Much Ado About Nothing

The Biden Administration recently announced new plans to further regulate polyfluoroalkyl substances, a class of chemicals generically known as PFAS. Such initiatives typically target pollutants that have been found in relatively high concentrations, especially when that pollutant is reactive. That is the case with chemicals like ethylene oxide, benzene, ozone, and a host of others. It's a bit different with PFAS. These are chemicals that are just barely detectable and are basically inert.

So why the fire drill? Are PFAS compounds a clear and present danger to the health and welfare of Americans? What is the best strategy to mitigate the PFAS threat to human health and the environment if they are? As important, how big of a threat are PFAS compounds to either?

It’s unlikely that we’ll ever get honest answers to those questions. The independent, rational, scientific traditions that encouraged critical thinking and informed disagreement is fading away in western civilization. In its place, we are increasingly subject to state-approved science formulated by armies of technocrats and administered by legions of bureaucrats. When the scientific method is eventually dead and buried, I have a suggestion for the epitaph to be engraved on its tombstone: “better safe than sorry.”

Those words concisely express the essence of the Precautionary Principle. The Precautionary Principle, in turn, is a bane of modern existence. It’s a societal plague that breeds cowardice, inhibits progress and encourages insularity in thought and in practice. It was probably inevitable that environmental organizations would eventually target these remarkable fluorinated compounds in another fit of excess caution.

It's all relative.

To a chemist, fluorine is one of the most remarkable elements on the periodic table. It forms incredibly strong bonds with other atoms, giving PFAS chemicals their unique characteristics and their resiliency. The last is especially troublesome to the E.P.A. and environmental groups who have dubbed PFAS “forever chemicals.” The implication being that once created they are impossible to get rid of. That’s not entirely accurate, but it must be admitted that getting rid of PFAS compounds does take a bit more work than your run of the mill waste product.

Should we not be concerned about these "forever chemicals"? There's two parts to that question. First, does having a particular chemical in your system for a long time necessarily harm your system? The answer to that depends on the chemical and the dose. It would be fair to call silicon dioxide, what we commonly call sand, a “forever chemical” every bit as much as PFAS. Absent willful and energetic processing, sand is sand and will remain sand. So do we worry if we ingest some sand into our system? If it's not much and it's in our gastrointestinal system the body recognizes it as a waste, something it has no use for, and will pass it through the GI tract and colon to be eliminated.

I am not a biologist. So I do not know if PFAS compounds bioaccumulate in the body in part or in whole. If they do they certainly don't accumulate in substantial amounts. We can say that because when people have conducted studies and found PFAS in the water, in the air, and in the soil they find it in concentrations that are in the parts per trillion or less levels.

A part per trillion is an incredibly small concentration. It is the equivalent of 1 drop of water in enough water to fill 20 Olympic sized swimming pools. Twenty or thirty years ago we didn't even have the technology that would allow us to look at these extremely low concentrations. Are concentrations that low a significant threat to human health and the environment? I cannot answer that question definitively, but I don't think anyone else can do so either.

When the E.P.A. and environmental groups talk about PFAS they inevitably choose verbs that allow them to hedge their bets. Verbs like “may” and “could” and “suggests.” As in: “research suggests that these compounds may be associated with – fill name of your favorite scary disease – and that these effects may be more serious among the elderly and newborn children.”

Definitive verbs are to be avoided at all costs. Verbs like will or does or demonstrates. It takes years of indoctrination by the technocrats and the bureaucrats before they'll move up to definitive verbs. At that point the war is over and the scientists have lost. There was a time when "climate change" was discussed as a potential threat, as a hypothesis worth examining, but not as a proven fact. We are well beyond that point today. Every politician, every journalist, every representative of an environmental NGO talks about "climate change" in terms of certainty. They assure us that the science is settled. The E.P.A.'s PFAS Strategic Road Map puts us well on the way to settling this rather dubious bit of science as well.

Dr. Thunberg demands change now.

I cannot assert that parts per trillion levels of these compounds are not a serious threat to human health and the environment. Nor can I assert they are. I doubt if there's any single scientist who can say one way or the other. I doubt there is anyone who can say pursuing this research is worth the cost compared to other priorities the E.P.A. might be pursuing. But I can predict the E.P.A. will follow its usual playbook: develop a large set of very restrictive rules, very expensive rules, whose cost will be justified by the theoretical reduction in the hospitalizations and death that will be assumed. Not proven. Assumed. That's what inevitably happens. At one point during the Obama administration E.P.A. director Lisa Jackson claimed so much savings from environmental regulations that we could have paid off the national debt had her numbers been accurate.

New rules are coming that will affect regulations covering water, covering land, covering the air, covering waste disposal, covering approval of new and existing chemicals. These rules will largely be developed by the technocrats and bureaucrats alone. Yes, once they're developed there will be comment periods and the various agencies will be flooded with comments. As a result of the comments there'll be a change here and a change there but really no substantive changes in direction. The rules are developed in an echo chamber where only cheerleaders are present. Only then are they presented to the public. No matter. Experience shows that what is finally approved will look much like whatever is first proposed.

It's possible this effort could become another bust like Alar, toxic mold, and endocrine disruptors. All of those crises du jour more or less went away after time. Maybe it will be the same with PFAS. But given the way that fantasies have materialized into so-called realities so quickly over the last few years I fear that massive investments in PFAS regulations, controls and clean-up will be a part of our lives for a long time to come.

THE COLUMN: The Leaving of It

Donald J. Trump, most recently the 45th president of the United States, may—to use the favorite phrase of the New York Times—"make history" this week by becoming the first chief executive ever to be indicted after leaving office. Not for anything he did while in office (that would be unconstitutional, although at this point what difference does it make?) but for... wait for it... paying $130,000 in hush money to a hitherto unknown "porn star" to keep quiet about an alleged one-off sexual tryst in 2006.

Now a transaction, however trashy and unsavory, between consenting adults 17 years ago, which became a political issue in 2018 (you remember that; it was in all the papers), is hardly the crime of the century. The rogue local prosecutor, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, Jr., is ostensibly in charge of this precedent-shattering miscarriage of justice, but everyone knows he's just a front man for the brains of the outfit, including his deputy, social-justice warrior Meg Reiss, the Clintons, and, ultimately the Biden White House.

In the brave new world of the Panopticon, anything you've done at any time your life from birth and the present can now bring you down, the corrupt cur media baying at your heels.

