Happy New Year!

One's 'Duty of Conscience' in the White Guilt-Pride Weltanshauung

...and the need for a sustaining oppressor (ie - White racists/ supremacists) in order for it to function and maintain contemporary relevance.  And after time, when the "oppressor" can no longer be found... to "fake" hate crimes in order to keep the oppressor/ oppressed Narrative alive so that the 'other' co-believer's raison d'etre doesn't disappear and Weltanshauung collapse from an inability to glean narcissistic pride from their attempts to atone for and assuage one's guilt in being historically associated with the former oppressor.

Why does a religious believer fake a religious relic?  Not to sustain one's own belief, but to sustain and inspire the beliefs of others who might share and be losing the faith.  ie- a piece of the 'true cross', or a grail that once captured the blood of the Saviour.  Evidence/ Proof's for the religion's doubting Thomas' to present at the next ritualistic gathering.

The Bi-Annual Secular Election Ritual...

A PanAthena & Olympiad Rolled into One

Is Cancel Culture a form of "Anti-Trad" Cultural Performance Art Spawned from a Luxury Belief System?

Scapegoating the Old Idols and Casting their followers Out

Meet the Corporate Donors!

Source

When is a Marriage NOT a Marriage?

 ...when liberals re-define marriage to suit their science & biology denying social agenda.

When is a Vaccine NOT a Vaccine?

ibid.

What's YOUR permission structure?  Current Government 'Authorities' (lexicographers)?

...or Leftist blogs:

h/t - Woodsterman

When the Standard Model No Longer Adequately Explains the Physics...

When the current Standard Model of Physics began to no longer support all the measured observations, scientists introduced new theories to better support and explain the observational anomalies.  For example, when scientists observed a pronounced red-shift bias in the apparent velocity of distant stars and galaxies moving away from us, they concluded that the Universe's expansion must be accelerating.  To explain this acceleration, one group of Scientists created a component in their equations the called "Dark Energy".  They called this the Lambda CDM Model of the Universe.  

But recently a new model has been postulated that better fits the observed data, and make the postulated "Dark Energy" component in the Lambda CDM Model unnecessary. It's called the "Timescapes Model" and accounts for the red-shift bias as a product of an uneven distribution of matter in the Universe and its' 'clumping' in the observed local structures known as the 'Cosmic Web'.  They postulate that Dark Energy is merely an observational illusion, as time travels more slowly in the vicinity of greater masses (like in the movie Interstellar).

So how does this relate to politics?

Think of all the scientists who advocate the Lambda CDM Theory who have spent hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars looking for Dark Energy and trying to explain it.  Now think of the proponents of this new Timescapes Theory that need billions of dollars to attempt to prove it.  Which side should the Government fund?

Now consider how these two groups would then characterize the other group's theory, and try to explain its' deficiencies to the National Academy of Sciences when trying to obtain funding. 

Consider now the following Salon article as seen from the perspective of the Institutionalists who are fighting for increased funding for Lambda CDM Theory research....

Amanda Marcotte, "Conspiracy theory is the new normal: 2024 was the year QAnon went mainstream"

The single biggest reason Trump won? The median voter ignores real news to consume endless disinformation

In the face of Vice President Kamala Harris losing the presidential election to Donald Trump, the punditry's focus has been almost exclusively on asking how the Democrats couldn't beat a relentless liar with 34 felony convictions and a previous attempted coup under his belt. Everyone has a different theory about Harris' "messaging," with every critic inevitably arguing that if she had just talked more about their pet issue, she would have won.

Another option, however, is to listen to what swing voters who backed Trump said about their decision. That would seem the wisest choice, but to be fair to people who don't want to go there, hearing these people out is a truly miserable experience. What quickly becomes evident about the median voters in an American focus group is how profoundly opposed they are to even the most basic factual information. On the contrary, it's a community with a pathological aversion to reality, where people compulsively react to anything truth-shaped with hostility, running as hard as they can toward disinformation. They are addicted to BS. Of course they voted for Trump, the country's most reliable dealer of their favorite drug.

This may sound ungenerous to these voters, but only if you've been sparing yourself the torture of engaging their actual opinions. If you hold your nose and dive in, it's startling how much the typical swing voter is allergic to facts. It's not just ignorance, but overt hostility to anything that smacks of veracity. Such as the Trump voter who insisted to the New York Times that Democrats are "lying about pregnancies," by conveying factual information about abortion bans. Or the one who falsely believed "so many people just walk right across the border and get free housing, free food." Or the one who was excited that "Trump brings a Robert Kennedy Jr. or a Tulsi Gabbard and Elon Musk." Or the one who said the "Democratic Party [is] going after average people who disagreed on Covid, who disagreed on school boards, who disagreed on boys playing in women’s sports," which is just a way to complain about liberals who criticize him on social media for saying things that aren't true.

Sarah Longwell's "Focus Group" podcast ended the year by interviewing Joe Rogan fans who voted for Trump for the first time this election. It was a smart choice, and not just because Rogan's endorsement likely pushed Trump over the top in a shockingly close election. Rogan's audience perfectly illustrates the way the firehose of disinformation online — his conspiracy theory-hyping podcast has over 16 million followers — has pickled the brains of so many otherwise normal people. Most of the people Longwell interviewed couldn't go two minutes without coughing up a conspiracy theory. Everything is a shadowy plot, from the COVID-19 pandemic to the guy who shot Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. The straightforward details of the shooting of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson came out after the arrest of Luigi Mangione, and yet these voters refused to believe the banal facts. Some are wallowing in theories that Mangione is a patsy, or that the shooting is a psyop. The truer any information was, the more they rejected it.

After the insurrection of Jan. 6, a lot of attention was paid to the rise of QAnon, because so many rioters were adherents to this online cult that preached that Trump is a savior prophesized to stop a worldwide Satanic conspiracy. Alarming reports showed millions of Americans believed QAnon myths, such as the divinity of Trump or that Democrats drink children's blood. QAnon is still around, but it gets much less media coverage these days. One likely reason is what we see in these focus groups: bonkerballs levels of conspiracy belief is no longer a fringe phenomenon. QAnon-style beliefs are simply the norm in American society.

I wrote about this right after the election, but it bears repeating: One of the best predictors, if not the best predictor, of a Trump vote is how poor a person's information ecosystem is. People who read or watch real news outlets voted overwhelmingly for Harris. People who get their political information from social media voted for Trump. Subsequently, polls showed that Trump voters couldn't answer basic factual questions about what the candidates believed. Harris voters were far more accurate.

It's not like Americans got hit with a stupid bomb, sending millions of us away from the real news and toward nonsense peddlers like Rogan. On "Focus Group," they briefly discussed how people's boredom during the pandemic caused them to spend more time on social media and listening to podcasts. Many got deeply addicted to disinformation during that period. (Interest in QAnon certainly spiked.) COVID-19 isn't the threat it was, but millions of those people still have the conspiracy theory monkey on their backs, as evidenced by Rogan's enormous audience.

