Category: Political Ponerology

Bumper Stickers and Yard Signs

As November 5th approaches, I am seeing a lot of them, especially yard signs. I myself prefer to 'go gray' inasmuch as such signage will reliably trigger emotions, but never persuade anyone to change his position.  Suppose you have good relations with your neighbor across the street. You share some interests, but have never talked politics.  You display a Trump-Vance sign. He sees it, and thinks to himself, "I thought Ron was a nice guy, but what sort of person would vote for Hitler?"  What did you accomplish by putting up the yard sign?  Nothing, and you've made things slightly worse.

"But shouldn't you stand up for what you believe in?"

Generally speaking, yes. But there are more effective and prudent ways of proceeding.  Vote, encourage your like-minded friends to vote, try to persuade open-minded fence-sitters, make a campaign contribution.

There are also safety considerations, especially if you have a family to protect.  Take a gander at this, seeing once again  just how vicious, vile, and dangerous our political enemies can be.

Trump supporters in Pennsylvania are reportedly being targeted with threatening letters from radical leftists, warning them that their visible support for the former President could lead to dire consequences.

Residents with Trump signs in their yards, particularly in Philadelphia, have reported receiving disturbing letters through the U.S. Postal Service, complete with fake Trump campaign letterheads, Post Millenial first reported.

The threatening letters, which start off as a seemingly benign “thank you” note for being engaged in the electoral process, quickly devolve into dark, ominous threats.

One Trump voter, Janet from Penn Valley, shared her harrowing experience to Post Millenial.

After proudly displaying Trump signs in her yard, she received one of these letters, filled with hateful rhetoric and explicit threats to her family and property.

The unsettling message was far from an isolated incident. Janet, who reported the matter to the Lower Merion Police, revealed that other Trump supporters in her area had received similar letters.

Local law enforcement, however, has been unable to pursue the matter further, as the letters were delivered through the mail without any available video evidence.

Despite this, Trump supporters in the area have confirmed that this intimidation campaign is widespread, with reports of the same threatening letter being delivered both by mail and without postage directly into mailboxes.

The letter, which opens with pleasantries, swiftly transitions into a vitriolic condemnation of Trump supporters, labeling the former President a “felon, rapist, desecrator,” and blaming him for political violence in the country.

Read it all.

Kamala the Destroyer

Tom Klingenstein understands what's going on:

Republicans criticize Kamala Harris for refusing to reveal her agenda, but, as Frank Cannon points out, she already has. Her agenda is the agenda of her vice-presidential pick, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota — someone Harris “ loves,” as she said recently. Unlike Kamala, Walz’s agenda and his beliefs are out there for all to see. He supports the full belief system of what I am calling “Kamalism”: a utopian society, today nominally led by Kamala, based on equal group outcomes. 

Admitting people to college or flight training school (or anything else) based on quotas is the essence of the destructive Left’s “social justice,” which is utterly irreconcilable with American justice, which is based on individual merit. Because these are two understandings of justice (as occurred in the Civil War) it’s one or the other, group quotas or merit. A house divided against itself cannot stand; it will be all one thing to another. Not to put too fine a point on it: Kamalism must try to destroy America (and of course the reverse: we must try to save it). So, let’s frame the election: “Kamalism versus America.”

This is by far the most important aspect of this election. One candidate wants to destroy our country ; the other wants to save it. This seems to me what virtually every politician misses. This election should not primarily be about immigration or crime or inflation or anything else Republican and Democrat politicians talk about. It should be about whether to elect a woman who wants to destroy America or a man who wants to improve it. But it isn’t. If we are to save America we must make the election about this choice, for every voter, right up until Election Day. 

Kamala the Plagiarist

She follows in the footsteps of Joe and Jill Biden, Claudine Gay, and so many others. Christopher Rufo exposes her.  

At the beginning of Harris’s political career, in the run-up to her campaign to serve as California’s attorney general, she and co-author Joan O’C Hamilton published a small volume, entitled Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. The book helped to establish her credibility on criminal-justice issues.

However, according to Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian “plagiarism hunter” who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world, Harris’s book contains more than a dozen “vicious plagiarism fragments.” Some of the passages he highlighted appear to contain minor transgressions—reproducing small sections of text; insufficient paraphrasing—but others seem to reflect more serious infractions, similar in severity to those found in Harvard president Claudine Gay’s doctoral thesis. (Harris did not respond to a request for comment.)