The alleged crime, which has something to do with campaign financing laws involving how Trump reimbursed his sleazy former lawyer and recent jailbird, Michael Cohen, who was the front man on the deal. You may rightly think that such a charge—a philandering playboy businessman paying a woman who, as a working professional, will have sex with anybody for money—is right up there with spitting on the sidewalk or picking your feet in Poughkeepsie. And cooler heads may yet prevail if, as rumored, Cohen's own former legal adviser, Robert J. Costello, appears before the grand jury today to shred what little is left of Cohen's credibility. 

But when that man is named Trump... 

Trump broke the news of what he said was his impending arrest tomorrow via social media (all caps his):

THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE AND FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK. PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!

And...

“IT’S TIME!!! WE JUST CAN’T ALLOW THIS ANYMORE. THEY’RE KILLING OUR NATION AS WE SIT BACK & WATCH. WE MUST SAVE AMERICA!PROTEST, PROTEST, PROTEST!!!”

That is the last thing anybody should do. Or didn't we learn anything from the Jan. 6 fiasco, which has landed hundreds of innocents in what JJ Sefton, the morning blogger at Ace of Spades, has taken to calling the Garland Archipelago. The Left's inability to ever stop (they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit) because the dictates of Marxist "progressivism" make it impossible for them to stop, means that should protests get even a little bit out of hand, the red-diaper babies and their amigos in the media will view it as the next Reichstag Fire, starring conservatives as the hapless Marinus van der Lubbe, and act accordingly. 

There's no question but that the Bragg/Reiss tag team is trying to provoke a confrontation with their absurd legal theories about the Trump/Daniels frolic, but one of their additional goals is to fan the flames of the Trump/Ron DeSantis rivalry. There's been talk of ringing Mar-a-Lago with Trump supporters and demanding that Ron DeSantis call out the Florida National Guard to prevent Trump's possible extradition. Already, the lunatic fringe is frothing:

Still, even Loomer has reconsidered her firebrand stance on her hero's "Protest!!" demands: 

Waco—that's not incendiary or anything. 

DeSantis would be smart to say nothing about Trump (as indeed he did not in this statement today), but instead to issue a warning about the unprecedented political chutzpah of Democrat stooges arresting and trying not only a former president but a current candidate for the office again. Despite Trump's constant whining about how the Florida governor "owes" him "loyalty" for Trump's endorsement back in 2018, DeSantis owes Trump bupkis; as Mr. Dooley famously said, politics ain't beanbag and nobody owes nobody nothing once the bell sounds. 

But what should Trump do? If and when he's arrested, or voluntarily surrenders, he should take the high road. He should utterly reject Bragg's legitimacy or authority to bring charges against him, that on behalf of all living former presidents and all future presidents he will not be a party, on constitutional grounds, to a precedent-setting farce, to wit partisan attempts to use a local legal system to affect the outcome of a national election and in defiance of the will of the people.

And then he should say "not guilty" and just walk out. No speeches to the media, no preening, no playing to the crowd, but instead cloaking his worst instincts in the solemnity of his demeanor. He should not encourage the people to rally to his side, but instead play the martyr, and let his bloody shirt wave itself. 

Another Ace co-blogger, CBD, makes these valid and troubling points:

A Trump arrest will galvanize his support and re-energize his struggling campaign for president. And why would the Democrat-Socialist apparatus want this? Maybe because they WANT to run against Trump in 2024. They see Donald Trump's electoral college success with a hard ceiling of about 235 votes, but fear DeSantis or some other new, young and nimble Republican candidate as a much stronger opponent who can savage the Democrat candidate (Biden or some other malleable vegetable) without having to deal with the baggage of the fake January 6th issues and personal peccadilloes that can overwhelm more substantive advantages.

So this is a twofer for the Democrat-Socialist machine. They continue their long march through our institutions, destroying everything in their path, and they solidify their political hold on the country by manipulating a flawed candidate into contention for the Republican nomination.

Be careful what you wish for: I think Trump is likely to be defeated by any Democrat at this point, but then again that's what everybody thought in 2016, when I thought otherwise, and said so in the pages of the New York Post. And it's possible, just possible, that he's learned enough from what happened to him in 2020 to make him competitive.

What he should not do is this:

Can Trump control himself in this crisis? He recent dog-in-a-manger behavior regarding the presidency, his childish attacks on DeSantis, and his deteriorating command of the English language, don't offer much hope:

REMEMBER, THE SAME ANIMALS AND THUGS THAT WOULD DO THIS TO PERHAPS 200 MILLION PEOPLE, BUT ACTUALLY ALL AMERICANS, ARE THE COMMUNISTS, MARXISTS, RINOS, AND LOSERS THAT ARE PURPOSEFULLY DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY!

He'll be 78 at the time of the next election, and if we've learning nothing from Joe Biden then we're even dumber than Robinette himself. To slightly paraphrase Malcom in Shakespeare's Macbeth: "Nothing in his presidency/ Became him like the leaving it." Nothing would become Donald Trump, half-Scottish himself, more than a principled, defiant—and above all peaceful—exit from the national stage. 

THE COLUMN: The Untouchables

In the movie The Untouchables, written by David Mamet and directed by Brian De Palma, a streetwise Irish cop named Malone tries to educate a starry-eyed fed named Eliot Ness in the ways of Chicago justice when up against an implacable, deadly opponent like Al Capone. The scene has become justly famous for this line: "He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. THAT'S the Chicago way! And that's how you get Capone."

But for our purposes here, what even more important is the exchange between Sean Connery and Kevin Costner that immediately precedes it: 

Ness: I want to get Capone! I don't know how to get him.

Malone: [talking privately in a church] You said you wanted to know how to get Capone. Do you really wanna get him? You see what I'm saying, what are you prepared to do?

Ness: Everything within the law.

Malone: And *then* what are you prepared to do? If you open the ball on these people Mr. Ness you must be prepared to go all the way. Because they won't give up the fight, until one of you is dead. 

Well, that's the question, isn't it? In a battle between good and evil, with the law having gone over to the side of evil—as it had in the gangland Chicago of the 1920s and '30s—what are the good guys prepared to do? With the country-as-founded now being shot out from underneath us on a near-daily basis, how do concerned citizens fight back?

The electoral system? Since the election of George W. Bush in 2000, there have been at least three presidential votes in which the losing side has contested the outcome; Bush's hanging chads, Hillary Clinton's baseless charge of "Russian collusion" against Donald Trump in 2016, and the chaos of 2020 that installed longtime hack politician Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. in the Oval Office. Of these, the two most recent are best viewed in tandem. The Left was taken by surprise by Trump's Electoral College victory (the only kind that counts) and, starting the day after the vote, launched its plan to make sure they'd never be robbed by what they thought was a fixed fight again.