Why are conspiracy theories so addictive? Having researched the issue for an investigative report last year, I think there are two main reasons. First, like actual drugs, conspiracy theories relieve boredom. As Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times argued during the height of the drone mania earlier this month, the "drones" were mostly planes, hobbyist drones, and stars, but "life does seem more exciting if you think the Iranians are specifically interested in the everyday activities of New Jerseyans." Boredom was especially high during the pandemic, which is why so many otherwise stable people went straight down the conspiracy rabbit hole.

But while boredom is the gateway, ego flattery is why people keep coming back. The allure of the conspiracy theory is that you, Joe Nobody, understand a topic far more than the experts who spent their lives working on this issue. You understand viral transmission more than medical scientists. You see the hidden secrets of the "deep state" the journalists on Capitol Hill are missing. You, with your enormous brain, understand every field from nutrition science to American history far more than those people who study and research. This is why people who get into one conspiracy theory start digging into others. Feeling like you know better, while not having to learn anything, is intoxicating. It combines laziness with the will to feel superior. That most conspiracy theories affirm pre-existing beliefs is a bonus.

Nicole Karlis at Salon recently wrote an excellent article detailing the mania for raw milk in the MAGA movement. I'd label the discourse around raw milk a conspiracy theory. It's presented as this near-magical health product supposedly suppressed by shadowy conspirators for nefarious reasons. That idea is certainly more exciting than the banal truth: pasteurization was developed to prevent foodborne illness. But it also flatters the ego of the raw milk enthusiast, who is convinced he's part of an elite group with special access to knowledge that ordinary people can't or won't access. As a cherry on top, raw milk also feeds the fascist fantasy that life was better in the early 19th century when slavery was legal and women couldn't vote.

By now, no doubt, a certain number of readers are raging at me because I haven't offered a solution to get people to go cold turkey on the disinformation and return to the less exciting but healthier real world. In the interest of remaining reality-based, I have to confess I don't have such a solution — and would advise personal resistance to anyone offering One Simple Solution to complex problems. (Although I hope the TikTok ban goes through, as that will help.) But the good news is that conspiracy theories have a way of petering out. They often rise as a response to widespread social stress. The upheavals of the 60s and 70s resulted in conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination and the moon landing, for instance. The rise in divorce and women working in the 80s led to hysteria about "Satanic cults" at daycares. Eventually, most people stopped believing in, or at least caring about, those theories. It may take a long time, but eventually, even this mania will likely pass. The fight is in trying to reduce the damage they cause in the meantime.

In other words, "The Timescapes Theory is Bunk!  They're just CONSPIRING with other CRACKPOT THEORISTS to STEAL OUR FUNDING and impeding our progress in discovering the REAL Source of Dark Energy!"

Which theory better fits and accords the Standard Model of either politics or Physics?  We'll likely never know.  But one thing's for sure.  The Standard Models are definitely showing more and more cracks.

Santa's on his way!

The Electoral College Has Confirmed 47!

Varoufakis on DiEM25...

L&R Populists on the Same Stage!

Whither comes the sorting of Populist from Elite Permission Structures?  Or Will the Educated Elites Always Dominate the Populist Permission Structure?  I suspect that the L/R Elite-Populism dichotomy merely reflects a natural L/R elite struggle for social status and control (described below) that will always be present as a result of Elite Overproduction, much as elites on both sides of the L/R Elite divide will always gravitate towards embracing "Luxury Values" whilst the Populist embrace the more 'common values' of "Pragmatism" sprinkled with a similar resentment?

Excerpt from Oliver Traldi's, "Who the Woke Are" on the book "We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite", by Musa al-Gharbi (Princeton, 432 pp., $35)

Al-Gharbi gives a grand theory of awokenings—accounting for not only the recent Great Awokening but also social changes in the leadup to the Civil War, in the 1920s, and in the 1970s—and finds multiple threads of causation common to them.

One such thread is elite overproduction. When too many would-be elites are produced, they don’t get the standing they think they deserve, and sometimes seek to be revolutionaries instead (the '68 Student Revolt sound familiar?) In cases where elite overproduction occurs simultaneously with more widespread social unrest, would-be elites can co-opt and redirect political movements toward their own goals—which, according to al-Gharbi, is often correlated with plateaus when it comes to those movements’ successes on their own terms. The biggest victories of these redirected revolutions are often “social justice sinecures,” or carved-out positions for the elites among supposedly marginalized groups.

According to al-Gharbi, elite overproduction leads to resentment and reactive calls for revolution: “Frustrated symbolic capitalists and elite aspirants sought to indict the system that failed them—and also the elites that did manage to flourish—by attempting to align themselves with the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged.” But this isn’t completely clear. If wokeness is a legitimating ideology of a successful and powerful elite class, how can it also be a kind of formation aimed against that class by those who failed to join it? Some disentangling of this sort of tension could have helped highlight the book’s overall thesis amid the forest of fascinating detail.

In the recent Great Awokening, al-Gharbi notes with his characteristic eye, the new group of over-credentialed underachievers mostly consisted of women, and a significant majority of the jobs in the administrative bloat that was created in the wake of woke upheaval—the HR and DEI bureaucracies—went to women. Later on, he writes: “The feminization of the symbolic professions is significant in light of the robust and ever-expanding lines of research in moral and social psychology demonstrating that . . . men and women tend to engage in very different forms of conflict, competition, and status seeking.” This feminization is linked, for al-Gharbi, to the rise of a “victimhood culture” oriented in part around the concept of “trauma.” The psychology of victimhood fits the broader sense of superiority that al-Gharbi attributes to the woke symbolic capitalists: “Research has found that people who understand themselves as victims often demonstrate less concern for the hardships of others; they feel more entitled to selfish behavior; they grow more vicious against rivals . . . [T]hey also gain a sense of moral superiority relative to everyone else.”

Further, the risk-aversion and fear of ostracism that characterizes the psychology of most symbolic capitalists leads to reduced innovation in spheres as diverse as science, business, and pop culture. This section is more speculative than most, but I was happy to see al-Gharbi address the ubiquity of remakes, adaptations, and spinoffs in contemporary cultural output—just what one would expect if culture is dominated by those who have spent their lives getting better and better at following the rules. Progressive culture seems to resemble the political equivalent of bankers showing off their near-identical business cards to one another in American Psycho. Thus We Have Never Been Woke also improves on earlier accounts of wokeness by linking it to other contemporary phenomena that are obviously related but hard to associate as a matter of pure political belief.

Ron Paul on USIC Nostradumbasses

Cui Bono?

Trump and Musk and China G2, Oh My!

Spreading Holiday Cheer!

The most offensive Christmas song ever!

Tom MacDonald - Let It Snow (Screw The Woke)

SHARE THIS LIKE CRAZY! pic.twitter.com/X8y0bbdvM3

— Tom MacDonald (@IAMTOMMACDONALD) December 21, 2024

What's YOUR Budget CR Permission Structure?