Read it all.

More Proof that Our Political Enemies are . . .

. . . indeed political enemies.  Jonathan Turley is solid and sane:

This week, Elton John publicly renounced the Rocket Man — no, not the 1972 song, but Elon Musk, whom he called an “a**hole” in an awards ceremony.

Sir Elton, 77, is only the latest among celebrities and pundits to denounce Musk for his support of former president Donald Trump and his opposition to censorship. Musk-mania is so overwhelming that some are calling for his arrest, deportation and debarment from federal contracts.

Kamala and Moria/Witzelsucht

Joe Biden, suffering from dementia, was finally and 'democratically' kicked to the curb only to be replaced with Kamala Harris who may be suffering from her own neuropsychiatric malady, moria. How else explain her giddiness,  uncontrolled childish euphoria, inappropriate laughter, inability to be serious about matters of grave importance, hyper-joyous inanity, and the like? This very short video (1:33) displays her astonishing unseriousness about a very serious matter.

It is not for me to decide whether there is anything pathological here, let alone suggest a treatment protocol, but this article may shed light on this strangest of all presidential candidates in the history of the Republic.

Having pointed to a possible psychiatric cause of the 60-year-old's laughing-gas vacuity, let me now suggest a sociological cause: we live in an Age of Feeling. Like a superannuated AOC — the overgrown adolescent narcissist of the occasional cortex — Kameradin Kamalita can feel, but not think. 

"It's an unfortunate reality that millions of Americans lack convictions founded in logic, reason, and history, instead relying on feelings as their primary touchstone."  That nails it.

Trump Derangement Syndrome: A Textbook Case

Liz Cheney's Endorsement of Kamala Harris.  Under nine minutes. Transcript provided. This well-fed matron embodies TDS to a T.  For a 'conservative' to endorse Harris-Walz is like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

If you will permit me a bit of wit, what we have here is RINO-ectomy.

UPDATE 9/8/24

To compound the lunacy of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face, quisling Dick has joined quisling Liz:

The two most prominent Bushies who have taken their ball and gone home in a fit of pique are Dick Cheney and his backstabbing daughter Liz. 

Dick and Liz have thrown their support behind Kamala Harris, which isn't a surprise to anybody. Like all of the Never Trump lunatics, they're trying justify their turncoat ways by saying that they are voting for a commie to save the country and the Republican Party. There's no way to spin that illogical garbage to make any sense, of course. Kamala Harris is a threat to the Constitution and a host of freedoms that we currently enjoy.

Putin Joins Liz Cheney and David French in Endorsing Kamala

Given what he's about, Putin's support for the silly goose makes perfect sense; given what she's supposed to be about, Cheney's make no sense at all but accords perfectly with her terminal TDS.

The Trumpianly deranged are a strange bunch.  The syndrome is not easy to understand. The pathology is on display in these articles:

Nicholas Kristoff, Why We Shouldn't Demean Trump Voters

Matt Bai responds to Kristoff.

Slouching Toward Totalitarianism

Can Trump save us?

Klingenstein: Is our regime totalitarian, emerging or otherwise? What makes it so? How far along are we? Can we fight back?

Ellmers: I think the essay that Ted Richards and I wrote for your website, and the several excellent responses that you published, cover this pretty well. 

Klingenstein: How much can Trump fix it?

Ellmers: Very hard to say. Showing up, as they say, is half the battle. Or, as you have noted, the first step in winning a war is to know that you are in one. Trump knows this. He has to keep making the case to the American people that they are true sovereigns, and the arrogant ruling class is illegitimate. The outrageous incompetence of the Secret Service, which failed to prevent the attempted assassination of President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, is a good way to remind people that our so-called experts have no expertise. These bureaucrats are mostly blowhards, grifters, and phonies. 

I agree with Trump’s decision not to talk any more about how he was almost murdered, but incoming Vice President Vance should… a lot. In fact, I hope that Trump will continue to do what he does best as president — using his wit and populist rhetoric and negotiating skills to good effect — while the vice president’s office acts as the day-to-day juggernaut that ruthlessly dismantles the administrative state. 

