Time to Ring Out the OLD!

CJ Hopkins, "The Year of the Gaslighter"

Well, it has been quite a year, 2022. I’m officially dubbing it “The Year of the Gaslighter.” I was going to dub it “The Year of the Mother of All Mindfucking Global-Capitalist Gaslighters,” but that seemed like a mouthful, so I’m opting for brevity.

Seriously, if there were an Olympics of Gaslighting, GloboCap (i.e., the global corporatocracy) would take the gold in every event. At this point, the majority of the global masses have been successfully gaslighted into a semi-conscious, quasi-cyclothymic state in which they oscillate, on a moment-by-moment basis, between robotic obedience and impotent rage. Those who are not still walking around in their masks and prophylactic face shields and injecting themselves with experimental “vaccines” for reasons they no longer even pretend to be able to articulate without gibbering like imbeciles are genuflecting at the feet of an oligarch huckster who they believe has come to deliver them from Wokeness.

If you were GloboCap, and in the process of imposing your new official ideology on the entire planet in a kind of global Gleichschaltung op, and otherwise establishing your “New Normal Reich,” and you needed the masses confused and compliant, you couldn’t ask for much more from your Gaslighting Division!

The gaslighting got underway in January, when the corporate media, health authorities, and other major organs of the New Normal Reich started suddenly “discovering” that the official Covid narrative was “inaccurate,” or, you know, a bunch of lies.

A series of limited hangouts ensued.

Suddenly, it appeared that the “Covid case” and “Covid death” statistics were inaccurate, or inflated, or had been fabricated. The “vaccines” didn’t work. They were killing people. Lockdowns had been a “serious mistake.” And so on. Duplicitous politicians, pusillanimous public-health authorities, perfidious pundits, and assorted other professional sycophants and lying weasels were shocked to discover they had inadvertently been part of the most insidious PSYOP that had ever been perpetrated on the masses in the history of insidious mass-PSYOPs.

The Last Days of the Covidian Cult were upon us! The Corporatocracy had overplayed their hand, and underestimated their opposition, and they knew it.

But the Cult was not going to go down quietly. In February, in Ottawa, Canada, thousands of truckers and other working-class people who had had enough of the Pandemic PSYOP occupied the streets outside the capitol and demanded an end to “vaccination mandates,” segregation of “the Unvaccinated,” and other “emergency health measures.” Justin Trudeau, the Canadian media, and their counterparts throughout the New Normal Reich immediately denounced the protesters as “treasonous, Russia-backed, transphobic, Nazi terrorists.”

This affront to the authority of the New Normal Reich could not be allowed to go unpunished, so Trudeau declared de facto martial law and unleashed a battalion of militarized police and other unidentified goons to beat and trample the protesters with horses (including one old lady with a “terrorist walker”). Then he went about hunting down and freezing the bank accounts of any Canadians who had donated to the protest, and otherwise attempting to destroy the lives of anyone who had disobeyed him.

This display of contempt for the rule of law and the ruthlessness of the New Normal Reich was one of the last of the bloody crackdowns on dissidents in countries all over the world that had been in progress for over a year by then, e.g., in Australia, The Netherlands, France, Germany, China, and other countries. These vicious “crackdowns” on peaceful protests were conducted “to protect the public health,” of course, and were not at all a display of brute force meant to intimidate the masses into obedience. The global-capitalist ruling classes are not fascists, or totalitarians, after all, and anyone who suggests they are is clearly a “Russia-backed, Covid-denying, conspiracy-theorizing extremist,” or whatever.

Oh, and speaking of totalitarians, and fascists, and goose-stepping, Sieg-heiling neo-Nazis, the Gaslighting Cavalcade of 2022 reached a whole new level of gaslighting in March, when, after years of provocation, Russia finally invaded Ukraine, and all the Ukrainian neo-Nazis that the corporate media had been extensively reporting on magically vanished into the ether.

Yes, it was Springtime for the GloboCap Nazis! And not just for the GloboCap Nazis! Liberals, still struggling with withdrawal symptoms from the adrenaline rush of the Covidian Cult, and the thrill of fanatically persecuting “the Unvaccinated,” suddenly had a new official narrative that they could mindlessly parrot and fanatically defend from the “conspiracy theorists” and “disinformationists.”

The only problem was, it didn’t make any sense. According to the new official narrative, those reports of Ukrainian neo-Nazis by virtually every mainstream media outlet and Nazi-hunting organization on the planet in the years leading up to 2022 were now, suddenly, just “Russian propaganda.” GloboCap hadn’t even bothered to scrub or visibility-filter those reports. They were all still right there on the Internet.

And, OK, the other problem was, in order to remain “New Normals in Good Standing” and keep their jobs and social contacts, liberals were now forced to actively cheer for swastika-tattooed, Sieg-heiling Nazis, and look the other way as Ukrainian fascists advocated the mass murder of children and quoted Adolf Eichmann on Ukrainian television.

The Spring and Summer were kind of a blur, or maybe I was just preoccupied with publishing The Rise of the New Normal Reich, a collection of my essays documenting the rollout of the New Normal in 2020 and 2021, which was an international Barnes & Noble and Amazon bestseller upon its release, and then was promptly banned by Amazon in Germany, The Netherlands, and Austria, and labelled with a “Covid-19 vaccine warning” advising readers to visit the CDC before purchasing and (God help them!) reading the book in every other Amazon market.

I vaguely remember something about monkeypox, but, mostly, when I wasn’t promoting the book, or struggling to keep my breakfast down after seeing another one of my liberal friends cheering for neo-Nazis on Facebook, I was focused on events here in New Normal Germany (which, yes, mask mandates are still in effect), and The Normalization of the New Normal Reich (which, no, is not over, but is just beginning), and attempting to start to emotionally recover from two solid years of official gaslighting, demonization, segregation, and so on.

Fortunately, in September, right on cue, as I was working through my emotional issues, i.e., how most of my former friends and colleagues had either gone silent and looked away as our constitutional rights were cancelled, dissent was censored and demonized, goon squads were dispatched to brutalize dissidents, experimental “vaccines” were forced on people, a social segregation system was implemented, and so on, or else, if they hadn’t gone silent, they had joined the shrieking fascistic mob … just as I was starting to process all that, as were a lot of other people, a prophet arrived on the “freedom” scene!

That’s right, as it turned out, I was totally wrong about the new totalitarianism, and how it works! I had stupidly assumed it was a political phenomenon … you know, a sociopolitical and cultural system imposed on the masses from above by force, but, according to Mattias Desmet, it’s actually a psychological phenomenon, a “mass formation” or “mass hypnosis”-type thing!

It’s possible that I’m not describing it correctly. As his devoted fans have repeatedly informed me, I don’t understand the nuances of Desmet’s theory. He explained it all on the Alex Jones show, while he was lying, which he does, repeatedly, but … whatever. I’m not a professor of psychology. The point is, the Covidian Cultists were all hypnotized! No one was threatening or gaslighting the masses! The poor confused things were doing it to themselves!

But that was not the end of the gaslighting. Globocap saved the best for last!

