called MARC (Men Advocating Real Change). MARC focuses on engaging men in including women in their businesses. In supporting both of these, Ford started discriminating against men, particularly white men, in their workforce. What could possibly go wrong? What went wrong was that they took their eye off their “Quality is Job #1” fundamental goal. Vehicle quality since 2018 cratered. Not only that, but the company started bleeding billions of dollars in various acts of gratuitous buffoonery. They today acknowledged they have a problem and at least are making noises about a culture shift that will return them to a merit-based world. Good luck with that while their DEI overhead and DEI hires act like so many boat anchors on their ability to do profitable business in a competitive world.
7. Indigenous. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland is well on her way to becoming one of the worst Interior Secretaries over the last 30 years, quickly approaching such luminaries (/sarc) as Clinton Administration’s Bruce Babbitt and O’Bama’s Sally Jewell. Haaland’s addition to all the usual green claptrap we saw out of Babbitt and Jewell is a healthy dose of Native American tribalism and racism. Quite the toxic brew, that. Haaland blocked seven oil and natural gas leases here in Alaska last year. Her recently uncovered excuse for the cancellation was the application of what she called “indigenous knowledge”, essentially Alaskan Native folk wisdom, that Interior used as part of their scientific assessments. Haaland put the entire Arctic Ocean off limits to oil and natural gas exploration. She called local natives, many of whom moved into the oil country at the time Prudhoe Bay was opening for drilling, as the original stewards of the area. The only reason a nomadic group of people show up on the Arctic Ocean coast year-round is because their hands are out for free money. Indigenous knowledge indeed. In taking this action, Haaland may be breaking federal law. Interior is governed by something called the Information Quality Act, a 2001 piece of legislation (timing of this sounds like it fell out of the Babbitt infestation during the Clinton years) that governs what kind of data sources Interior can use while making rules. Indigenous knowledge is not mentioned in that legislation. Haaland brought this foolishness into Interior after being confirmed, telling the USGS in 2021 to unleash the science. In this case, the science the USGS is unleashing indigenous knowledge so as not to disrespect the spirits. Will we see witch doctors at the CDC next? Who knows? OTOH, witch doctors might do better than Fauci and the COVID crowd.
8. Loans. Dementia Hitler’s latest attempt at purchasing student votes via forgiveness of student loans nationalized as part of O’Bama Care continued last week with announcement of another $39 billion in student loan breaks. This would touch another 804,000 potential Biden voters in 2024. Dementia Hitler has been pushing this noodle for a long time, having his unconstitutional plan to forgive $800 billion in student loans slapped down by SCOTUS last June. Since then, his handlers have figured out how to forgive $136 billion of the $1.3 trillion student loan debt using a number of other vehicles.
9. Alito. Associate SCOTUS Justice Alito raised concerns that potential jurors were who hold traditional religious beliefs (Christians) on homosexuality are being labeled as bigots and summarily bounced from serving on juries. The case surrounded a lawsuit by a lesbian against a Missouri government agency. SCOTUS refused to take the complaint, prompting Alito to express his concern. He warned of the underlying issues that SCOTUS created in Obergfell and is ignoring, that the Appellate Court got its opinion wrong. During jury selection for the trial, the plaintiff lawyer requested the judge remove three Christians in the jury pool not because of their religion but because of their beliefs, a distinction without a difference. MO appealed the removal as discrimination based on religion. The federal court upheld the removal. This case continues to highlight Alito’s concern that Obergfell concocted a right not in the constitution that will be used to discriminate against Christians, accusing them of being bigots.
More later –
- AG