Read this—"Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition" from something called the Electoral Integrity Project and weep:

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Some of their thoughts:

"Dangerous" it is for sure. One instant solution is to restore Election Night to its one-day, one-vote place in the proper scheme of things. And note for the record that "an unscrupulous candidate" describes Mrs. Clinton's churlish and criminal response to her loss in 2016 far better than it does Trump's. As for defying the popular vote, so what? That vote means nothing until the Left finally passes its National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and thus eliminates the Electoral College by unconstitutional means.

Because they are the law.

Some of their solutions: 

Except that politically mobilized Trump supporters didn't take up arms on Jan. 6, and as for "violence," the patsy protesters had nothing on the Antifa and Black Lives Matters thugs during the Summer of Floyd of blessed but rapidly fading memory, his work on earth here now done.

If not the system (which as I noted here and here, IS the steal, having now effectively legalized voter fraud), then what? Certainly not the courts. Time after time, suits have been brought in response to this or that enormity, only to have the courts dismiss the plaintiffs as "without standing." Most egregious of the recent examples was Texas v. Pennsylvania in late 2020, in which Texas and other states sued Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—the states that handed Biden his "win"—for changing their election laws (owing in large part to the Covid hoax) by means other than legislative, in clear violation of the Constitution.

Further, the suit was brought directly to the Supreme Court under Article III of the federal constitution which cites disputes between and among states as one of the Court's few "original jurisdiction" powers. This was the only one of the many suits launched by or on behalf of the Trump campaign that had a legitimate chance of winning, but of course the Roberts Court wanted nothing to do with it, and drop-kicked it through the goalposts of infamy. "Without standing"? If the citizens of the several states and the states themselves, whose initial compact resulted in the creation of the federal government in the first place, don't have standing, then who the hell does?

As the members of the Court, especially its weak and cowardly Chief Justice, John Roberts, wonder why the Court's reputation has fallen into such disrepute, its abandonment of its constitutional role as an arbiter and its arrogation of legislative authority with the Marbury power grab of 1803 surely has everything to do with it. Congress, by the way, could strip the court of its "judicial review" powers any time it wanted to, but of course it never will. 

And speaking of the Congress—that "parliament of whores" in the late P.J. O'Rourke's famous phrase—the recent revelations of the Twitter Files, the display of the hidden Jan. 6 videos, and the scalded-vampire reaction to their publication and broadcast by such "Republicans" as Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, and Thom Tillis (whoever he is) have pantsed and unmasked the distaff-bitch side of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party. One of the most enduring effects of Elon Musk, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger and Bari Weiss' bravery in pulling back the McConnell curtain will be the public realization, at long last, of the perfidy of the establishment Republicans, and the understanding that this is why nothing ever changes, even when the GOP is in power. 

No surcease from the courts or the Congress, then. Meanwhile, the addlepated but deeply malevolent Joe Biden, who continues his payback war against everyone who wrote him off half a century ago as a malignant idiot, continues to illustrate the truth of "Irish Alzheimer's," which is that you only remember the grudges. Wrecking the economy, annihilating longstanding societal norms in the name of "equity", picking a fight with Russia like a drunk in a bar nearing closing time, shuttling his treasury secretary over to the Ukraine as techbro banks collapse literally overnight, Biden is the most destructive president in American history, even worse than Woodrow Wilson: like Wilson he disbelieves in the Constitution; unlike Wilson, he openly despises his country and his countrymen and acts on it every day.

So what are you prepared to do? The recent midterms, which were supposed to have been a spanking for the Democrats, barely moved the needle. The sudden appearance of Kevin McCarthy's backbone as speaker of the House has been a pleasant surprise (and thanks to the Freedom Caucus for holding his feet to the fire until they got what they wanted), but the superannuated Senate led by two ambulatory stereotypes, Chuck Schumer and Turtle McChao, is functionally dysfunctional, held periodic hostage by Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, and now boasting both a vegetable in John Fetterman and its very own Lady Gaga in Dianne Feinstein. There is much talk of partition, even of civil war. 

Yet most of us continue to believe in America; like the movie version of Eliot Ness, we've sworn to do "everything within the law" to try and right the ship of state before, like all previous democracies, it sinks beneath the waves of historical reality. As I often say about the imported "critical theory" Left, they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit. They won't give up the fight until one of us is dead. 

So then what are you prepared to do?

Let's hope it never comes to this. Better it should end this way, with America restored as the gangsters are sent scurrying for jail or their rodent holes: 

One way or another, that's how you get Capone. Which is it to be?

Outsuffering the Woke Western Alliance

The little-noted but principal effect of the ongoing world crisis has been to challenge woke-progressive political agendas throughout the world. As Roger Cohen recently wrote in the New York Times, a crisis has derailed the Great Reset:

The Covid-19 pandemic, invasion of Ukraine, trend toward autocracy and economic inequalities challenge the World Economic Forum’s relevance.... The scramble in Europe for new sources of energy to replace Russian oil and gas, in societies under acute economic pressures, does not always favor expensive renewables or the conversion to 'environmental capitalism' that so many business leaders in Davos have publicly embraced.

The End of History vacation cruise has been suddenly canceled. The expanding scope of the war in Ukraine will force Joe Biden to either let go of his Woke agenda or risk losing the conflict. Until recently there seemed hope he could hang on to both, but when China indirectly joined the fray Washington's calculus was upset. Beijing's offer to broker a negotiated settlement to the war in Ukraine, has both divided the West and threatened to extend Russia's ability to hold out. China has become the arsenal of autocracy, allowing the Kremlin to prolong the war.

Friends in low places.

This Chinese strategic challenge should not be confused with Russia's inability to inflict tactical attrition. Tactically, Russia may be weak and is losing men and equipment at an unsustainable rate. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, "Russia suffered more combat deaths in Ukraine in the first year of the war than in all of its wars since World War II combined." Moreover the Kremlin is going broke. Russia will run out of money in 2024, one oligarch warned. But Russia and China may figure they can "outsuffer" the West if by that they can make the New World Order unaffordable in domestic political terms.

The warning signs that so alarmed Roger Cohen are flashing everywhere. Polls show that limiting economic damage due to the war has become a greater priority to Americans in 2023 than it was in 2022. According to a new survey, some 58 percent of Germans fear their country could be drawn into the war, while 69 percent believe the economy will deteriorate further. Politico summarized both trends by noting that:

Biden will host German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at the White House... in what will be, on the surface, another display of Western unity with Ukraine as it repels Russia’s punishing invasion... The show of solidarity comes against a backdrop of growing strain as the trans-Atlantic alliance works to remain in lockstep while grappling with the fact that the war has no end in sight.