See, the problem was, there were all these people who hadn’t joined the Covidian Cult or any other part of the New Normal movement, and who were extremely angry about having been demonized, and segregated, and censored, and gaslighted, and so on, by their governments, global corporations, non-governmental governing entities, the corporate media, “scientific experts,” and the majority of the masses for two and a half years.

Something needed to be done about all that anger. It needed to be redirected somewhere. At something that wasn’t GloboCap, and that wouldn’t interfere with the New Normal program.

Emperor Elonicus to the rescue!

If Elon Musk wasn’t actually appointed by the global-capitalist ruling classes to redirect the pent-up anger of “the Unvaccinated” demographic, and the “Systematically Censored and Demonized” demographic, and everyone else who opposed the New Normal into a balls-out left/right shit-slinging contest … well, they couldn’t have found anyone better for the job.

Consider what he’s accomplished in the space of six weeks. After purchasing Twitter for $44 billion, he bought himself a couple of independent journalists — because who could resist the Twitter Files? I certainly couldn’t have, had I been in their position — and is staging the most audacious limited hangout in the history of audacious limited hangouts. Whether it will work over the longer term is unclear — Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi are already starting to become uncomfortable with being perceived and treated as Elon Musk’s employees — but, so far, it is going gangbusters!

Now, students of limited hangouts, whitewashing, and other COINTELPRO ops, really need to pay attention. Because the beauty of this limited hangout is that the “hangout” is actually a monumental story, an up-close look at the nuts-and-bolts processes of the global-capitalist Ministry of Truth. As Matt Taibbi reported in a recent piece …

“… the Twitter Files show something new. We now have clear evidence that agencies like the FBI and the DHS are in the business of mass-analyzing social media activity — your tweets and mine, down to the smallest users with the least engagement — and are, themselves, mass-marking posts to be labeled, ‘bounced,’ deleted or ‘visibility filtered’ by firms like Twitter. The technical and personnel infrastructure for this effort is growing. As noted in the thread, the FBI’s social media-focused task force now has at least 80 agents, and is in constant contact with Twitter for all sorts of reasons. The FBI is not doing this as part of any effort to build criminal cases. They’ve taken on this new authority unilaterally, as part of an apparently massive new effort to control and influence public opinion. These agencies claim variously to be concerned about election integrity, foreign interference, medical misinformation, and monitoring domestic extremism, among other things. As crises wax and wane, the building out of the censorship infrastructure to ever-bigger and broader dimensions has been constant, suggesting that creating and deploying the tool to manipulate opinion was always the real end.”

And this monumental story is being buried in shit … American red/blue partisan shit. With a series of ham-handed PR stunts, cheap provocations, attention-grabbing antics, and good old-fashioned diversionary shit-slinging, Musk is (a) whitewashing the new “free-speech Twitter,” which continues to censor and defame us with impunity, (b) burying the actual story under a steaming heap of partisan acrimony, and (c) driving a big blunt wedge into the supra-partisan coalition of forces that had aligned in opposition to the roll-out of the New Normal.

That, my friends, is some world-class gaslighting! And the wildest part is, he probably doesn’t even consciously realize what he’s doing. Nevertheless, by the time he’s done playing grab-ass with the freedom-of-speech thing, and getting revenge on Taylor Lorenz, and so on, corporate censorship will have been completely normalized. “Freedom of speech” will be a running joke, as opposing camps of hate-drunk hypocrites take turns applauding as global corporations and their governmental partners censor one camp or the other.

On that cheery note, I’ll sign off for the year, and go tend to all the irate messages I’m getting from abject Elon Musk worshipers, and the hate-email from assorted anti-Semites, and so on, and then hibernate until 2023.

Oh, yeah, and those “Covid Twitter Files.” I can’t wait to scroll through those with a nice glass of eggnog. I’m sure they will be coming out any day now, maybe even on Christmas morning!

Happy holidays to one and all!

More Proof that American Politics and Diplomacy no Longer Function

Meet the New Left...

Jeffrey A. Tucker, "How the Left Became What It Once Hated"

In the final scenes of the book and film “The Hunger Games,” Katniss Everdeen has the opportunity finally to kill the hated dictator President Snow, but instead, turns her bow on the leader of the rebellion armies, namely President Coin.

The plot twist is remarkable because it adds an element of realistic complexity to the dynamics of power. Katniss has come to realize that the rebels had gradually become the thing that they hated the most. They had begun to crave the very power that they were trying to overthrow.

Indeed, there was no reason to think that the regime under rebel control would be different than the status quo. The emoluments of power would be newly available to a new group of managers. Coin would replace Snow just as Snow had replaced the person before him. What Katniss really wanted was a completely new system of freedom, not just a new public face to the old tyranny.

Her insight is profound here. When hatred becomes focused, boundless, and obsessive, the hater gradually comes to emulate the very thing it opposes. That’s what happened to the rebel armies and to Coin.

So too, this is what Trump Derangement Syndrome has done to the left in this country. It began in 2016, when Donald Trump won the presidency over Hillary Clinton, who was somehow supposed to win. After that, the single-minded focus of opposition became to grind him and his presidency into the ground and oppose everything about him, including his supporters and even the system that brought him to office.

The bitter irony here is that the left has become the very thing that they warned against. They said Trump was an authoritarian and brutal, a financial racketeer who lived off manipulation. They warned that he would use his personality cult to impose a quasi-dictatorship.

And here we are six years later and what do we see of the left in this country? Especially during the COVID crisis, they embraced censorship, authoritarianism, imposition on bodily autonomy, and attacks on the freedom of association. For a time, the word freedom itself became a bad word to them. People who were merely trying to get schools open or the freedom to run a small business became the object of their loathing, even to the point that the left began to label as fascist those who wanted freedom.

Someone coming of age right now would never have any idea that the left once had some central principles that revolved around themes of freedom. They were free speech, bodily autonomy, peace, small business over large, the poor and middle class over the rich, freedom of expression and art, and opposition to ruling-class manipulation of the system on behalf of the privileged instead of the common good. They were deeply suspicious of the national-security state, corporate elites, and arbitrary uses of executive power. They were against corruption in government.

They were once for human rights and against segregation based on medical compliance. Probably today, no one younger than the age of 25 would believe this, but trust me: These used to be central principles of the left.

So far as I can tell, every single one of these principles has been thrown out. In the COVID crisis, all major lefty journals of opinion pushed mask and vaccine mandates, argued for more statist power to muscle people, favored large businesses over small, crushed the working classes and poor, and even threw out their traditional defense of public schools, which they seemed to want to be closed for longer periods of time.

They rallied around the segregation of whole cities by vaccine status, even though doing so meant excluding nearly half the members of minority populations from access to public accommodations such as restaurants, museums, libraries, and theaters. Not a peep of protest among the center-left! 

They completely disregarded one-time liberal precepts such as a woman’s right to work as millions of married women with kids were thrown out of corporate life to take care of kids. The day cares and schools were closed, so women had no choice about it. The result is that women’s participation in the workforce has been set back 34 years! We’re nowhere near pre-pandemic levels and it’s still falling!