🚨CHAMATH: "People are underestimating what happened here (The Bill). This was a multi hundred billion dollar grift that was stopped on a dime over 12 hours of tweets. You would have never thought this was possible. To put a dagger in something that big that had so much broad… pic.twitter.com/xz7ULHk1P7

— Autism Capital 🧩 (@AutismCapital) December 21, 2024

Clarice Feldman, "Trump and Musk Demolish the Obama Hallucinatory Permission Structure"

The big story this week is how X (formerly Twitter) worked to dramatically change the American legislative process. As Chamath Palihapitiya said, "People are underestimating what happened here [The Continuing Resolution]. This was a multi-hundred billion dollar grift that was stopped on a dime over 12 hours of tweets. You would have never thought this was possible. To put a dagger in something that big that had so much broad support just a few hours earlier is so consequential in how the United States can run going forward."

But if you grasp the background for this feat -- the story of how Axelrod and Obama, a struggling and complacent media, puppet NGOs, and a corrupt bureaucracy for years created a false preference cascade that fed absurd crazes like “defund the police,” ”structural racism,” “white privilege,” ”assigned gender,” ”genocide in Gaza” -- you can better understand the fast collapse. Obama’s was an autocratic regime that, using David Axelrod’s once benign psychological creation, sold large swaths of the public counterfactual, illogical nonsense like ObamaCare, the Iran deal, and Russiagate and used COVID hysteria to transfer billions of dollars from the rest of us to the top 1% and corrupt our electoral system, but it was utterly without foundation: In sum, sanity finally overcame politically manipulated hallucinatory thinking.

BACKGROUND STORY

To fully understand how the Continuing Resolution was defunded, how Trump won, and how Benjamin Netanyahu was able to properly defend Israel free of Obama’s delusionary views of reshaping the Middle East, read this lengthy, well-researched and argued essay by David Samuels.

I urge you to read it all. I have not space to do it justice, but I’ll try to summarize it. In 2000 the media landscape switched to online communications as 20th-century media collapsed. Early internet communications were on small platforms, often attracting the like-minded, but by 2000, “monopoly social media platforms” took off, and Obama used them to sell his policies. Captured NGOs, think tanks, and puppet outfits like ADL “credentialed each other on social media,” creating feedback loops and echo chambers. In other words, young aides in the White House were “creating ‘public opinion’ from their iPhones and laptops.” When Hillary lost to Trump, Obama stayed on as titular head of his party, controlling digital platforms, and he ramped this up when Trump lost in 2020 -- using it to bury the Hunter laptop story, promoting the fake Russia story generated by 51 former government officials, restricting and banning factual reports which challenged these narratives. Even worse, “the enforcement arms of the federal bureaucracy” were engaged and worked with the digital media to censor dissenting views on such things as COVID, DEI, police conduct, and the effects of transition treatments on youth. Nothing in these fads was “accidental, mystical, or organic.” “Formerly fringe positions” were promoted as something “all ‘decent people’ think.” The digital monopolies used algorithms to speed the momentum of these manufactured opinions. Thus, for example, we were led to dismiss suggestions that the obviously senile Biden was not. Eventually, the lack of logic and obvious deleterious results of these policies, which had been based on fake consensus, got to people, and “the fever broke.” It also broke Obama, who is visibly haggard and no longer of consequence. “The entire structure he had erected over more than a decade, and which was to have been his legacy… has collapsed entirely.”

Twitter was a significant part of Obama’s “permission structure machinery,” and Elon Musk’s purchase of it was recognized as dangerous to this scheme. Indeed, this explains the persistent lawfare against Musk and the party’s efforts to cut X’s advertising revenues until he followed other platforms like Facebook and Instagram and censored dissent.

Where this analysis went wrong is the same place that the Obama team’s analysis of Trump went wrong: The wizards of the permission structure machine had become captives of the machinery that they built. Bullying large numbers of people into faddish hyperconformity by controlling the machinery of social approval may require both money and technique, but it is not art or thought. In fact, it is something like the opposite of thought. Lost in the hypercharged mirror world that they had created, they decided that having made themselves cool also made them right, and that evidence to the contrary could be safely dismissed as a “right-wing talking point.” Obama’s operatives shared the same character flaw as their master, a kind of brittle, Ivy League know-it-all-ness that demanded that they always be the smartest person in the room. Musk, meanwhile, was entirely and sincerely his own man -- a privilege that came in part from being the richest man in America, and in part from the nature of his businesses, which the Obama cadres appear to have misunderstood. Musk may have paid twice as much as the next-highest bidder for Twitter, if such a bidder actually ever existed. Except, it was also true that, as a business proposition, Twitter was worth more to Elon Musk than it was to anyone else with the money to pay for it. That’s because the value that Musk creates in his companies is a unique blend of high imagination and physical products which function as memes. [snip] It is clear by now that the Obama party were the suckers -- not Musk. In fact, the party’s belated war on Twitter’s new owner only served to convince other Silicon Valley oligarchs that whatever reputational risks they might incur by backing Donald Trump would be outweighed by the direct risks that party weaponization of federal regulatory structures, which gave it effective control of markets and banks, would pose to their businesses. [snip] With Musk’s X now open to all comers, the party’s censorship apparatus was effectively dead. A new counter-permission structure machine was now erected, licensing all kinds of views, some of which were novel and welcome, and others of which were noxious. Which is how opinion in a free society is supposed to operate.

DEMOCRATS LOSE THE BATTLE OF THE CONTINUING RESOLUTION

Just as Musk’s X platform created an open vehicle for Trump and his supporters, which certainly contributed to his victory, the platform undeniably played a historic and significant role in defeating a bloated Continuing Resolution by utilizing the forum to make it possible for everyone to read what was in it before the vote was taken. For years, Congress has avoided accountability for overspending by waiting until almost the end of the year, crafting a grift-heavy bill and demanding that it be immediately passed before the year-end recess under threat of a government shutdown (a shutdown sounds scarier than it actually is, in any event). Tucked into this monster is usually one or two more palatable appropriations, which the lackey media will highlight to persuade what readers they still have that the bill must be passed. This time, it was an appropriation for research into pediatric cancer. Unfortunately for the fools who bought this sob story, the House had passed a bill appropriating funds for this purpose nine months earlier, which Senator Chuck Schumer had left languish so that there could be a diamond in this manure heap to demagogue about. (Hours after the third attempt to craft a resolution that both houses would pass succeeded, the Senate finally got around to passing the House bill for this research.) When the first bill was introduced days before it was to be voted on, it was over 1500 pages long, another legislative trick, because no one could digest it in time. But Musk created an artificial intelligence program, Grok, that could and did, and the analysis was posted on X so everyone could see a summary of what was in the bill. Voters saw that Congress would fund a 35% raise for themselves, would continue the hated COVID biometric regime, would fund more government censorship, and would grant immunity from prosecution for the corrupt J6 committee, among other things. Outraged voters swamped congressional lines, and Trump threatened to primary any Republican who voted for it. The bill failed, as did a second one. A third bill,l now pared down to less than a tenth of the original, passed the House, then the Senate on Saturday morning, and Biden signed it into law.