Perhaps nowhere are the strains between the new reality and the Woke agenda more evident than in the matter of "climate change." David Gelles at the NYT writes, "beyond the enormous human suffering and catastrophic damage inflicted on Ukraine, its people and its cities, one of the war’s most profound impacts has been on global energy markets, and by extension, on the global fight against climate change... coal has had a resurgence, subduing hopes for meeting goals to rein in greenhouse gas emissions."

Can't afford one? Too bad.

The strain of higher energy prices is heightening tensions between the rich and poor voters. As Scientific American notes, "Russia’s war in Ukraine has altered global energy markets, accelerating the green transition in wealthy parts of Europe and forcing poorer countries to fall back on dirtier fuels like coal." News that wealthy Australians are buying solar panels while the poor struggle to pay their power bills sums up the class effect of Green policies that Joel Kotkin called a "neo-feudal war on the people."

"Can't afford the gas prices? Buy a Tesla!" works about as well as an electoral slogan as "Let them eat cake!"

But nowhere is the effect of the new Cold War potentially to be more keenly felt than upon DEI policies. The first Cold War was set off a competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in every conceivable arena – even space — that forced the United States to call on even politically incorrect Nazi rocket scientists to meet. "Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from the former Nazi Germany to the U.S. for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, between 1945 and 1959... Many of these personnel were former members and some were former leaders of the Nazi Party."

The technological challenge now posed by China to Biden's crumbling "new world order" now equals or exceeds the former Soviet threat. "Technology is at the center of the emerging competition between the United States and China, with far-reaching consequences for democratic societies. At stake in this competition are the prestige and reach of liberal values, as well as the economic competitiveness and national security of the United States and its allies and partners," writes Brookings.

In the face of this challenge the U.S. cannot afford to lumber the hard sciences with racial and sexual identity quotas so favored by the progressive constituency. The Supreme Court's reported resistance to Biden's proposal to forgive half a trillion dollars in student debt may reveal a new reluctance to bail out bad choices. "Let’s not forget that the student debt problem is built on a foundation of terrible major choices. Bailing generations out of those bad choices will mean more bad choices, tuition hikes, and terrible consequences for America," said one investor. One thing America cannot afford to do in a Second Cold War is throw away money any more.

Against the Great Reset

Now on sale.

Before 2019 there may have seemed enough money for projects like DEI, the Great Reset, "Climate Change," Pronoun Revolutions, and the world order. It seemed like the whole landscape lay before the heights of Davos just waiting for them to remake. But the pandemic, economic crisis, war and Cold War that followed rang down the curtain on that fleeting scene and reimposed hard choice.

By the end even the politicians realize there'll be a lot less public desire to eat bugs, live in dark unheated ruins and make out with bearded ladies after privation brings the demand for basics back. China and Russia need not "outsuffer" the West in a military sense, only in a political one as hardship melts the Western progressive vision away.

THE COLUMN: 'Vaccine Amnesty'? Not On Your Life

This really says it all: 

Nothing better encapsulates the Stalinist Left's ability to turn on a dime and argue the same set of facts both ways than its reaction to Covid. From the "scientifically" induced panic and hysteria over a fundamentally non-existent threat to the survival of humanity (something one would think the Left would welcome, and in fact they do and are even beginning to admit it) to a state of weaponized HIPPA was but a journey of two years. Beginning as an area of some mild public concern to a fascist boot stamping on a human face for what seemed like forever, the Hoax of the Century has become the Crime of the Century. Without the slightest bit of proof that Covid-19 was indeed a planetary menace, but merely the assertions and "projections" of hypocritical "scientists," cranky lunatics, and foaming totalitarians of every stripe, a near-worldwide lockdown was imposed upon an innocent and trusting populace.

Result: madness. The elderly, dying imprisoned and alone. Families sundered. Children tortured. The rise of an internal, informal Stasi, as neighbor turned against neighbor and ratted him out. It was insane, but even worse: it was evil. Cold, calculated evil. And yet they—and you know who you are, Justin Trudeau, Jacinda Ardern, Joe Biden, and the rest of you nasty international socialists—now have the unmitigated gall to beg for mercy:

LET’S DECLARE A PANDEMIC AMNESTY

In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks.  Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”

These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.

Dementia meets malevolence.

Baloney. Of course, they did. Not only did they know, but they enjoyed it, in a way leftist sadists like those at the The Atlantic and their ilk always do. In a way that international moguls like Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum did in his book, Covid-19: The Great ResetIn the same way that all genuine Enemies of the People do, formerly secretly and, increasingly, openly.

Unabashed and unashamed, they have the chutzpah to throw themselves on the temporary mercies of their victims, most of whom still haven't realized that the Rubicon has been crossed, and that there is no going back for the antagonists of Western civilization. So ignore their pleas to "focus on the future." Like Satan himself, they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit. By their masks shall ye continue to know them.

Here's another amoral monster, feigning a quasi-mea culpa:

We didn't know. We didn't understand. We were just following orders. So, of course, we brought the entire apparatus of the state down on your heads in the name of "safety." It was for your own good, comrade.

Don't forget that, literarily, every Aristotelian drama can be told from two viewpoints: that of the hero and that of his opponent. Narrative storytelling has evolved into a constant clash of good and evil: the protagonist wants X (a woman, glory, power, money), while his opponent it trying to frustrate his goals and desires. Turn the story around, have the antagonist become the narrator, and you have the same story but with an entirely different outcome. In the Leftist narrative, they are the good guys trying to save the world while we, the inheritors and defenders of Western civilization are the villains, stubbornly and bitterly clinging to the old ways and trying to frustrate "progress."

Leftists, being Marxists of either the economic or cultural variety, are great believers in what they call the "arc of history," a kind of quasi-religious determinism that posits "iron laws" of history that must, eventually, result in their triumph. (Any resemblance to the narrative of the Bible, in which all promises of military triumph and spiritual salvation are conveniently located in the unspecified future, is entirely not coincidental.) As I wrote in The Devil's Pleasure Palace

Progressives like to throw around the phrases “the arc of history” and “the wrong side of history.” Martin Luther King Jr., quoting the abolitionist Theodore Parker, formulated it this way: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But when you stop to think about this, it’s simply a wishful assertion with no particular historical evidence to back it up. Such sloganeering emerges naturally from the Hegelian-Marxist conception of capital-H History. The only teleology they can allow has to do with abstract, ostensibly “moral” pronouncements of a chimerical, ever-receding horizon of perfect “justice.” The moral universe must not and will not ever admit of amelioration in our lifetimes, or indeed any lifetimes, they insist. It is a Faustian quest, at once admirable and yet a fool’s errand; no means will ever suffice to achieve the end.