Have you heard even one peep about this problem from the left-wing press? Has The New York Times or Washington Post even covered this? I don’t think so. It’s an absolute scandal and a great measure of just how many principles the left has thrown out in their crazed and maniacal hatred of Trump. They’ve been willing to utterly destroy social and economic life in the single-minded pursuit of killing Trump as the one and only goal. And in pursuit of that goal, they’ve embraced an authoritarian biosecurity state that robs people of personal autonomy.

And let’s not forget the one-time centrality of science in the leftist vision. Since at least the Monkey Trial, American progressives have rallied around science as opposed to religion and faith. But when it came to COVID, they completely threw all science out the window. They would hear nothing as the evidence kept pouring in that COVID was not a threat to kids, that it had an infection fatality ratio that compares to the flu for anyone younger than the age of 75, and that even the overall death rate was 0.2 percent. But instead of dealing with this reality, they screamed panic so that the whole population would fly into fits of rage.

As for the vaccines, even as evidence mounted that they protect against neither infection nor transmission and that the adverse effects are inordinately high even against the target population of the elderly, they still wouldn’t hear it. They’ve pushed these grotesque human rights-destroying mandates and segregations.

Even this wild D.C. obsequious deference to the Ukrainian president from last week has roots in Trump hatred. They spent so long trying to prove that Russia was somehow responsible for Trump’s election in 2016, despite the complete absence of evidence to that effect, that they even came to believe it. So the stupid logic goes this way: Russia equals Trump and therefore anyone who’s against Putin is a friend, no matter the corruption. As a result, even the one-time penchant for favoring peace over war has been tossed out.

So too, the strange lack of interest in the FTX scandal and the targets of this fake company’s “effective altruism” has roots in Trump hatred. The company passed out millions and billions of dollars to nonprofits and candidates that backed the Democrats and various lockdown measures, and all we get now is silence. That’s rooted in the very same corruption: The left has become the very thing they once claimed to hate.

In other words, the left in the United States has adopted all the practices that they once warned that Trump would bring to the United States! I say this too, not as a Trump fan personally at all. I was warning that his presidency would be unhinged as early as 2015 because his ideological impulses departed too far from constitutionalism and Reaganite suspicions of government.

All that said, unhinged hate is a dangerously distorting emotion. The left’s single-minded focus on grinding Trump into the dust has turned the left into the mirror image of their most paranoid worries about him.

At some point, the left in this country is going to have to do a serious self-examination of what it has become. To return to “The Hunger Games,” the pursuit of President Snow has turned the followers of President Coin into what they once claimed to oppose. And this has become so obvious to the public that they’ve even turned against the public, demonizing middle-class values as inherently dangerous and science itself as misinformation worthy of censorship.

Be careful what you hate. Too much focus, too much attention, and too much study will cause the object of your hatred to be the most compelling pedagogue. If you take a close look in the mirror, you won’t recognize yourself anymore. That, in short, is what has become the left in America today.

Is MSNBC Subsidized by the CfPB?

Who Pays for their Fawning Admiration of US Government Officials?

Progressive Non Sequiturs...

...The FBI Runs Twitter... the CIA Runs Google and Facebook... but there is no "Deep State"

Merry Christmas!

Happity Holidays!

Hopitty Halidays!

I Wonder What Lindsey's Ukraine-Omnibus Kickback Was...

Anybody Remember Lindsey's Speech BEFORE Russia "Invaded Ukraine w/o Provocation"?

...I'll bet that the McCain Institute gets a BIG FAT CHECK from Ukraine!

The 18 Republican Senators Deserving of Primary Challenges...

BREAKING: Here are the 18 Republican senators who voted for the $1.7 trillion omnibus:

Blunt, Boozman, Capito, Collins, Cornyn, Cotton, Graham, Inhofe, McConnell, Moran, Murkowski, Portman, Romney, Rounds, Shelby, Thune, Wicker, Young.

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) December 22, 2022

Budget Parasites Descend Upon US Capitol Seeking Omnibus Earmarks

Jordan Boyd, "Here’s Everything Wrong With Congress’s Plan To Give Zelensky Cash For Christmas"

Despite the financial strain Ukraine has put on the United States, the swamp is ready to welcome Zelensky with open arms — and more money.

Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky is slated to receive a hero’s welcome in the U.S. capital today, just as Congress is poised to award him another $45 billion in its mammoth inflationary spending bill.

It may be Zelensky’s first time leaving Ukraine since the war with Russia began, but it’s not his first time appearing before an American audience to beg for more money. And it certainly won’t be his last. Already, Zelensky is prepared to use his congressional address to complain that the beaucoup bucks the U.S. has thrown at Ukraine in the last 10 months — more than $100 billion total if the omnibus passes — is still “not enough.”

Despite the financial strain Ukraine has put on the United States, the swamp is ready to welcome Zelensky with open arms. You wouldn’t know it from corporate media coverage, but that’s problematic. Here’s why.

Americans Simply Don’t Approve.  

Contrary to Mitch McConnell’s claims, spending taxpayer dollars on a proxy war in Eastern Europe is not high on the priority list for Republican or Democrat voters.

McConnell: "Providing assistance for Ukrainians to defeat the Russians is the number one priority for the United States right now according to most Republicans. That's how we see the challenges confronting the country at the moment." pic.twitter.com/NPmzWRzoz1

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) December 20, 2022

If Americans overwhelmingly reject going to war with Russia on behalf of Ukraine, which polling since the beginning of the conflict has said they do, Congress shouldn’t be spending money that indicates the U.S. is willing to prolong a war by whatever means necessary.

Throwing Dollars at Ukraine Escalates Rather than Ends the War 

Nearly half of Americans want their government to urge Ukraine to negotiate a peace settlement. Instead of heeding the voters’ wishes, the Swamp extends Ukraine’s ability to fight with more funds, weapons, and verbal support. Money for Zelensky solidifies U.S. involvement in a war that Congress never voted to declare.

Cash for Ukraine Takes Away from Necessary U.S. Spending 

While Congress funnels tens of billions of dollars to protect the border of a foreign country, our country’s border is virtually nonexistent. Each day, thousands of illegal border crossers pour into the southern United States.

These migrants put a physical and financial strain on our immigration system and cities all around the nation. Yet Congress, specifically Senate Republicans, repeatedly refuse to leverage their influence for funding to secure our border.

Senate Republicans could stop this by demanding border security before voting for the Biden "omnibus." Instead, they are voting for a budget that *prohibits* Border Patrol from securing the border! https://t.co/ugDlDxxLQz

— Rep. Mary Miller (@RepMaryMiller) December 21, 2022

Funding an Overseas War When Americans Struggle to Afford Basics Is the Wrong Choice 

While Congress ships taxpayer dollars overseas, Americans can’t afford to live in the increasingly expensive homeland.

As retirement accounts dip into the negative, 1 in 4 U.S. parents reports they couldn’t cover basic needs such as food, shelter, and care for their families in 2022. That’s no surprise considering raging inflation has jacked up prices across the board. Americans now pay 49.1 percent more for eggs, 27 percent more for butter, and 14.7 percent more for milk compared to 2021.

Zelensky’s Handout Is Part of a Destructive Spending Package

The more than $45 billion Congress designated for Zelensky is part of a sweeping, inflationary omnibus bill that would fulfill Democrats’ spending wishes before the newly elected Republican House is sworn in.