Tomorrow, Senator Rand Paul is scheduled to release his Festivus Report detailing hundreds of billions of dollars in government waste -- things like a million dollars spent to study the effects of cocaine on Japanese quail. Look for it to be republished in full on X.

If “con” is the opposite of “pro,” what is the opposite of “Congress?”

Our Brave New Technofeudal World

Rajan Laad, "The Democrat Trump-Musk Feud Strategy"

It has been a triumphant phase for the MAGA movement. President Trump won a landslide electoral victory last month. The bogus cases against him, which were part of the establishment's attempts to outlaw political opposition, appear to be winding down. Trump had a triumphant return to the global stage during the reopening of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. He effectively won a case against vicious slander by ABC News and George Stephanopoulos which compelled the outlet to initiate a settlement payment of $15 million. Gorgeous George himself had to pony up $1 million. Trump won Time magazine's Person of the Year, which meant a lot to him and his supporters. Trump secured a $100 billion investment from the Japan-based SoftBank Group Corp which will create 100,000 U.S. jobs, doubtlessly encouraging other investors.

Hamas has expressed intentions to end the conflict with Israel. Canada announced new border security rules to avoid a 25% tariff after Trump threatened them. Trump was in command during his recent presser which sent a signal globally that the U.S. is back.

Elon Musk was an important ally in Trump's massive victory last month. Musk joined the Trump campaign after being impressed by Trump's exemplary bravery and defiance following the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. Musk made X a free-speech platform, preventing the Democrats from manipulating the narrative on social media as they did in 2020. This time the public had access to all information and the lies were with 'community noted.'

Trump announced that Musk and Ramaswamy will lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a watchdog focused on cutting wasteful government spending and reducing bureaucratic impediments.

To sum it up, President Trump has had a triumphant start even before being sworn in. He seems on track to be delivering key campaign promises. DOGE is already on the job, both Musk and Ramaswamy have been vocal about the scandalous recent 1500-page spending bill.

The D.C. swamp could render DOGE irrelevant by preemptively mending its ways, but will not, because its existence is based on corruption and government excesses.

The swamp dwellers are now in a quandary. They know that they cannot misuse agencies to target Trump as they did before. Their media proxies aren't going to engage in blatant lies, after the ABC settlement. They desperately need to derail this Trump train.

So what do they do?

They resort to petty ploys. Following Trump's victory there were memes by some Democrat proxies that Musk was the new first lady. In time they attempted to suggest Musk was the equivalent of Vice President and that Vance was sidelined.

But neither of these had any impact.

Now they are pushing another hoax -- that Musk is the President and Trump is the Vice President. This is similar to the Trump-Russia collusion hoax where they attempted to credit Putin for Trump's amazing victory in 2016 and suggested that Putin was in charge. This time around, Putin has been replaced with Musk.

The usual hoaxers Kinzinger, Sanders, the Lincoln Project, Democrat representatives, etc. are pushing this falsehood.

Democrats allies are posting memes depicting Trump as subservient to Musk. USA Today, the WaPo, MSNBC, and CNN are also pushing this hoax.

This divide-and-rule tactic has been used throughout history to overcome seemingly invincible enemies. It may appear petty but it can be effective and it doesn't cost anything. All one has to do is sow seeds of division.

This is depicted in Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece Yojimbo and its remake A Fistful of Dollars with Clint Eastwood. They are hoping that the constant bombardment of this narrative will enrage Trump. They are also hoping it will color his judgment about Musk, if he finds a comment or a Tweet that appears to be a difference of opinion, Trump will interpret it as an act of defiance. They are also hoping that Musk will succumb to the flattery and think of himself as a puppet master and make a display of it on X.

The main goal is to cause a massive feud which will lead to Musk's sacking and the dismantling of DOGE. Many Democrat proxies are openly declaring this on X. They are hoping that the rift will make Musk one of Trump's worst adversaries and that they will engage in a vicious war of words on social media.

In subsequent days, expect mainstream news outlets to use unnamed sources to declare a battle royale between Musk and Trump.

We will learn of 'sources' claiming that Musk ridiculed Trump among friends. 'Sources' will claim Trump is furious with the President Musk hoax and told allies he will 'kick Musk the f---k out of Mar-a-Lago and banish his a—forever.' In the coming weeks, months, and years both Musk and Trump have to be careful.

Musk must understand that Trump is the founder and will always be the leader of the MAGA movement. He was a great support and an ally. But it was Trump who won.

During the early 80s, rock superstar Sting's manager Miles Copeland revealed that his primary job was to keep the egos of his Police bandmates in check. He said bandmates would complain they had better ideas than Sting and he had to remind them that if Sting dropped out, the concert would be canceled. But if any bandmate quit, he would be replaced and nobody would notice.

Musk is a guitarist in the MAGA band, but Trump is the lead. Musk is a valuable bandmate, as is Lara Trump, Dan Scavino, Susie Wiles, Dana White, Vivek Ramaswamy, etc.

While exercising his opinions Musk must be clear that he reports to Trump in DOGE. Musk must not be seen to defy Trump in any way. Musk is accustomed to being the boss and doing as he pleases, and he will have to exercise restraint given this new role.

To be clear, Musk hasn't shown any disloyalty or defiance toward President Trump. There is also no indication that Musk is behind this hoax. Musk even praised Trump in a recent tweet.

Trump too must exercise caution while reacting to this hoax. During future pressers, he will likely be bombarded with questions about 'President Musk.' It would be a good idea to ridicule this premise without an answer while expressing support for Musk.

Trump, Musk, and the rest must remember that they thoroughly vanquished the Democrats last month.

The Democrats have nothing to offer but lies, petty ploys, and hoaxes.

Hopefully, everyone will remember a lesson that history frequently teaches us -- to be victorious, total unity is essential.

Just How Sharp Was That Tack?

Proof that an Empty Chair President can always get 38% of the Country to approve of him so long as he has a (D) after his name.

Andy Harris Voted AGAINST the Trump CR in Congress

All the above is a lie.  He's 100% out all for HIMSELF, and NOT DJT!

 Andy Harris (R) MD no longer knows how to put on his big boy pants.  It's time to vote his stupid ass OUT of Congress.  His website no longer even lets his constituents send him a message, even if you enter your 9 digit zip.  It's a fund raising capture site.

Dump Andy in 2026!

He's a useless unserious tool.

He wants to keep pretending that Congress is a "serious" institution.  It is NOT!

The country voted for DJT, not the Freedom Caucus.  Regular Order for budgets ended decades ago.