As these things so often do, the determination to control the world at its most vulnerable and gullible point of entry, health, necessitated a coverup—Twitter and Facebook, take a bow! Overnight, our long-cherished notions of free speech, free expression, the right to "question authority," and even religious observance were overruled by a handful of crackpots aided and abetted by the social-media companies, working in cahoots with governments and the oligarchs of the World Economic Forum to create the Brave New World of the Great Reset. "The viper tongue of totalitarianism is most often bathed in palliatives before it strikes," I wrote in the introduction to our book on the subject. So also does it beg for "tolerance" when it is at its weakest. 

Against the Great Reset

Fight back.

Now that, once again, they have been exposed for what and who they really are, this is most definitely not the moment to treat them with kindness and empathy which, like "tolerance," is a destructive impulse masquerading as a virtue). Forgiveness, amnesty? Not on your life. Even now, they are plotting their next moves: "climate change" lockdowns, restricted mobility, vaccine-or-carbon tax passports, electric cars, digital currency, the destruction of the fossil fuel industries, artificial scarcity, and misery shared by everybody except themselves. 

Look at the picture at the top of this page, and ask yourselves: if they would do this to your children, what won't they do? And what kind of man are you if you let them get away with it?

 

The Media's Lying Lips

According to the U.K.’s Met Office, 2022 was the hottest year on record for the U.K. Take me back forty years or so and I would have taken this for gospel. The Met Office might get tomorrow’s weather wrong but you could rely on its expertise and objectivity when it came to reporting temperature records. A similar sentiment applied to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and, no doubt, to the National Weather Service in the U.S., and to other national weather bureaus. Recall, too, if your experience is anywhere near the same as mine, that numbers of mainstream newspapers and broadcasters provided the news in a more-or-less factual way; or, in any event, we thought that they did. And now?

Now, I don’t trust anything I read, hear or see. Sadly, I’m sorry to say, this does not so much reflect on the competence of various government and news organizations; but, instead, on their allegiance to the truth. I believe that they have no compunction about lying to bolster their agendas. This takes two forms. Burying inconvenient facts and presenting fiction as though it were fact. What’s going on?

You might say that lies have always infected the public square. True enough. But this caveat reminds me of passage from the novel No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. Sheriff Tom Bell contrasts the reported transgressions of schoolboys in the nineteen-thirties with those of his day (1980). It went from talking in class, chewing gum and running in the hallways to rape, arson, murder, drugs and suicide. He drolly reckons there’s a big difference between rapin' and murderin' people and chewin' gum. I reckon too that lying has taken a big uptick in its prevalence and audacity over recent decades.

The other day, I saw George Santos, the GOP’s congressman-elect for New York’s 3rd district being interviewed by Tulsi Gabbard on Fox News. He had lied egregiously about his background to voters. He squirmed and dissembled rather than admit it. Jason Whitlock, interviewed later, made (for me) the telling point that when God isn’t thought to be around, lying for advantage is no big deal. Various clips were shown of President Biden lying his head off. Simply making things up about his past life, without any apparent shame; bare-faced. This self-proclaimed Catholic clearly doesn’t believe God is listening. Neither today do most of the political, corporate and media class. That’s the world in which we live. It is tailor made for stoking climate change alarmism, as it for stoking Covid hysteria.

Last year, on Friday December 9, Australia recorded its lowest summer temperature on record. Minus 7⁰C in the Perisher Valley in the state of New South Wales. You had to dig out the info. I had to be told about it by a conservative friend. I asked others I know. None knew. Not surprising. It wasn’t emblazoned on the news. They’d all heard of a heat wave hitting the northern part of Australia. Most of my fellow churchgoers watch the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and read the Sydney Morning Herald. They definitely heard about the heatwave; which, of course, was associated with "climate change."

Suppressing inconvenient facts is one reason despots control the media. No need in the West. Enlightened, selective self-censorship dominates the media landscape. The role of the fourth estate to hold governments and the powerful to account is dead. Unless, that is, Donald Trump is in power; and no doubt (hopefully in 2025) Ron DeSantis. The fourth estate is now predominantly an arm of the leftist-green coalition of governments, activists and rent-seeking carpetbaggers. Selective censorship is complemented by the publication of artful misinformation.

Every extreme weather-related event – heatwaves, droughts, floods, cyclones, bushfires – is attributed to "climate change," even though those pushing this tendentious line must know that such events have invariably been equaled or exceeded in their intensity and frequency in the recorded past. Such information is readily available. They simply lie, and blatantly. In Australia, the lie stretches to the persistently-cultivated ludicrous proposition that the bush fires of 2019-20 and the recent floods are attributable to the previous government’s relative inaction on climate change. Yet, Australia could revert to prehistoric times tomorrow and those maniacally monitoring emissions wouldn’t notice.

The only disservice I can recall Ron DeSantis making to public debate was his assurance that there would be “no more noble lies” in the course of dealing with Covid. He was much, much too kind. The so-called noble lies were just plain old despicable lies. Lies about the effectiveness and safety of vaccines in the service of profits for Big Pharma and its lobbyists and hangers on. Lies which created the pretense that the disease put healthy children and people at material risk; and that useless lockdowns and masks were absolutely vital. All in the service of exerting power over populations and punishing dissidents. A practice run for the real plague of communists-cum-fascists who have infiltrated, permeated, saturated, wormed their way into governments, corporations and academia; and for their flag carrier, the World Economic Forum. Their lingua franca: newspeak.

Against the Great Reset

Now on sale.

I want to come back to Christianity. Do the climate and Covid liars feel comfortably lying because they don’t believe in God and therefore put their agenda above all ethical considerations. It must help. But is that all there is to it? A passage in Romans is apropos: Romans 1:28 (NASB version):

And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a depraved mind, to do those things that are not proper.

Don’t want to get too theistic. But, under what circumstances would those in positions of power and influence, who are intelligent, who have access to information, set out deliberately to deceive and appear not to have the least qualms about it? If a complete sociopathic absence of integrity is not a sign of abandonment by God, what exactly is it? How else can it be comprehended?