The legislation was conjured quickly with hardly any time slated for review or criticism. Because of that, Senate Republicans like McConnell face threats of gridlock from members of the new GOP House.

There Are Bigger Foreign Policy Problems Than Ukraine 

As the world watches Ukraine and Russia duke (or possibly nuke) it out, China, our nation’s biggest threat, has been taking advantage of the Russia-Ukraine war.

Thanks to the laxity of the U.S., China crept its way into a working relationship with Russia and created a hegemonic plan to expand its rule. The communist regime’s boldness in expanding its Marxism and reaching for Taiwan will only grow stronger as America drains its foreign policy budget on Ukraine.

Ukraine Is Not a Top Strategic U.S. Security Interest 

Not only is Ukraine not our biggest foreign policy problem, but it’s also not even a top strategic U.S. security interest. McConnell regularly justifies funneling dollars to Ukraine under the guise that the spending is part of “Essential Investments in American Strength and Security.” But the truth of the matter is that spending endless money on an indefinite war in Ukraine does nothing for Americans but create a national security threat.

The Biden Admin Is Incapable of Handling Problems Properly 

Americans don’t trust Biden to handle the Russia-Ukraine war because every problem the Biden administration touches turns into an even bigger disaster.

Not only does the White House exacerbate crises, but it also creates them. Take one look at the economy, the southern border, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the political war waged by the Department of Justice and FBI against Americans, and you’ll understand why our president shouldn’t be so eager to be a cash cow for a foreign country.

Ukraine Isn’t the Most Honest Country

Zelensky’s Ukraine is filled with anti-democratic practices and principles: a war on the free press, money-grabbing bureaucrats, and a broken justice system.

Congress granting a corrupt regime funds with little to no oversight doesn’t just undermine war hawks’ reasoning for supporting Ukraine. It could also quickly result in a “Taliban inherits American weaponry” situation.

Coming Soon - WokeScores and Digital Dollars

Say Goodbye to Democracy...

46. The FBI’s influence campaign may have been helped by the fact that it was paying Twitter millions of dollars for its staff time.

“I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!” reports an associate of Jim Baker in early 2021. pic.twitter.com/SmNse97QxK

— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 19, 2022

On The US Intelligence Community and partner's "SCALE" Infrastructure...  and AI Tool development (Chatbot GTP, et al)

Apparently, the US Government believes itself to currently be on the Front Lines of a global AI War where "truth" is often the 1st victim.

How Democrats became America's "War Party"

I think that Julian is closer to the mark...

James Billot, "New Evidence Confirm's the Blob's Hawkishness: Proximity to Washington leads to more support for military intervention"

Ideology based on employment status. Credit: Richard Hanania and Max Abrahms

Washington’s foreign policy circle is a famously tight network. Comprising government officials, academics, and think tanks, this group (known as the ‘Blob‘) has developed a reputation for hawkishness and support for high levels of military spending.

There are hundreds of think tanks based in Washington, making it difficult to tell where the policy comes from: the White House or unelected officials. During the Reagan era, for example, there were almost 200 employees at conservative think tanks who served as government officials or consultants for his administration. But what do they actually believe?

New research by Richard Hanania and Max Abrahms has found that think tanks are much more hawkish than International Relations scholars, even controlling for ideology.

Taking a comprehensive survey of the most influential scholars and top 20 think tanks, the two researchers discovered that the closer a think tank employee was to power (both geographically and professionally), the more likely they were to be militarily interventionist. According to Hanania and Abrahms, for all the think tanks located within three miles of Capitol Hill, every mile further away is associated with a -0.48 deviation in militant internationalism:

Militant internationalism based on geo-coded responses of think tank employees responding within 20 miles of Capitol Hill.

The researchers posit that the reason for this is the increased likelihood of socialisation with government officials:

These kinds of contacts can take the form of, among other things, panel discussions, interviews with the media, and access to social, business, and networking opportunities with influential figures…Those closer to the center of power are more likely to be part of the foreign policy community (Walt 2018). We do not expect to see a relationship between distance and political preferences within the category of professors, whose job description does not necessarily involve influencing public opinion, being close to media centers, and meeting with powerful figures. 

- RICHARD HANANIA AND MAX ABRAHMS

So why is the foreign policy community more hawkish generally? Hanania and Abrahms give three answers: self-selection, institution-selection and knowledge-based:

First of all, people who favor more hawkish positions might be more likely to seek out positions of influence and power. Second, institutions and governments might seek out those with more hawkish views, or perhaps pressure them into supporting a more aggressive posture for the United States abroad…Finally, the nature of the work and the focus of their research might encourage TTEs, who put more effort into studying contemporary and policy-relevant issues to adopt more hawkish views.

- RICHARD HANANIA AND MAX ABRAHMS

The Ukraine war has been something of a renaissance for the Blob. But this research should serve as an important reminder to Washington foreign policy officials that not everyone thinks alike — even if all think tank employees do.

Tax Broke, Baltimore's Dirty Secret

For 50 years, Baltimore city officials have trumpeted the use of tax subsidies for private developers as a way to catalyze economic development. As more and more public funds have gone into the pockets of the rich, the city’s prospects have only worsened. Hundreds of thousands of residents have left or been pushed out of the city, and numerous businesses have followed suit. In their new documentary, ‘Tax Broke,’ TRNN reporters Taya Graham and Stephen Janis team up with veteran Baltimore reporter Jayne Miller to tell the story of how capital has fed parasitically on taxpayer money for half a century. Stephen and Jayne join Rattling the Bars to share what their reporting in ‘Tax Broke’ uncovered.

Look for "Tax Broke" premiering on YouTube this January. 

The Modern Fragile Woke Society vs...

Sinema Defects!

Died Suddenly... RU Quadruple Vaccinated?

I'm told that much of this film has been debunked. I sure hope they're right.

Western Denseness on Energy Densities

Robert Bryce, "Siemens Power CEO Confirms the Iron Law of Power Density" 

Last month, the CEO of Siemens Energy, Christian Bruch, appeared on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” to talk about the myriad problems facing the wind industry. And during his appearance, he confirmed the Iron Law of Power Density.

Bruch said his firm was “in the heart of the energy transition” but there were “challenges” in wind energy, particularly with regard to supply chains. And this is where his comments revealed what I call the Iron Law of Power Density, which says the lower the power density of a given source, the higher the resource intensity. Bruch said: “Never forget, renewables like wind roughly, roughly, need 10 times the material [compared to] ... what conventional technologies need...So if you have problems on the supply chain, it hits … wind extremely hard, and this is what we see.”

Siemens and other companies that produce wind turbines are being hammered by huge losses. Siemens just posted a net loss of 647 million euros, which was up from a 560 million euro loss in the previous year. In October, GE announced that its renewable energy business will lose a staggering $2 billion this year. Those losses are being driven in large part, by the surging cost of metals like zinc, nickel, neodymium, and copper.

If your power plant requires 10 times more of those commodities than other forms of power generation, it’s readily apparent why the Siemens boss is saying his company is having “problems on the supply chain.” And those problems are a direct result of wind energy’s low power density. If you skipped high school physics as I did, you may not understand why power density matters. But it is perhaps the single most important metric when it comes to explaining the size and shape of our energy and power networks.