DOGE is COMING!  They will sort the budget out, not YOU!

 

Andy, stop being part of the "No Caucus".

The USIC - Hidden in Secrecy

On the system that Barack Obama's Deep State created

World's Incompetent Liberal Leadership Collapsing...

 
h/t -  Woodsterman

Meanwhile in America...

Mitch McConnell for Global Conquest via WWIII

Mitch McConnell, "The Price of American Retreat: Why Washington Must Reject Isolationism and Embrace Primacy"

When he begins his second term as president, Donald Trump will inherit a world far more hostile to U.S. interests than the one he left behind four years ago. China has intensified its efforts to expand its military, political, and economic influence worldwide. Russia is fighting a brutal and unjustified war in Ukraine. Iran remains undeterred in its campaign to destroy Israel, dominate the Middle East, and develop a nuclear weapons capability. And these three U.S. adversaries, along with North Korea, are now working together more closely than ever to undermine the U.S.-led order that has underpinned Western peace and prosperity for nearly a century.

The Biden administration sought to manage these threats through engagement and accommodation. But today’s revanchist powers do not seek deeper integration with the existing international order; they reject its very basis. They draw strength from American weakness, and their appetite for hegemony has only grown with the eating.

Many in Washington acknowledge the threat but use it to justify existing domestic policy priorities that have little to do with the systemic competition underway. They pay lip service to the reality of great-power competition but shirk from investing in the hard power on which such competition is actually based. The costs of these mistaken assumptions have become evident. But the response to four years of weakness must not be four years of isolation.

Even though the competition with China and Russia is a global challenge, Trump will no doubt hear from some that he should prioritize a single theater and downgrade U.S. interests and commitments elsewhere. Most of these voices will argue for focusing on Asia at the expense of interests in Europe or the Middle East. Such thinking is commonplace among both isolationist conservatives who indulge the fantasy of “Fortress America” and progressive liberals who mistake internationalism for an end in itself. The right has retrenched in the face of Russian aggression in Europe, while the left has demonstrated a chronic allergy to deterring Iran and supporting Israel. Neither camp has committed to maintaining the military superiority or sustaining the alliances needed to contest revisionist powers. If the United States continues to retreat, its enemies will be only too happy to fill the void.

Trump would be wise to build his foreign policy on the enduring cornerstone of U.S. leadership: hard power. To reverse the neglect of military strength, his administration must commit to a significant and sustained increase in defense spending, generational investments in the defense industrial base, and urgent reforms to speed the United States’ development of new capabilities and to expand allies’ and partners’ access to them.

As it takes these steps, the administration will face calls from within the Republican Party to give up on American primacy. It must reject them. To pretend that the United States can focus on just one threat at a time, that its credibility is divisible, or that it can afford to shrug off faraway chaos as irrelevant is to ignore its global interests and its adversaries’ global designs. America will not be made great again by those who simply want to manage its decline.

A FALSE CHOICE

China poses the gravest long-term challenge to U.S. interests. But although successive presidents have acknowledged this reality, their actual policies have been inconsistent. Administrations have failed even to agree on the basic objective of competition with China. Is it merely a race to produce more widgets? An opportunity to sell more American soybeans, semiconductors, solar panels, and electric vehicles? Or is it a contest over the future of the international order? The Trump administration must recognize the gravity of this geopolitical struggle and invest accordingly.

In so doing, it must not repeat the mistakes of President Barack Obama’s so-called pivot to Asia. The Obama administration failed to back up its policy with sufficient investments in U.S. military power. Inverting the traditional relationship between strategy and budgets, it prioritized defense cuts for their own sake, abandoning the decades-long “two-war” construct of force planning. The bipartisan Budget Control Act of 2011 compounded this mistake and harmed military readiness.

Partners in Asia came to understand what the pivot meant for them: that they would receive a larger slice of a shrinking pie of American attention and capabilities. Partners in Europe, for their part, were not happy to see Washington ignore the Russian threat. Republicans who consider Ukraine a distraction from the Indo-Pacific should recall what happened the last time a president sought to reprioritize one region by withdrawing from another. In the Middle East, Obama’s premature withdrawal from Iraq left a vacuum for Iran and the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) to fill, and the ensuing chaos there consumed Washington for years. By 2014, as Obama struggled to consummate the pivot to Asia, dithered on the Middle East, and failed to enforce his own “redline” on Syria’s use of chemical weapons, Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded eastern Ukraine and seized Crimea.

Standing up to China will require Trump to reject the myopic advice that he prioritize that challenge by abandoning Ukraine. A Russian victory would not only damage the United States’ interest in European security and increase U.S. military requirements in Europe; it would also compound the threats from China, Iran, and North Korea. Indeed, hesitation in the face of Putin’s aggression has already made these interconnected challenges more acute. The George W. Bush administration’s failure to respond forcefully to Putin’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 was a missed opportunity to nip Russian aggression in the bud. Obama’s “reset” with Russia doubled down on this miscalculation, snuffing out hope for a concerted Western response to Russian aggression. In pursuit of arms control negotiations, he pulled his punches as Putin grew emboldened. This weakness continued in Obama’s tepid response to the 2014 invasion of Ukraine.

America will not be made great again by those who simply want to manage its decline.

Trump deserves credit for reversing the Obama administration’s limitations on assistance to Ukraine and authorizing the transfer of lethal weapons to Kyiv. During the first Trump administration, the United States used force against Russia’s ally Syria to at last enforce the redline against chemical weapons, killed hundreds of Russian mercenaries who threatened U.S. forces in Syria, and increased U.S. energy production to counter Russia’s weaponization of its oil and gas reserves. But Trump sometimes undermined these tough policies through his words and deeds. He courted Putin, he treated allies and alliance commitments erratically and sometimes with hostility, and in 2019 he withheld $400 million in security assistance to Ukraine. These public episodes raised doubts about whether the United States was committed to standing up to Russian aggression, even when it actually did so.

Despite Biden’s tough campaign rhetoric about Russia, his policy of détente with the Kremlin resembled Obama’s reset. Immediately after taking office in 2021, Biden signed a five-year extension to the New START treaty, giving up leverage over Russia that he could have used to negotiate a better agreement and tying the United States’ hands as nuclear threats from China and North Korea grew. In June of that year, he, too, withheld critical security assistance from Ukraine. And in August, he oversaw the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which no doubt encouraged Russia to further test the limits of American resolve. The Biden administration’s apparent belief that Putin’s imperial ambitions could be managed with arms control and U.S. restraint was not dissimilar to right-wing isolationists’ misplaced interest in accommodating Russia.