THE COLUMN: 'A Man Who Could Have Been Great'

One of the best and most poignant moments in the underappreciated 1999 TV movie, RKO 281, about the making of Citizen Kane and the battle between William Randolph Hearst and the brash upstart Orson Welles, comes when Hearst, defeated, broke, and broken, defends himself and the choices he's made in an argument with his mistress, Marion Davies:

Hearst seemed to have everything: wealth, political influence, multiple homes, a beautiful actress-mistress in California and a wife and five sons back home in New York. And, of course, a media empire that included prominent newspapers across the country. He tried his hand at politics, serving two terms in the House as a Democrat, but losing races for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1904, mayor of New York (twice), and governor of New York. Relentlessly acquisitive, he eventually spent himself into penury, losing control of his company and retiring into seclusion. As James Cromwell, the actor portraying Hearst in the film cited above, says: "I am a man who could have been great, but was not."

If that reminds you of anybody, join the club. Donald J. Trump's recent lackluster announcement that he will seek the GOP nomination for president of the United States in 2024 has a Hearstian air about it, the last cry of a wounded bull who could have been great during the four years the nation allotted him in the Oval Office, but was not. Of course, he did some splendid things with both the economy and in the realm of foreign policy, most if not all of which have been overturned, reversed, and otherwise destroyed by the regime of the doddering Joe Biden. But he failed early and often to grasp the peril he was in, emanating not only from his avowed enemies but also from the vipers right in his own breast: his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner (known around the West Wing as "the Democrats").

Worms in the apple.

Worst of all were his catastrophic errors in personnel judgment and his own insatiable craving for the love of people who loathed him. "The president thinks he can get anyone to like him," a top administration official told me early in the term, and those words certainly suit for Trump's political epitaph.

Losing a very winnable campaign for re-election, however, was the unpardonable sin. Before you start shouting "what about the Steal?" let me remind you that just before the election, I wrote a column in the Epoch Times laying out exactly how the Democrats were going to steal the election. Perfectly legally, too.

Already some 60 million ballots have been cast either by mail or via “early voting.” More votes undoubtedly will come in before Nov. 3, not to mention absentee ballots from residents and military personnel living and stationed overseas. In sum, a record number of votes will be cast by people without all the necessary information to make an informed choice on Nov. 3.

The idea behind elections is one man, one vote, one time, on one day. This ensures that everyone has equal access to all the information available about the two candidates at the same time. Thus, an election is a snapshot in time, binding for a certain period of time, and reflecting the will of the citizenry at that moment. Which is the way it should be, and has been since the ancient Greeks and Romans. What we have today is, in effect, a rolling plebiscite.

But there were rallies to be held (why?) and barbs to be traded with the media, while meanwhile the Democrats were laughing all the way to the drop boxes where the votes were already banked and the election already decided.

After two straight election disappointments, the GOP finally seems to be waking up to reality. Naturally, they've grasped it by the wrong end of the stick, and now are being advised to emulate the Democrats rather than re-establishing the notion of one-man, one-vote, one-day. But trying to out-cheat a lawyer-ridden party like the Democrats is a fool's errand; the Republicans just don't have the necessities for it, and so they'll continue to lose around the margins in crucial states, which as we've just seen twice is all is takes.

But do we hear Trump making this case? Of course not:

Almost nothing in that statement is true. As we've seen, there was no "massive and widespread fraud & deception," just the workings of the systems the Democrats, with GOP acquiescence, have put in place over the past decade or so. Yes, the big tech companies colluded with them; just how deep in the tank for the donkeys they were we are just now seeing thanks to Elon Musk. But Trump's query is just nuts: throw out the election results and declare him winner or have a new election? Even were such a thing possible, would it be advisable? That way lies anarchy, and possibly civil war.

Trump really got himself into trouble with his next statement. "A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution." The only sane response is—and immediately was—are you nuts? It does no such thing!

The former president's dwindling band of defenders promptly jumped in to "clarify" that what he really meant was not "allows for" but something more like "leads to" or "results in." That, however, is not what he wrote, and no amount of sympathetic parsing can make it so. Clearly Trump has neither filter nor proofreader on his staff of yes-women, but that a former president, who should know better, can be so cavalier with his syntax does not bode well for a second term. Words matter, and the man with his finger on the button has to be able to say exactly what he means, or else he will be accountable for meaning exactly what he said.

Finally, the kicker: "Our great 'Founders' did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!" This is entirely incorrect. From the start American elections have been marked by finagling, chiseling, horse-trading, vote suppression, and outright cheating. In fact it's something of an American art form, as any student of the elections of 1800, 1824, 1876, and 2000 knows.

With this intemperate outburst, Trump has disqualified himself from returning to office. Over the past few years he has become increasingly inarticulate, unable to complete sentences or express a fully formed thought. (In this regard, he's beginning to rival both of the Bushes, off-prompter Obama, and the senescent Biden himself.) Trump is, after all, 76 years old and would be 78 in November 2023. The man most likely to replace him, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, is 44 and will be 46 on Nov. 5 2024, just three years older than JFK when he was inaugurated in 1961. Biden, should he run, would turn 83 a few weeks after Election Day. If you think he's a geezer now, wait 'til you see him then.

In any case, Trump's day has likely passed. So much winning has turned into so much losing, and not even the small clawback of the House last month can ameliorate the disasters of 2018 and 2020. "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing," said Vince Lombardi, quoting Red Sanders. With the house already on fire, this is no time to worry about whether DeSantis has had enough "seasoning" (did Kennedy? Teddy Roosevelt? James K. Polk? Ulysses S. Grant?). DeSantis served two terms in the House and has now embarked on his second term as governor; short of already being president, how much more "seasoning" does he need? And how can we not wish to elect the first Italian-American president, whose first name echoes that of the Gipper and whose middle name is Dion?

But no one put it better, or more bluntly, than a man who really did know how to win, General George S. Patton, Jr., who said in a pre-D-Day speech to the troops: "Americans love a winner. Americans will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise cowards. Americans play to win all of the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost nor will ever lose a war; for the very idea of losing is hateful to an American." Screenwriter Francis Ford Coppola adapted the speech at the opening of this 1970 multiple Oscar-winner:

For reasons both of, and not of, his own making, Trump (like Hearst) will go out a loser. For the good of the nation, when the time is right and DeSantis most needs him to, he should close down his campaign and retire gracefully to Mar-a-Lago. It may not be Hearst Castle, but if he can hang on to it in the financial disruption that is almost certain to come, he can still do his country a great service. He can be great, just not in the way he might have wished.

Biden Pledges 'No More Drilling' at Hochul Rally

During a campaign rally for New York's flailing governor, Kathy Hochul, Joe Biden reassured an environmentalist protestor in the crowd that, while he was president, there would be "no more drilling."