Here’s a quick primer. Energy (measured in joules, or Btu) is the ability to do work. Power (measured in watts, or horsepower) is the rate at which work gets done. As I have said many times, we don’t care about energy. What we want is power. We don’t care what form of energy (oil, sun, coal, or gas) that’s being used to power our car, run our television, or cook our quinoa, we only care that we have the power we need to do the work at hand.

Power density is the measure of energy flow that can be harnessed from a given area, volume, or mass. Power density reveals how many watts we can get per square meter, liter, or kilogram from a given source. The concept of the Iron Law of Power Density is borrowed from author and University of Colorado professor Roger Pielke Jr., who coined the Iron Law of Climate, which says that when forced to choose between economic growth and climate action, politicians and decision-makers will always choose economic growth.

The Iron Law of Power Density is a cousin of Pielke’s edict. If you are relying on a low-power-density source like corn ethanol (0.1 watt per square meter) or wind energy (1 watt per square meter) or solar (10 watts per square meter) you have to counteract those paltry energy flows with big inputs of other resources. For ethanol, that means using lots of land, fertilizer, and diesel fuel to grow enough corn to produce meaningful amounts of liquid fuel. Last year, Dave Merrill, an ace reporter and data analyst at Bloomberg, reported that “Two-thirds of America’s total energy footprint is devoted to...corn grown for ethanol. It requires more land than all other power sources combined.” Merrill determined that biofuels (mainly corn ethanol) use about 80,000 square miles, an area bigger than the state of Nebraska.

Like corn ethanol, the low power density of wind and solar requires huge amounts of land. But wind and solar also require vast amounts of steel, copper, and other things like polysilicon and neodymium. The staggering amounts of land required by those sources are fueling a raging backlash in rural America, and around the world, against Big Wind and Big Solar. I have documented most of those rejections in the Renewable Rejection Database. Since 2015, at least 373 government entities from Maine to Hawaii have rejected or restricted Big Wind. Since 2017, at least 103 solar projects have been rejected or restricted in the U.S. with 76 rejections this year alone.

Indeed, land-use conflicts, and material inputs, are the binding constraints on the expansion of renewable energy. In these pages in October, Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor at Princeton University, admitted that the amount of land required to accommodate the roughly 800 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity that his computer model assumes will be built due to the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act would require “37,000 square miles for wind farms and 4,700 square miles for solar PV. That’s roughly the area of Tennessee, so no joke, or 15% of the area of Texas.”

No joke, indeed. The last time I checked, the U.S. doesn’t have a spare Tennessee to accommodate all that wind and solar. But I digress.

Now back to Bruch. He told CNBC that there is “still a way to go” in the maturation of the wind industry and that there are problems with distributing “risk along the supply chain in a world which is much more volatile, much more difficult, much more multilateral than before.” He continued, saying “if we don’t resolve it as an industry, we are missing a substantial part of the energy transition, and we’ll fail with the energy transition.”

While Bruch didn’t say it, the obvious way forward is to quit throwing money and staggering amounts of resources at land-devouring-low-power-density -- and incurably intermittent -- sources like wind and solar. As can be seen in the graphic above, which uses numbers published by the Department of Energy, the energy sources with the lowest resource intensity are natural gas and nuclear energy. Indeed, the graphic proves that Bruch is correct when he says that wind energy takes about 10 times more materials than conventional forms of generation.

There are many reasons why N2N, natural gas to nuclear, is the obvious way forward if we are serious about reducing CO2 emissions. Low material intensity is just one of them. Add the fact that both sources are proven, low- or no-carbon, affordable, and scalable, and it quickly becomes clear why I’ve been advocating for N2N for more than a dozen years.

In summary, the Iron Law of Power Density will not be repealed. While it’s great that the CEO of Siemens is underscoring wind energy’s fatal flaw, his warnings need to be

heeded by the policymakers, NGOs, and elite academics who continue hyping the dead end of wind energy.

Can America be Saved from Idiocracy?

...Outcome NOT Likely:

Omens from Dodona

Matthew Boose, "It’s Trump vs. the Establishment All Over Again"

Seven years after his historic escalator ride, Trump remains the only man who the establishment truly fears, the only one with the capability of crashing this rigged system called Our Democracy™.

Since the “red wave” fizzled out, a consensus has quickly emerged in the media that Donald Trump is no longer a viable political force. The newly anointed prince of the Right, according to the tastemakers, is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Trump’s more palatable, less chaotic protégé. But DeSantis and Trump offer two very different things. DeSantis is a conventional politician with Trump-like qualities, who can, at least according to his fan base, build a popular majority that is beyond Trump’s reach. Trump is a radical outsider to a rigged, illegitimate political system with which he has been at war for seven years, and which his supporters see as an existential threat to their way of life.

Those inclined to dismiss Trump for a smooth imitation are taking a facile view of the political terrain. “Anyone,” Trump said in his 2024 campaign announcement at Mar-a-Lago last Tuesday night, “who truly seeks to take on this rigged and corrupt system will be faced with a storm of fire that only a few could understand.”

Of course, Trump was speaking about himself, as well as his allies who have been censored, imprisoned, bankrupted, and defamed since he entered the arena. There is now a very real chance that Trump will become a political prisoner at the hands of his past, and future, electoral rival.

Thanks to Trump, we now know how Our Democracy™ really functions. The Right isn’t going to win by being less “extreme,” ignoring election integrity (if anything, this would embolden cheating), or by trying to coax elusive “independents” in elusive “free and fair” elections. America does not have free and fair elections. The “Blame Trump” narrative overlooks this harsh reality in a lame attempt to sell Trump short. Trump did not “lose” the 2020 election, no matter how many times Biden or the state-run media say it: it was stolen, if not through outright ballot fraud, then through media censorship and election regulation shenanigans that tipped the scales in his opponent’s favor.

How would DeSantis respond to having an election blatantly stolen from him in 2024? Would he fight, or meekly congratulate Joe Biden and shuffle back home to Florida? And if DeSantis were somehow to win, would he, like Trump, be able to withstand the backlash from the media and the administrative state? DeSantis’ accomplishments should not be discounted, but he has yet to show the capability or inclination to push the envelope as Trump has done. This is not surprising: DeSantis got his start within the Republican Party, and owes his current position in no small part to Trump’s favor.

Some deference is owed to Trump, who has energized the Right as no man in generations has done. Only time will tell if Trump is as diminished as his detractors appear to think he is, but it is tempting to think that 2016 is repeating itself

The media meltdown over Trump’s announcement was instantaneous: “Donald Trump, who tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election and inspired a deadly riot at the Capitol in a desperate attempt to keep himself in power, has filed to run for president again in 2024,” ran a representative headline from NPR. Bill Kristol admitted he was “alarmed.” Meanwhile, there are signs DeSantis is being co-opted by the Republican establishment to coopt and destroy the MAGA movement. Whether or not DeSantis is a willing participant, it’s sure going to look like it when Trump is campaigning against the Florida governor, CNN, and Fox News all at once.

Prediction: “DeSanctimonious” will stick.