As it became clear that Putin would launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I urged Biden to offer meaningful lethal aid to Ukraine and expand the U.S. military footprint in Europe. But the president demurred. Even after the invasion, the Biden administration’s assistance to Ukraine was beset by hesitation, needless restrictions, and endless deliberation. These delays repeatedly ceded the initiative to Moscow and diluted the effectiveness of U.S. aid, prolonging the conflict and diminishing Kyiv’s negotiating leverage. The weakness of the Biden administration’s policies was drowned out by frenzied attention to some Republicans’ objections to supporting Ukraine. Their misguided opposition delayed passage of the “national security supplemental,” but when the chips were down, Senate Republicans overwhelmingly supported the measure, as did many Republicans in the House. Congress passed the supplemental in April 2024. And not a single Republican legislator who voted for Ukraine lost a primary.

Despite legitimate misgivings about Biden’s approach, a majority of my GOP colleagues appreciated that support for Ukraine is an investment in U.S. national security. They recognized that most of the money was going to the U.S. defense industrial base or military and that this security assistance, a mere fraction of the annual defense budget, was helping Ukraine degrade the military of a common adversary. But more work is required. For now, Putin’s indifference to his own people’s suffering has allowed him to increase his defense industrial base’s capacity to pump arms and soldiers into Ukraine. His ability to do this in perpetuity is questionable; Russian victory is inevitable only if the West abandons Ukraine.

THE ALLIED ADVANTAGE

Trump will hear from neo-isolationists who discount the importance of American allies to American prosperity, ignore the need for the United States’ credibility among fence sitters in critical regions, and misunderstand the basic requirements of the U.S. military to deter or win faraway conflicts. Their arguments elide the fact that the enemy gets a vote, too, and may decide to confront the United States simultaneously on multiple fronts, at which point allies become more valuable than ever.

In Europe, Trump will find encouraging progress. After major surges in their defense budgets, U.S. allies on the continent now spend 18 percent more than they did a year ago, a far greater increase than the United States’. More than two-thirds of NATO members now meet or exceed the alliance’s target of spending at least two percent of GDP on defense. This progress is not without exception. One of the West’s most glaring vulnerabilities to the influence of Russia—and China and Iran—is Hungary’s self-abnegating obeisance to those countries.

But aside from this noisy exception, it is not lost on the United States’ European allies that Trump called on them to take hard power and burden sharing more seriously. NATO allies are also buying American, and since January 2022 have ordered more than $185 billion of modern U.S. weapons systems. But Trump will be right to encourage allies to do more. At the next NATO summit, allies should set a higher defense-spending target of three percent of GDP and commit to increasing their base budgets accordingly.

The most inconvenient truth for those calling on Trump to abandon Europe is that European allies recognize the growing links between China and Russia and increasingly see China as a “systemic rival.” During a visit to the Philippines in 2023, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen noted that “security in Europe and security in the Indo-Pacific is indivisible.” U.S. allies in Asia understand the same thing. As Hsiao Bi-khim put it in 2023, when she was Taiwan’s representative in Washington, “Ukraine’s survival is Taiwan’s survival.”

The unwillingness of the “Asia first” crowd to welcome European allies’ progress is curious. They ignore a glaring need to work with allies to counter Chinese threats to shared interests, raising the question of whether they are really interested in contesting China after all. Some even seem to have seized on the need to counter China as a rationale for the United States to abdicate leadership everywhere else, suggesting that “Asia first” is merely an excuse for underlying isolationism.

These critics ignore the growing strategic alignment of China and Russia, Russia’s own influence in Asia (including its increasingly capable Pacific fleet), and the inescapable reality that U.S. competition with both powers is global. In the Middle East, for example, Russia has undermined U.S. interests for years through its intervention in Syria and partnership with Iran. Putin’s use of Iranian attack drones in Ukraine should have come as no surprise: the West’s collective failure to stand up to Iran earlier has allowed it to become a more powerful partner to China and Russia. Beyond embracing Iran, the two countries have also sought to deepen their relationship with traditional U.S. partners in the region.

China has for years sought to drive a wedge between the United States and its partners. It is tragic that the “Asia first” crowd would so obviously play into Beijing’s hands, just as previous administrations that had turned their back on allies in the Middle East opened the door to Chinese influence in that critical region.

HOLIDAY FROM HARD POWER

The U.S. government spends nearly $900 billion annually on defense, but considering the total amount of federal spending, the challenges facing the United States, the country’s global military requirements, and the return on investment in hard power, this is not nearly enough. Defense is projected to account for 12.8 percent of federal spending in 2025, less than the share devoted to servicing the national debt. And each year, a larger portion of the defense budget pays for things other than weapons; nearly 45 percent of it now goes toward pay and benefits.

The situation is grave. According to an estimate by the American Enterprise Institute that rightly incorporates the paramilitary functions of China’s space program and coast guard, China spends $711 billion a year on its military. And in March 2024, Chinese officials announced a 7.2 percent increase in defense spending. The Biden administration, by contrast, requested real-dollar cuts to military spending year after year. If defense budgets cannot even keep up with inflation, how can Washington keep up with the “pacing threat” of China?

Moreover, because its immediate military objectives are focused on countering the United States in the Indo-Pacific, China, unlike the United States, mainly needs to allocate resources to its own backyard. The requirements of global power projection necessarily spread U.S. defense expenditures far thinner. Although bipartisan recognition of U.S. interests in Asia is welcome, it is reckless for U.S. politicians to visit Taipei or talk tough about China if they are unwilling to invest in the capabilities necessary to back up U.S. commitments.

The United States needs a military that can handle multiple increasingly coordinated threats at once. Without one, a president will likely hesitate to expend limited resources on one threat at the expense of others, thereby ceding initiative or victory to an adversary. The United States must get back to budgets that are informed by strategy and a force-planning construct that imagines fighting more than one war at once.

Trump must reject the myopic advice that he prioritize China by abandoning Ukraine.

And yet for years, congressional opponents of military spending absurdly insisted that there be parity between increases in defense spending and increases in nondefense discretionary spending, holding military power hostage to pet political projects. Meanwhile, domestic mandatory spending skyrocketed, and massive expenditures that circumvented the annual bipartisan appropriations process, such as the ironically named Inflation Reduction Act, included not a penny for defense.

Isolationists on both ends of the political spectrum unwittingly validate this artifice when they peddle the fiction that military superiority is cost-prohibitive or even provocative, that the United States must accept decline as inevitable, or even that the effects of waning influence won’t be that bad. Calls for “disentanglement,” “leading from behind,” and “hard prioritization”—amplified by historical amnesia—amount to defeatism. The United States’ security and prosperity are rooted in military primacy. Preserving that decisive superiority is costly, but neglecting it comes with far steeper costs.

Past levels of U.S. defense spending put today’s needs into perspective. During World War II, U.S. defense spending hit 37 percent of GDP. During the Korean War, it reached 13.8 percent. At the height of the Vietnam War, in 1968, it stood at 9.1 percent. The defense buildup under President Ronald Reagan, which followed a low of 4.5 percent of GDP during the Carter administration, peaked at only 6 percent. In 2023, the United States spent 3 percent of GDP on defense.