Now, it's possible that the president didn't realize where he was, or that his mic was live -- he actually appeared to stumble over his own shadow at one point during the rally -- but, seriously, is he not aware that his anti-resource policies, and the surging energy prices they've helped bring about, are killing his party in the polls just before an election? Things are so bad for the Dems that John Fetterman, their Far-Left senate candidate in Pennsylvania has been forced into a major flip-flop on this topic, claiming that he has always been "very supportive of fracking" after years of calling for it to be banned.

Chances are Kathy Hochul wasn't too happy about the exchange, considering the fact that she's having trouble holding off Republican challenger Lee Zeldin, who supports ending New York State's fracking ban. Fracking would deliver jobs and desperately needed tax revenues to those rural areas of New York where Hochul is struggling the most. Plus even New York's urban dwellers have had to deal with the state's restricted natural gas capacity. There have been instances where people who had their natural gas turned off during home renovations have found that their gas company won't turn it back on, due to insufficient supply.

And then there are prices. New York has some of the highest energy prices in the nation, a fact which has been aggravated by Governor Hochul's successful quest (and that of her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo) to close nuclear power plants in the state, such as Indian Point. Hopefully Biden's "no more drilling" pledge inspires more than a few fence sitters to go and vote out Hochul.

THE COLUMN: Roll, Tumbrels, Roll

Ten years ago, back in the halcyon days when we simpletons believed the Republicans were at least some of the time an opposition party, and that Willard Mitt Romney was a man of probity and character, I wrote the following in the pages of National Review Online about the election that was about to take place. The piece was entitled "Crush Them."

Conservatives have a rare opportunity tomorrow to do something they signally failed to do in the landslide elections of 1972 and 1984: finish the job. Nixon’s victory was vitiated by Watergate and quickly revenged by Woodward and Bernstein, leading to his replacement in 1974 by Jerry Ford, a man who exactly nobody thought was qualified to be president of the United States, probably including Ford himself. Ford led to Jimmy Carter, whose ineptitude and weakness in turn lead to Ronald Reagan, who swept Carter away in 1980 and then smashed Walter Mondale and the Democrats to powder in 1984. 

And then, having won a famous victory, conservatives went home and left it to the establishment GOP in the form of another man who never should have been president, George H. W. Bush, to fritter away the fruits of ideological victory and be supplanted by Bill Clinton.

In retrospect, of course, William Jefferson Blythe III was Pericles of Athens compared to Barack Obama Joe Biden, who far more than Clinton has revealed the true face of contemporary American left-liberalism in all its coercive ugliness: a blizzard of executive orders; the deployment of the regulatory agencies that have (in the words of the Declaration of Independence) “sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance”; and the naked Marxist appeals to race and class envy. The most anti-American of American presidents has run the most un-American of campaigns.

Change only a couple of words and it's déjà vu all over again: shuffling, senile Joe Biden really is the zombified embodiment of Hussein's third term, staggering, one hopes, toward utter electoral disaster later today as long-suffering Americans finally awake and rise up against the tyranny of les aristocrates who have been torturing us these past two years and more. A la lanterne!

As my regular readers know, I have long described the Democrat Party—not just its lawless and fascistic modern incarnation, but going all the way back to its inception when Aaron Burr, the sitting vice president, a member of the Democratic-Republican Party, notorious traitor, and the founder of Tammany Hall, shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in 1804—as "a criminal organization masquerading as a political party." Indeed, I even wrote a small monograph concerning its violent, seditious history, still available on Kindle.

Now, after two years of Biden, everyone can see just how awful the Democrats really are. Not simply the party of slavery, segregation, secularism, and sedition, but (as they were during the Civil War, which they started) a movement actively hostile to the founding principles of the country that continues to give them shelter and legitimacy. Indeed, they have become the Anti-American Party, advocating unfettered abortion, public criminality, political violence, economic destruction, radical egalitarianism, an obsessive racialism that would make a Nazi blush, open and undefended borders, and the abrogation of the Constitution: a document they've long despised and which they are now actively trying to repeal.

As with the Great Reset (get your copy of Against the Great Reset here), the Democrats under the unholy trio of Biden. Chuck Schumer, and organized-crime-adjacent princess Nancy d'Alesandro Pelosi, together with their ideological flunkies in Congress and statehouses across the land, seized upon the uncertainty surrounding the Chinese-originated virus known as Covid-19 to suspend the first amendment and impose draconian lockdowns based on absolutely nothing but the word of a snake-oil peddling bureaucratic lifer named Anthony Fauci and a gullible president of spectacularly bad personnel judgment, Donald Trump.

No need now to limn the devastation—personal, economic, social, educational—that the Covidiots unleashed upon an unsuspecting public. Already, by April 2020, it was clear to some of us that the Covid panic was not a medical issue but a political weapon; it needed to be dealt with summarily before the evil of the "new normal" Leftist mentality fully took hold. Therefore, in the April 28, 2020 issue of the Epoch Times, I wrote:

From the available data, and the increasing preponderance of the evidence, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which is commonly known as the novel coronavirus and causes the disease COVID-19, has turned out to be only slightly more lethal than a normal seasonal flu—but the damage it’s done to our nation’s economy, our Constitution, and our sense of national pride has been incalculable.

Forget the pandemic—it’s time to flatten the panic curve. The fact is, the United States has just gotten a good long look at the ugly face of fascism, brought on by an overreliance on medical professionals with great taste in scarves, preening for the cameras and basking in media adoration, but without an ounce of domestic policy sense.

They’ve been aided and abetted by a hostile, ignorant White House press corps—when all you know is politics, everything looks political—intent on courting a coup against the president and determined to keep alternative viewpoints from the public as long as they can.

In this, they have willing collaborators in Big Tech, which has inflicted its peculiar brand of censorship via YouTube and Facebook to make sure nothing escapes the Washington bubble’s imprimatur regarding what constitutes acceptable public opinion.

This was my advice to president Trump:

That’s where the president comes in. The president can’t, on his own toot, command that the country reopen tomorrow. Under our federalist system, that authority lies with the governors, some of whom, such as Kristi Noem in South Dakota, never closed their states in the first place. (“I took an oath to uphold the United States Constitution,” she said.) But he can lead by example—by relishing his role as the chief executive and defender of the Bill of Rights, and making sure that freedom under the rule of law, not “safety,” remains the primary American value.

If the president wants to win reelection, he’s right to stop jousting with the press corps, and instead to break out Old Glory and announce that this unconstitutional and economy-busting overreaction is over—and will never happen again.