Seven years after his historic escalator ride at Trump Tower, Trump remains the only man who the establishment truly fears, the only one with the capability of crashing this rigged system called Our Democracy™. The talking heads know this truth deep down in their bones: Four years in Washington failed to make Trump into a boring politician.

Let’s face it: the man is an enigma. He is unpredictable, possesses extraordinary willpower, and, like all great men, brims with a sense of fate: In his campaign announcement, he spoke of his time in exile as “The Pause.” What the authoritarians dread most of all is Trump’s unique power to rouse the American spirit, even under the gloomiest of conditions. As Trump put it to his supporters last week: “This is not just a campaign. This is a quest to save our country.”

Happy Thanksgiving!

Broken

Alana Newhouse, "Brokenism"

Two years ago, I wrote an essay in which I tried to explore the growing sense, made more glaring during the first year of the pandemic, that whole parts of American society were breaking down before our eyes. The central idea was that we must accept what is broken beyond repair in order to build our communities and institutions anew.

Among the many people who wrote to me in the aftermath was a man around my age named Ryan, who introduced himself as a West Point graduate and combat veteran, biracial and from a multi-generational Black military family. “I’ve lived and traveled all over the world, but I cherish my family’s deep roots in a small town in rural Ohio,” he wrote. “It seems very dark some days, but your closing nails it: ‘It can almost feel easier to believe it can’t be done. But it can.’”

As I did with many others who wrote me heartfelt notes, I reached out to Ryan and asked to meet over Zoom. It turned out we had more in common than either of us had guessed, and we began a correspondence that’s endured since then.

At one point last year, Ryan said something that struck a nerve. “I don’t know what I identify as these days, because everything has gotten so scrambled,” he noted. “I’m not a Democrat or a Republican, I don’t even think I could define myself narrowly as either a liberal or a conservative anymore. The one thing I know that I fundamentally do believe is the premise of your piece, that the dominant institutions of American life—in education, in the arts, in politics—are either totally broken or so weak or corrupt that they’re becoming irrelevant. In a way, the only thing I know that I believe in is … brokenness.”

Ryan went on to explain that, when he gets into political debates with friends and acquaintances these days, those on the “other side” aren’t all liberals or all conservatives or in fact all from any other previously recognizable camp. Instead, they are the people in his life who, regardless of how they vote or otherwise affiliate, remain invested in the institutions and political ideologies that now leave Ryan cold. Many of them acknowledge that there are problems, even serious ones, with universities, newspapers, nonprofits, both political parties, what have you, but they see these as normal, fixable challenges, not signs of fundamental brokenness. To them, the impulse to consign weighty institutions to the dustbin of history feels impulsive and irresponsible—like arson. To Ryan, staying committed to decrepit structures, and insisting to others that they are fundamentally safe when they’re clearly not, is what feels reckless.

Most Americans don’t fall squarely into one of these two camps. Around 40% don’t even vote. But among the people who do engage in debates about this country’s future, the ones doing it most compellingly are not those still stuck in the battle between “Democrats” and “Republicans,” or “liberalism” and “conservatism.” The most vital debate in America today is between those who believe there is something fundamentally broken in America, and that it’s an emergency, and those who do not.

Which is why this is the debate that has, over the past few years, been given center stage at Tablet. On the one hand, we publish stories showcasing what is good about the status quo in American and in Jewish life: what institutions are working, what fears are overblown, which elites are doing good work, and what is decent and right about popular ideas. Half of our readers find these pieces at best silly and at worst naive, even dangerously so.

On the other hand, we also publish stories about institutions and ideologies that may appear to be functioning but are in fact failing in perilous ways, and how to think about developing new institutions, communities, and ideas to replace them. These articles are often marked by a desire to challenge, sometimes aggressively, what was previously considered settled wisdom, and even more so by a deep skepticism about the actions and motives of established institutions and public figures—the federal government, blue chip corporations, the admissions office at Harvard, and so on. The other half of our readership finds these stories crackpot or paranoid, or worse.

To those who wonder why such different kinds of stories are being published by the same magazine, let me explain: We aren’t confused; we are having a fight—and it’s one you might benefit from joining.

Over the past few years, even as Tablet’s audience has grown, some readers have questioned why a Jewish magazine has taken so much interest in topics that, at first glance, appear to have no Jewish connection at all: Russiagate, school closures, content moderation by tech companies, government surveillance, masks, U.S. investment in China, and more. Part of the explanation is that Tablet’s mission was never just to make the world smarter about Jews; it was also to make Jews smarter about the world.

But a related reason has to do with an increasingly dominant sensibility in our pages that, inspired by Ryan, might be called brokenism. At its base, brokenism revolves around the idea that institutions and even whole societies can and do decay—sometimes in ways that are obvious, often in ways that are not.

Now, to observe that a critical mass of American society is broken does not mean that America is falling like Rome or descending hopelessly into chaos like Weimar Germany. This country survived a civil war, the failures of Reconstruction, the Industrial Revolution and its destruction of previous ways of life, plus the political violence of the 1960s and the economic shocks of the 1970s—and arguably came out stronger after these crises.

Which is why many people understandably see our current moment as a wave of change that can be ridden successfully—without overblown diagnoses or radical solutions. These are status-quoists, people who are invested in the established institutions of American life, even as they acknowledge that this or that problem around the margins should of course be tackled. Status-quoists believe that any decline in quality one might observe at Yale or The Washington Post or the Food and Drug Administration or the American Federation of Teachers are simply problems of personnel, circumstance, incompetence, or lack of information. Times change, people come and go, status-quoists believe—this outfit screwed up COVID policy, yes, and that place has an antisemitism problem, agreed. But they will learn, reform, and recover, and they need our help to do so. What isn’t needed, and is in fact anathema, is any effort to inject more perceived radicalism into an already toxic and polarized American society. The people, ideas, and institutions that led America after the end of the Cold War must continue to guide us through the turbulence ahead. What can broadly be called the “establishment” is not only familiar, status-quoists believe; it is safe, stable, and ultimately enduring.

On the other side are brokenists, people who believe that our current institutions, elites, intellectual and cultural life, and the quality of services that many of us depend on have been hollowed out. To them, the American establishment, rather than being a force of stability, is an obese and corrupted tangle of federal and corporate power threatening to suffocate the entire country. Proof of this decay, they argue, can be seen in the unconventional moves that many people, regardless of how they would describe themselves politically, are making: home-schooling their children to avoid the failures and politicization of many public and private schools; consuming more information from YouTube, Twitter, Substack, and podcasts than from legacy media outlets; and abandoning the restrictions, high costs, and pathologies of the coasts for freer and more affordable pastures in the Southeast and Southwest.

Brokenists come from all points on the political spectrum. They disagree with each other about what kinds of programs, institutions, and culture they want to see prevail in America. What they agree on—what is in fact a more important point of agreement than anything else—is that what used to work is not working for enough people anymore.

In fact, both brokenists and status-quoists are attracting people from what was formerly known as the left and the right. That’s how you get left-wing guests on Tucker Carlson, and lifelong members of right-wing royalty making frictionless transitions into mainstream darlings. Marxist thinker Adolph Reed is a brokenist; Cass Sunstein is a status-quoist. Resistance Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Never Trumpers like Liz Cheney—these people are status-quoists. Bernie Sanders and Elon Musk are brokenists, as are the famously leftist Glenn Greenwald and the famously capitalist Marc Andreessen. When I was in elementary school, our gym teacher used to split us into two teams and then, midway through class, divide each side and swap the halves to make two new teams. That’s kind of like what is happening in America today.