During this American holiday from hard power, China and Russia have invested in asymmetric capabilities to offset the U.S. military edge. Today, their munitions in many categories can outrange U.S. versions, and their production can outpace the United States’. This is to say nothing of their numerical advantage in key platforms, from missiles to surface vessels. Quantity has a quality of its own. What’s more, the wars of the future may well last longer and require far more munitions than policymakers have assumed, as both Israeli and Ukrainian munitions-expenditure rates suggest. U.S. stockpiles are insufficient to meet such a demand. For years, the military services have shortchanged munitions in favor of new weapons systems and platforms. This is not to downplay the need to modernize major weapons systems but to highlight the harmful tradeoffs imposed by inadequate defense budgets.

If the United States finds itself embroiled in conflict in a far-flung theater, it will also have difficulty resupplying its forces. China, for one, intends to contest U.S. logistical supply lines. This reality, combined with the possibility of being challenged in different parts of the world simultaneously, doesn’t just require building larger inventories of platforms and munitions. It also requires ensuring that such capabilities are pre-positioned in multiple theaters. That, in turn, requires securing basing, access, and overflight rights—yet another argument for strengthening U.S. alliances globally.

Thanks to Republican efforts, the national security supplemental included necessary investments to expand the production capacity of key items, such as solid rocket motors, needed for long-range munitions and interceptors. But my efforts with Susan Collins, the vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, to expand this investment beyond the Biden administration’s request faced the same headwinds as our annual campaign to build bipartisan support for greater overall defense spending. In fiscal year 2023, congressional Republicans overcame Democrats’ insistence on parity between defense and nondefense discretionary spending. That was a step in the right direction, but Democrats need to permanently abandon this misguided obsession. The demands of U.S. national security are not political bargaining chips.

Progress on this front begins with real increases in defense spending. In 2018, the Commission on the National Defense Strategy—a bipartisan group of defense experts established by Congress—stressed that preserving the United States’ military edge would require sustained real growth in the defense budget of between three percent and five percent. By 2024, the commission, noting the worsening threats, called that range a “bare minimum” and advocated budgets big enough to “support efforts commensurate with the U.S. national effort seen during the Cold War.”

The Trump administration must heed the commission’s warning. To pay for increased defense budgets, it should take an axe to extravagant nondefense discretionary spending and tackle the unsustainable level of mandatory spending on entitlements that is driving the deficit. It should also reform an overly burdensome economic regulatory environment to counteract these drags with higher growth and revenue.

THE ARSENAL OF DEMOCRACY

At the same time, the United States must tend to its atrophied defense industrial base. The Pentagon, Congress, and industry all deserve blame for its sorry state. The Defense Department and Congress have sent inconsistent demand signals to industry, which has discouraged companies from investing in expanded production capacities and resilient supply chains. To solve the problem, administrations must submit defense-budget requests that are big enough to meet the United States’ true military needs. Congress must pass appropriations bills on time. If it doesn’t, the resulting “continuing resolutions”—temporary measures to keep the federal government funded—delay contracts and prohibit new program starts.

Congress has given the Pentagon the authority to sign multiyear procurement contracts—which limit the uncertainty sometimes caused by the annual appropriations process—for certain critical munitions. This approach and the money to back it up should both be extended to other long-range munitions and missile defense interceptors for which long-term demand is nearly certain. To expand production capacity, the Pentagon can also use the Defense Production Act, a 1950 law that allows the government to prioritize and steer resources toward the production of goods for national defense. Unfortunately, recent administrations have used this authority for purposes that have nothing to do with national security. Biden, for instance, invoked it for the production of solar panels. It is past time to put the “defense” back into the Defense Production Act.

But industry cannot simply wait for the government to invest. I am sympathetic to companies’ frustrations with a slow federal bureaucracy and an inconsistent Congress, but only to a point. It should be obvious to private-sector leaders that the need for air and missile defense interceptors, long-range munitions, and other critical weapons is steadily rising and unlikely to abate anytime soon. The demand is inevitable. Industry should be leaning forward to meet it. Trump should put the Pentagon and the defense industry on notice about the need to act.

Bureaucracy has also stifled innovation even when its military utility is obvious. The Defense Department is to be commended for its Replicator Initiative, a program designed to hasten the adoption of emerging military technologies, but creating an entirely new acquisition process raises the question of why the Pentagon doesn’t just fix its existing one. The department must figure out how to adopt and integrate disruptive technologies as soon as possible, or else the military will find itself on the receiving end of smarter, cheaper, more autonomous unmanned systems fielded by adversaries moving faster than the speed of bureaucracy.

Tariffs have strained relationships with allies and tested the patience of American consumers.

Just the contracting process for weapons—to say nothing of actually building them—moves unbelievably slowly. For weapons systems that cost more than $100 million, it takes an average of more than ten months between releasing a final solicitation for bids and awarding a contract. Foreign military sales move even slower: it takes an average of 18 months for American partners to get U.S. weapons under contract. The Biden administration made a halfhearted attempt to reform the foreign military sales process, but making it more efficient needs to be a joint priority for the secretary of defense and secretary of state. The arsenal of democracy will not endure if the United States’ own inefficiencies—or the opposition of vocal minorities in Congress—dissuade vulnerable allies from buying American.

The Trump administration should consider dramatically streamlining the process for commonly used munitions or preemptively building up inventories for export. The military should also consider maintaining larger stockpiles of weapons that can be more easily shared with allies and partners in times of crisis. Once the shooting starts, the time to build production capacity has passed.

To build an allied coalition of cutting-edge forces that can work together seamlessly, the United States must also be willing to share more technology. AUKUS, the United States’ security partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom, can be a model for greater technology sharing with other trustworthy allies and partners. Defense-technology transfer isn’t an act of charity; increasingly, it is a two-way street, with allies such as Australia, Finland, Israel, Japan, Norway, South Korea, and Sweden bringing cutting-edge capabilities to the table. The United States should expand coproduction with its allies and encourage them to produce interoperable capabilities, thereby reducing costs, shoring up inventories, improving supply chain resilience, and enhancing collective capacity to compete with China.

THE ECONOMIC ELEMENT

The United States would be foolish to compete with China by itself. U.S. allies and partners represent a significant share of the global economy. It would be simply unaffordable to replicate all their supply chains domestically.

Obama deserves credit for negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership with U.S. allies in Asia, and I do not regret working with him to overcome the objections of protectionist Democrats in Congress. Beyond lowering trade barriers and expanding market access for U.S. companies, the agreement was designed to establish favorable rules of the road for international trade in a critical region of the world. The parties to the proposed agreement represented 40 percent of the global economy. But rather than strengthen and harness the power of Western economies, the first Trump administration and then the Biden administration sometimes actively antagonized them, including with tariffs that have strained relationships with allies and tested the patience of American consumers. This abdication was an invitation for China to expand its economic influence in Asia at the United States’ expense.