He didn't and that's why he isn't president any more. Had he taken command of the situation, instead of standing there beside the malignant dwarf Fauci and his wicked-witch assistant, Deborah Birx, as if watching his own funeral, Trump might still be president. Instead he allowed the Democrats to stifle dissent, punish objectors, mask children like slaves, force elderly couples to suffer and die apart, restrict travel and destroy whole swaths of the American economy, and then watched himself lose to a bitter, doddering, incontinent non-entity a few months later. And not just lose the presidency, but the Senate (and thus the Congress) as well. 

Trump's gone, but the people who did this to us are not—not yet, anyway. And now these villains have the chutzpah to request amnesty for their sins: 

In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks.  Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”

These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.

Of course you knew. You all knew. And yet you endorsed the social ostracization of dissenters—"deniers," to use the loaded word hijacked from the Holocaust by people who ought to know better. You fought every rollback. You unleashed shrieking hordes of Walking Dead Karens to accost their neighbors on the streets and in the shops and literally scream at them. You went from zero to World War Z in the blink of an eye. 

"But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society," bleats the Atlantic's writer, Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University.

And that might be the biggest lie of them all. Anyone's who dealt with the Left for more than five minutes understands that mendacity is their stock-in-trade, which makes Biden the perfect president for our times. This is a man who, after all, can literally say of coal-fired electricity generating plants, "We're going to be shutting down these plants all across America," and then have his hapless press secretary insist a few hours later that her senescent boss's words were "twisted" and that of course the man who so gleefully shut down the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office really loves the fossil fuel industry. Hey, he's from Scranton! Coal country! 

If and when their bald-faced deceptions are found out, the next step is to fall back on their old standby, a plea for "tolerance." But tolerance is a protective coloring, not a virtue; it doesn't mean "compassion" (although that's not a virtue either), it means the process by which the breaking point of anything is ascertained. You reach full tolerance when the wing busts off your airplane and you're sent screaming to your death. You never want to go full "tolerance," because if you do you will die. Oster again:

The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. 

We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty... Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve... The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.

No, let's not. Instead, let's vote as many of you out of office today as possible. Let's round up and fire en masse the malicious thugs and petty party functionaries and time-serving rent-seekers and the cabal of Ivy League-educated media punks and poetasters who view themselves as part of the Democrat machine and daily proclaim their fealty to the Party. Let's publicly call out the neo- and cultural-Marxists who adhere to the Brezhnev Doctrine and will never willingly take one step back in their pursuit of "social justice." For them, every Democrat executive order is Order 227, for which they are supposed to fight to the end.

So let's make them do it. Give them what they want. No surrender, no quarter, no mercy. Fire them, strip them of their pensions, blacklist them. Kick them off Twitter and hound them on Facebook, as they have done unto us. Banish them from the town square. Inscribe their names on the Wall of Shame. RICO them and their infernal political cells. Go full Kurtz on them, literarily speaking. Hell, make sure they never eat lunch in this town again. Remember: they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit.

I concluded my NRO piece thus:

It’s not enough for the GOP to win tomorrow. It needs to win big, a win so convincing that even the Left won’t be able to explain it away. The definition of victory in war is not a 50.1 percent majority that allows the other side to keep fighting — it’s the battleship Missouri, on whose deck the losing side signs articles of capitulation. The modern Left — the unholy spawn of ’30s gangland and ’60s academic Marxism — must be forced to its knees in surrender.

There’s a honored place in our political system for a leftist party, one that pushes for improvement in areas that need improving, but not one devoted to revolutionary “fundamental change.” A vote for Romney tomorrow is a vote against the socialist elements that seized control of the JFK/Scoop Jackson Democratic party in 1972, and has worked against America’s best interests ever since. A vote for Romney tomorrow is a vote for a restoration of the old Jacksonian — Andrew, that is — Democratic party, a true populist party shorn of its Communist accretions that is every bit as all-American as the other guys. Unless and until this happens, though, the modern donkeys will continue their war on the Constitution, convinced they are on the side of the angels, and taking solace in the late Ted Kennedy’s words, “the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

It’s up to the electorate tomorrow to show them that the dream is really a nightmare, from which it’s time to awake, that the cause of America always endures, and the work of restoring our founding principles begins anew today. 

Maybe I'll be right this time. It's up to you; it's up to all of us. Finish the job.

When Your Enemy Threatens to Kill You, Believe Him

What more do you need to hear from the Rutabaga-in-Chief?

Also, Chump of the Year:

Sen. Joe Manchin Saturday demanded President Biden apologize for saying coal plants "all across America" will be shut down, in a scathing statement just days before crucial midterm elections.

"President Biden’s comments are not only outrageous and divorced from reality, they ignore the severe economic pain the American people are feeling because of rising energy costs," Manchin, D-W.Va., said. "Comments like these are the reason the American people are losing trust in President Biden and instead believes he does not understand the need to have an all in energy policy that would keep our nation totally energy independent and secure."

Dear Rump Part of Virginia taken as a spoil of war from rebel slave state Virginia during the Civil War: think on your sins.

UPDATE: This statement from the White House circus janitors who have to clean up after Dementia Joe is priceless:

President Biden knows that the men and women of coal country built this nation:  they powered its steel mills and factories, kept its homes and schools and offices warm.  They made this the most productive and powerful nation on Earth.  He came to the White House to end years of big words but little action to help the coal-producing parts of our country.  Working closely with Senator Manchin, a tireless advocate for his state and the hard-working men and women who live there, President Biden has helped get this part of the country back to work:  the unemployment rate in West Virginia was 6.2% the last month before Joe Biden took office; now it is down to 4%.  The President’s plans are already bringing new energy and manufacturing jobs to the region, and in the years ahead, will continue to create new jobs with projects like hydrogen energy generation.  In fact, through the Working Group on Coal and Power Plant Communities, President Biden has already delivered more than $23 billion to energy communities across the country.

The President’s remarks yesterday have been twisted to suggest a meaning that was not intended; he regrets it if anyone hearing these remarks took offense.  The President was commenting on a fact of economics and technology:  as it has been from its earliest days as an energy superpower, America is once again in the midst of an energy transition.  Our goal as a nation is to combat climate change and increase our energy security by producing clean and efficient American energy.  Under President Biden, oil and natural gas production has increased, and we are on track to hit the highest production in our country’s history next year.  He is determined to make sure that this transition helps all Americans in all parts of the country, with more jobs and better opportunities; it’s a commitment he has advanced since Day One.  No one will be left behind.

White House to the American people: who are you going to believe, us or your lying ears?