And it’s not simply that people are switching affiliations while the political parties largely remain the same. Instead, the parties themselves are changing—and in some cases swapping—what they stand for, a reality that observers from what used to be the right and the left are both starting to grapple with.

One popular explanation for this dynamic is that it’s an example of horseshoe theory—the idea, first posited by French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye, that extremists from both left and right have more in common with each other than they do with supposedly level-headed centrists from their own parties. But, to be fair, that’s fundamentally a status-quoist argument. Many of today’s brokenists, especially since the spring and summer of 2020, are not fringe fanatics lustily drawn to authoritarianism. They are parents and teachers enraged by COVID school closures and the learning loss their children suffered, especially the most vulnerable among them. They are writers and artists creeped out by increasingly flagrant government surveillance and demands for creative conformity. They are feminists whose life’s work has been grounded in the idea of biological differences between men and women. They are working-class people and families whose livelihoods have been taken from them by a new and rapacious form of turbo-capitalism. They are free speech advocates who can’t figure out why the left no longer feels like home. Brokenists feel certain they were considered ordinary people just a few years ago, but are now routinely accused of being reactionaries or “extremists,” often with real social and professional consequences. Former ACLU President Nadine Strossen, economist Jeffrey Sachs, writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—these people aren’t kooks; they have serious and well-argued concerns about how American society and its political and economic landscape are developing.

am i really a nazi fascist extremist or am i just a normal person from 15 years ago

— MJ (@morganisawizard) November 2, 2022

For their part, status-quoists believe their side is the one coming together under the banner of righteousness and sanity. The fringes, they say, are fertile soil for radicalism, and radicalism leads to danger. It’s not a surprise, these people argue, that antisemitism is rising in popularity and intensity—and that it’s coming from the extremes of both sides of the political aisle.

And the argument of the status-quoists isn’t simply defensive. They admit that many ideas and institutions are in bad shape, but they believe that change comes best from within—not because they are satisfied with the world as it exists, but because the status quo is the least bad option. Most new endeavors fail, they point out, and the ones that already exist have survived for a reason. Foundings are rare, difficult, and highly contingent—both Jewish tradition and the American constitutional system are based on the idea that what’s old is wise, that the past has a legitimate claim on the present, that change should be incremental and toilsome, and that it’s easier to destroy or run away than it is to remain and reform.

What’s more, they see in history plenty of examples of institutions that have been in advanced stages of decay, only to be transformed in useful and innovative ways. For status-quoists, universities today don’t prove brokenists right, but are instead a prime example of why they’re wrong: In 1900, Harvard and Yale were just finishing schools. Partly because of Jewish assimilation, then the Cold War and government-backed scientific research, they became world-class research institutions during the second half of the 20th century. They retained the superficial traditions of the old finishing schools, but in fact transformed into something approximating meritocracies. They did so because of market pressures, because of geopolitical events, and because the more parochial university presidents were eventually replaced by more broad-minded ones. If you had said in 1930 that the Ivy League was broken, you would have been right: They were hothouses of racism, antisemitism, and anti-intellectualism. But it turned out that there was a way to put their money, real estate, and prestige to productive use. They became impressive institutions—not perfect, but special enough that brokenists now look back at them with longing and nostalgia.

And then there were this month’s elections, which the status-quoists rightly see as a win for their side. Brokenists like to think that their own worldview is edgier, braver, sexier, and that they’re making more converts than enemies. Perhaps they’ll eventually be proven right, but as far as the midterms were concerned, it’s not happening yet.

There is no better platform for a conversation about which parts of society are functioning well, which really are broken, and what can be done to fix them, than a Jewish one. It has long been a basic premise of nearly all Jewish thought, from the rabbis of the Mishna and Talmud to the kabbalists of Safed, that the world is broken. The idea that, on one hand, God should have never created the world, and that, on the other, we are nevertheless commanded to embrace life, is the one point on which the legendary Jewish sages Hillel and Shammai are said to have agreed. The world is cracked, but we still have to live in it—which means that it is important to situate ourselves, mentally and physically, in places where we can have good and safe lives.

But it also means that we must be sensitive to the tremors that warn of impending earthquakes that could make our current homes dangerous. At different points in our history, that place was Spain, England, France, Turkey, Cairo, Baghdad, Beirut, Safed, Vilna, Warsaw, Prague, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and too many others to count. In all of those places, things got bad at some point; in some of them, so bad that they became irrevocably broken to us. In others, Jewish life went on, and continues to flourish in different ways to this day.

For the last 200 years, American society has been central to global Jewish survival and success. And central to the Jews’ successful integration into American society were many of the institutions currently undergoing radical change. The great public schools, private universities, media companies, publishing houses, law firms, and national corporations—these were the stepping stones to acceptance and success for Jews. What Jewish mother isn’t proud of her daughter or son, the lawyer or doctor, with a degree from Harvard or Yale or Princeton? It’s no wonder that if you walk around Ivy League campuses these days, you see Jewish names like Milstein, Schwarzman, and Bloomberg on so many newer buildings standing proudly alongside older buildings with names like Witherspoon, Harkness, and Eliot. Who cares about the student flyers advertising Israel apartheid week or a few mezuzahs knocked off doorposts? We made it, and we are grateful. Many of us are invested in the credentialing institutions of American life not only because we benefited from them ourselves, but also because we want others—not just our own kids, but kids of other races and religions and from other countries—to have that same privilege.

Perhaps more than many of us want to accept, however, Jewish success in America came not from some big-hearted, multicultural tolerance (which didn’t exist) nor from our ability to “pass” through prejudices and censors (we couldn’t), but from a commodious idea of what an American can be.

Jewish achievement, Jewish survival, and Jewish identity all depend not on radical acceptance—the idea that we have to be celebrated, not just tolerated—but on the specifically Jewish insistence on radical difference. Jews are called upon to eat, dress, pray, work, grieve, marry, and learn in distinct ways that, throughout history, have often made us objects of distrust and hatred. Yet we are required, as Jews, to be willing and able to sit by ourselves—even, if need be, to endure tremendous discomfort. The freedom to be different, while also being accepted as Americans just like anyone else, has for us been the great miracle of this country—and the reason it has been one of the brightest spots in our four millennia of existence.

The value of this American idea has been thrown into question of late, and its future viability is being hotly debated right now. Which is precisely why we should follow the cracks in the foundations of American society not in the way a pundit follows “politics” or “partisanship” or the “culture wars,” but more like a seismologist tracks sudden slips in tectonic plates. Throughout Jewish history, the ability to notice whether and how and when the ground is shifting has been a salient feature of life—or else a lesson purchased at the highest possible cost.