There is plenty of evidence that the globalist optimism of the 1990s was unfounded. Welcoming China and Russia into the World Trade Organization has not transformed their governments or economies, at least not in ways beneficial to the free world. Rather, both countries have exploited and undermined this and other international economic institutions. I am not naive about the downsides of international trade, but there is no question that free markets and free trade have been responsible for much of the United States’ prosperity. That’s why the United States and like-minded free-market economies must work together to reform the international trading system to protect U.S. interests from predatory trade practices—not abandon the system entirely. Without U.S. leadership in this area, there is little question that Beijing will be able to rewrite the rules of trade on its own terms.

Although flagging military primacy is the most glaring impediment to national security, the United States cannot neglect the role of foreign aid, either. As the former chair of the Senate appropriations subcommittee responsible for foreign assistance, I take seriously James Mattis’s admonition when he was head of U.S. Central Command that if Congress shortchanged diplomacy and foreign aid, he would “need to buy more ammunition.” Unfortunately, these important tools of American power are increasingly divorced from American strategic interests. It is past time to integrate foreign assistance more deliberately into great-power competition—for example, by working with allies to present credible alternatives to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

NO TIME TO TURN INWARD

In January 1934, William Borah, a Republican senator from Idaho and an outspoken isolationist, addressed a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Because peace had prevailed for 15 years following the end of World War I, Borah argued, global military spending was excessive. Tensions between European powers, he insisted, could not be solved by outsiders: “It will be a long time, I venture to believe, before there will be any necessity or any justification for the United States engaging in a foreign war.”

Of course, by the end of the 1930s, the Nazi conquest of Europe had driven a dramatic swing in U.S. public opinion away from Borah’s isolationist daydream. By May 1940, as German forces invaded France, 94 percent of Americans supported any and all necessary investments in national defense. By June, more than 70 percent favored the draft.

The United States saw the light during World War II. But must it take another conquest of a close ally before the country turns its belated attention to the requirements of national defense? Isolation is no better a strategy today than it was on the eve of World War II. Today, in fact, in the face of linked threats even more potent than the Axis powers, a failure to uphold U.S. primacy would be even more catastrophically absurd than was the refusal to assume that responsibility 85 years ago. The last time around, the naive abdication of the requirements of national defense made reviving the arsenal of democracy on a short timeline unnecessarily difficult. As Admiral Harold Stark, then the chief of naval operations, observed in 1940, “Dollars cannot buy yesterday.”

The United States urgently needs to reach a bipartisan consensus on the centrality of hard power to U.S. foreign policy. This fact must override both left-wing faith in hollow internationalism and right-wing flirtation with isolation and decline. The time to restore American hard power is now.

Flirting with Armageddon

Linguistics for Edumacated Persons: The MSM Fact-Checker PolitiFact's 2024 "Lie" of the Year...

Beege Welborn, "Stop the Presses - We Have the 'Lie of the Year'"

There are all sorts of lies in this world. Little white lies all the way to Bernie Madoff-sized piles of them.

Some lies don't hurt at all, some lies only affect one or two people, and some lies cover vast swaths of lives.

There are deadly serious lies with equally awful consequences, and then there are hilarious lies that only get funnier the more desperate they get.

Then there are the lies in politics, which are both, to a certain degree, expected and potentially devastating.

That's why the self-anointed, "unbiased" truth sniffers class, like some of the bigger 'fact checkers,' are "supposed" to be so important.

They root out the truth, protecting justice and the American way for all the non-savvy believers of everything they read types.

The most august in reputation of these used to be Snopes before a spectacular progressive flameout - plagiarism, coke, and prostitutes, (wheee!) - brought it down off the pinnacle in a fiery ball like a satellite returning to Earth.

The gold standard "Snopes-checked" is now met with snickers or "Who?"

So we are left with industry-leading - you'll notice I didn't mention quality - Politifact, another organization with whom one could take up any number of questionable issues.

But every year, it is sort of entertaining to see what the progressives who run the site decide what the "Lie of the Year" will be after magnanimously calling for suggestions from the public. The Politifact staff then spends countless hours reportedly agonizing over choices during the waning weeks of the year.

This year is no different although I would say as far as big fat whoppers go, there has been a wealth of material to choose from.

Right off the top of my head is one repeated by everyone from the Vice President of the United States on down: that this obvious vegetative mass is 'sharp as a tack.'

Just pick a name and put "Lie of the Year" next to their quote. It's a target-rich environment in a single article alone and there are dozens.

"...And I’m telling you, this guy is tough. He’s smart. He’s on his game,” Landrieu said."

...Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas offered a similar defense, calling Biden “sharp.”

“The most difficult part about a meeting with President Biden is preparing for it because he is sharp, intensely probing and detail-oriented and focused,” Mayorkas told “Meet the Press.”

That's the most obvious big fat one, affecting the entire world.

The most recent whopper in the public eye is also pretty obvious and caused a whale of a brouhaha. Weirdly, it didn't even rate a 'false' from Politifact, much less mind one of their iconic screaming "Pants on Fire" Truth-O-Meter readings.

You remember - that one about Biden not pardoning Hunter? And then he did?

To the non-biased fact-checkers at Politifact, that was a 'flop,' not a 'lie.'

President Joe Biden and his press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said on multiple occasions over several months that Biden would not pardon his son Hunter. Then Joe Biden issued a pardon anyway. We rate that a Full Flop. https://t.co/dtGlW1X2Sn

— PolitiFact (@PolitiFact) December 3, 2024

Democrat Party Politicians never LIE, they "flop"

If it's not PolitiFact, it must be PolitiFiction!

The Tail End of Woke Is Finally Disappearing Over the Political Laughter Horizon!

Is no social group beyond moral criticism any more?  And can anyone any longer pretend to be so based upon their historical "victimhood" status?  SoJus is being retransformed back into Mo' Justice!

...and best of all, Comedy is Coming Back, too!

Guilt-Pride is giving up the Ghost! Hurray!

High Anxiety over Russia...

...all those resources, so near and ripe for exploitation.

Russia possesses vast natural resources estimated to be worth around $75 trillion, making it a global leader in natural resource wealth.

Taking the 1st bite...

Ukraine is home to a vast array of critical minerals with an estimated value in excess of US$26 trillion, making it a significant player in the global supply chain. The country boasts approximately 20,000 mineral deposits, covering 116 types of minerals.

Muh!  Russia!

Democrat Psychology

Why everything is race and identity.

How's it Going, Ukraine?

Grooming Censorship...

...cuz Silence Prevents Islamophobia!

Dividing Syria...

Turkey gets a piece, the Kurds get a piece, Israel gets a piece... and who else, ISIS?

...maybe give the Gazans and Pseudostinian's a slice next to ISIS?

Why Can't Europe Just Elect the Right Leaders...

...and Save their OWN "Democracies"?

Let's Ask Bernie!

Slava Ukraini, eh Bernie?