Klingenstein: Will Trump win? What does it depend on? If you were his political consultant, what would you advise him to do?

Ellmers: I think he will win by a significant margin — too big, as people are saying, for the Democrats to steal. My friend Jim Piereson, writing in The New Criterion, has predicted that Trump will win the popular vote by six points, take all the swing states, and get 339 electoral votes. That sounds right to me. 

He seems to have been changed somewhat since he nearly took a bullet to the head. I would encourage him to remain upbeat and positive. 

Klingenstein: What will happen after Trump if he is elected in 2024?

Ellmers: Again, hard to say. Of course the Left will launch its resistance campaign, but I don’t think anyone knows how much support it will have outside the radical fringe. Some of my friends think I’m too optimistic, but I suspect that some energy and panache has gone out of protesting and rioting since the 2020 Summer of Left-wing Love. There will still be violence by Antifa and others, but I don’t think it will have the same mainstream support. And we should not discount the anger the hard Left will direct at the Democrat party. The media and the Beltway establishment really screwed up this election by lying about Biden, and I think the radicals will not take kindly to having their agenda thwarted by the complacency and arrogance of the Democrat’s leadership. 

Klingenstein: Is Vance MAGA? Is he the right choice for VP? He abhorred Trump before he lauded him. Does this make you hesitate?

Ellmers: It’s extremely important that Trump 1) went outside the decrepit establishment and picked someone who will help him fight the Beltway blob head-on; and 2) picked someone young and energetic who can carry on the MAGA agenda. That means Trump is thinking long-term. It was a good choice. 

Having just finished Hillbilly Elegy, I would say that Trump's VP pick was an outstanding choice, the best he could have made from the outstanding candidates on his short list.  A second brilliant move was his welcoming of RFK Jr. into his coalition. Here is the Kennedy clan's black (red?) sheep's Arizona Trump endorsement. 

Trotsky’s (Misplaced) Faith in Man

On 20 August 1940, 84 years ago today, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Leon Trotsky in exile in Mexico City where an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. He died the next day. Yet another proof of how the Left eats its own.

The last days of Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, prime mover of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, are the subject of Bertrand M. Patenaude's Trotsky: The Downfall of a Revolutionary (HarperCollins, 2009).  It held my interest from the first page to the last, skillfully telling the story of Trotsky's Mexican exile, those who guarded him, and their failure ultimately to protect him from an agent of the GPU/NKVD sent by Stalin to murder him.  Contrary to some accounts, it was not an ice pick that Ramon Mercader drove into Trotsky's skull, but an ice axe, a mountaineering implement far more deadly than an ice pick when used as a weapon.   Here is how Trotsky ends his last testament, written in 1940, the year of his death:

Read the rest over at my Substack site.

Among those who guarded Trotsky in exile was a fascinating character in his own right, Jean van Heijenoort. I have two Substack entries about him: Thomas Merton and Jean van Hejenoort: A Tale of Two Idealists and Like a Moth to the Flame: A Sermon of Sorts on Romantic Folly.  The latter begins:

Jean van Heijenoort was drawn to Anne-Marie Zamora like a moth to the flame. He firmly believed she wanted to kill him and yet he travelled thousands of miles to Mexico City to visit her where kill him she did by pumping three rounds from her Colt .38 Special into his head while he slept.  She then turned the gun on herself. There is no little irony in the fact that van Heijenoort met his end in the same city as Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky. For van Heijenoort was Trotsky's secretary, body guard, and translator from 1932 to 1939.

In these days when Comrade Kamala threatens to preside over a once-great nation, I offer a salutary reflection on the horrors of communism with the help of Lev Kopelev. It begins:

While completing an invited essay for a collection of essays by dissident philosophers, I pulled down from the shelf many a volume on Marx and Marxism, including Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford UP, 1987). In the front matter of that very good book I found the following quotation from the hitherto unknown to me Lev Kopelev (emphases added):

Finally, a question for Tony Flood, one-time card-carrying member of the CPUSA, who knows more about communism than I ever will.  Trotsky says somewhere something along the lines of: You may attempt to distance yourself from politics, but politics won't distance itself from you.  What exactly did he say? And where did he say it?

I fear that old Trotsky is right, which is why we of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable must fight, Fight, FIGHT!