When it comes to American institutions, though not America itself, I am a brokenist—both because of my sense of the problems (which I explored here and here) as well as the possible solutions. The ferment in American life and culture is now on the fringes—among the creative types who are too far gone for the establishment institutions to control, and the outsiders who oppose those institutions, and the builders who are too busy obsessing over their own life project to notice or care much about what the status-quoists think. That’s where the cultural energy is: in innovative new prep schools for young Black men in rural Georgia; in young families quitting the cities for rural areas; in science and biotech landscapes run by swashbuckling pioneers who bob and weave around bureaucratic obstacles, expanding the possibilities for how life is and can be lived, and performing medical and technological feats we’d once have easily described as miracles.

At the same time, as someone who is deeply engaged in Jewish life, who admires and loves many people who work in Jewish institutions, I also embrace the status quo. I know that the dentists and lawyers and bakers and butchers who form the backbone of every living Jewish community don’t currently live on the blockchain, or in self-made communes. They live in an imperfect world that has always been imperfect, and from which people have often been able to generate safety and even beauty by committing to stakes already in the ground.

There is, though, one thing that is nonnegotiable to me. We are in a historic moment of flux. Regardless of your political or religious or cultural allegiances, you must not be surprised by the fact that the world is changing, or that change often spans a spectrum of feeling from uncomfortable to very, very bad. Whether you see yourself as a brokenist or a status-quoist (or neither), you must not be surprised by a world that looks different from what you had grown used to. You must not be surprised when we are considered “the enemy” on an increasing number of college campuses or in the pages of storied newspapers; you must not be surprised when famous athletes or beloved musical artists or crafty politicians want to turn their fans against us; you must not be surprised by election results, or Supreme Court decisions.

This idea is central to our mission now. No Tablet reader in 2022 should scan the news in the morning and find herself shocked. When you wake up and look at your phone and the headlines at least make sense, however bad the news may be—that is when you know you are inside an authentically Jewish conversation. To see the cracks in the building before it collapses—that is a Jewish experience. To argue about whether the building can be saved or has to be evacuated—that is a Jewish debate. To find a way to somehow invent an entirely new kind of building—that is a Jewish act. To dismiss the cracks as unimportant and suppress questions, so that the next day’s news shocks you all over again—I wish you luck in your efforts, but don’t confuse your approach with the values of Jewish engagement.

Once you stop spending your time being outraged, you’ll realize how much energy you have for whatever work you want to do. Leave. Stay. Build something new; invest in current institutions to see if they can be made better. Think bravely and creatively about what America needs for a stable and rich future. Be deliberate about what you’re doing, and try to understand those who do and see things differently. What you encounter might seem or actually be misguided or outright wrong, foreign, scary—even dangerous. Engage anyway.

A handful of readers misread my original essay as a downer. As my friend Ryan understood, my goal is not to discourage people, but precisely the opposite: to give hope. The ground is moving again. Everything bad comes from change, but so does everything good.

On Living Inside the MSMs Hyper-Normal Filtered Fake News Bubble

The DNC's 2nd Largest Donor? Fraud.

The Democrat's (& UniParty Republicans) Ukrainian Kick-Back Scheme Falls Apart Post-Midterms

Thanks Mitch McConnell, here's your $2.5 million cut...

Oooops!

How's Our Global Transition to Green Energy Going? Do the Results Match all the Progressive Clamor?

...why it's going EXACTLY as the Corporate Globalist's Planned it, of course!

Thanks, WEF!  Thanks ESGs!  Thanks DAVOS Men, EVERYWHERE!

(D)Oligarchy's Big Win!

Selwyn Duke, "Circumstantial evidence of vote fraud?"

Yesterday America voted, and there were some rather odd election anomalies -- much as there had been in 2020. As for the latter, a bit of history:

The winner of Florida, Iowa, and Ohio had won the presidency for perhaps as long as the three states have been part of the union and certainly had for 60 years, since Richard Nixon won them but lost an election widely regarded to have been stolen. Donald Trump won all three states by comfortable margins -- but “lost” the 2020 election. There also are the 19 bellwether counties that had supported the presidential victor in every contest since 1980, 18 of which Trump won (the one he lost had instituted a new voting system more susceptible to fraud). And now, in 2022, it appears we’re seeing anomalies again.

A “red wave” was expected by virtually all analysts, partially, but not completely, because Republicans enjoyed polling advantages that had been increasing for weeks prior to the election. What’s more, given that the GOP tends to under-poll -- one study estimated by five points this election cycle -- robust Republican gains seemed reasonable to most observers. Yet curiously, if we’re to believe Tuesday’s results, something perhaps unprecedented in modern elections happened: The GOP had over-polled -- in most places but not all.

This is interesting because polling “systems” are the same in every state -- but voting systems aren’t.

This raises a question: Does this point to polling problems, or voting system problems?

Consider Florida, which did experience a profound GOP wave (all figures are from the RealClear Politics’ polling averages and election result data). Governor Ron DeSantis led his challenger, Charlie Crist, by 12.2 points on average in the polls but actually won by 19.5. So he under-polled by 7.3 points. Senator Marco Rubio led his challenger, Val Demings, by 8.8 points in the polls but won by a whopping 16.5, a 7.7 point improvement.

(Republicans are also expected to increase their margin in Florida’s 120-member House to 85 seats, their largest majority in history.)

Yet the picture was very different in most of the rest of the country. Consider the following Senate races (all numbers are as of early 11/9):

Democrat Michael Bennet had a 5.7 point polling lead in Colorado but won by 12.4.
Democrat Maggie Hassan had a 1.4 polling lead in New Hampshire but won by 9.9.
Democrat Patty Murray had a 3.0 polling lead in Washington but won by 14.
Democrat John Fetterman had a 0.4 polling deficit in Pennsylvania but won by 2.3.
Republican Ted Budd had a 6.2 polling lead in North Carolina but won by only 3.6.
Republican J.D. Vance had an 8.0 polling lead but won by 6.

 Regarding the still undecided Senate races:

Republican Blake Masters had a 0.3 polling lead in Arizona but is behind by 6.
Republican Herschel Walker had a 1.4 polling lead in Georgia but is behind by 1.2.
Republican Ron Johnson had a 3.6 polling lead in Wisconsin but is ahead by only 1.2.
Republican Adam Laxalt had a 3.4 polling lead in Nevada but is ahead by 2.7.

Using the current numbers from the first six states above, where the races have been called, I find that Republicans allegedly over-polled by an average of 5.43 points. In contrast, DeSantis and Rubio under-polled by an average of 7.5. That’s a difference of almost 13 points between the GOP’s under-polling in Florida and its “over-polling” elsewhere. 

Possible explanation?

Florida’s Ron DeSantis has been attacking election fraud more aggressively than probably any other governor -- including fellow Republicans. The Sunshine State created a new agency, the Office of Election Crimes and Security. A massive ballot-harvesting operation was recently exposed in Orlando. DeSantis also signed a law limiting ballot drop boxes’ hours of availability, requiring they be monitored by public officials, tightening the procedures for getting a mail-in ballot, creating new voter-ID requirements, and making it a crime for anyone to possess or deliver more than two mail-in ballots per election. This is significant because mail-in balloting is the kind most susceptible to vote fraud (which is why France prohibited it in 1975).

While my data are far from exhaustive (and I’d welcome a more comprehensive analysis), the pattern I’ve outlined appears to hold everywhere or virtually everywhere.