Tag: hypocrisy

I’m Envious of Billionaires Too!

America, Economy, Government, Health Care, Science, Society & Culture, Values

At last night’s Democrat debate schoolyard brawl/whine-fest, the unifying theme was, “Let’s bash millionaires and billionaires!” No, wait a minute…let’s just bash billionaires because everyone up there, perhaps with the exception of Boot Edge Edge, (although his CNN or MSNBC contract is waiting) is already a millionaire.

This is one of the big problems of the Democrats. SUCCESS ENVY. Does anyone honestly think, if having invented a product or service that makes a billion dollars, Klobuchar, Buttigieg or Sanders would say, “No, I’ve made too much money?” The hypocrisy of the Left stinks to high heaven.

Hey, I’m envious of billionaires too. I wish I had invented a better service than Quotron (the predecessor to the Bloomberg product/service) and made billions. I’ll bet the “My Pillow” guy is doing ok too!

The problem with the Left is their envy has always manifested itself in a Robin Hood complex. Unable to achieve success on their own, they demand that those who have it give the fruits of that success to them. They argue that those who succeeded either gamed the system somehow, or stepped all over exploited workers, cheated, or were successful because the government was responsible for that success (“You didn’t build that.” – Barack Obama).

It’s the winners against the losers. Irrespective of how the billionaires made their money, let’s think through what would happen if Sanders or Warren were elected and able to impose confiscatory taxes on people making, I think one of the suggestions is, more than $600,000 per year.

  1. The arithmetic is extremely simple and everyone with half a brain already knows that even if you taxed ALL of that income at 100% there wouldn’t be enough money to fund the Democrat utopian dream list.
  2. If you imposed those taxes, would the high income earners put the same amount of money away in private equity, venture capital, hedge or mutual funds, the pools of capital that fuel innovation, job creation, and which indeed trickle down (sometimes flash flood down) to employees thereby boosting the economy and growth in general? And what would that do to the American Spirit and the American Dream? Would people still work hard to advance their careers, think out of the box, invent new things, hire employees, shop more at Saks or WalMart? Of course not. Their consumption and spending would decrease as they would be deprived of the incentive to make more than the specified threshold.
  3. If you actually confiscate wealth as some Leftists have suggested, i.e. say to the wealthy…”I’m going to demand you give us X% of your 401(k) or stock portfolio or savings account so we can redistribute it by providing healthcare or tuition free college for all” for example, how hard will you want to work knowing you’ll be penalized if you’re actually successful?
  4. Look at those people on stage in South Carolina last night. Even if you’re the most altruistic person in America, would you really want ANY of them to decide how to redistribute and allocate the money they’ve taken from you in taxes?

For further understanding of what happens when Democrats take your money and redistribute it, you need look no further than Obama’s 2012 $800 billion, “shovel ready projects”, so-called “stimulus package”. Here’s the breakdown of how that our money was spent:

First of all, it galls me that “Individual Tax Cuts” are called “stimulus” at all. TAX CUTS ARE THE ABSENCE OF INCOME OR WEALTH CONFISCATION, NOT GOVERNMENT SPENDING! (TAX REBATES, by the way, are a RETURN OF YOUR OWN MONEY THAT THE GOVERNMENT PREVIOUSLY CONFISCATED) It’s RELIEF, not STIMULUS. Are you stimulated by the act of a government bureaucrat taking out the nail they drove into your forehead?

Same goes for Alternative Minimum Tax Relief, the second item in the chart. It too was just the absence of additional taxation and had nothing to do with “shovel ready projects”.

State Fiscal Relief wasn’t infrastructure spending either – it was handouts to fiscally irresponsible states, particularly Democrat-controlled states. As with “Aid to Directly Impacted Individuals”, it trickled down only to the public sector unions to fund their entitlement (pensions and healthcare) spending shortfalls and to shore up welfare spending as well.

The final category…Public Investment Outlays… paid for the signs you saw on some of the highways and parkways around you. Did we really see much of any benefit to our nation’s roads and railways from that $270 billion? No. And so only 1/3 of the so-called “Stimulus” went to “infrastructure projects”. The rest went to reward favorite Democrat constituencies, i.e. into the ether.

I used to think Liberals were altruistic. I’ve learned over the years that their motivations are either the garnering of power for power’s sake, or an unbounded arrogance that if they have power and control of our money, they can make everybody happy. Both are evil because they deprive us of the impetus to work hard and achieve success for ourselves, and by extension, our families, communities and our country.

So do we really want Bernie Sanders, Elisabeth Warren, Joe Biden or any of the other megalomaniacal, power-famished hypocrites who were on that stage last night in charge of the government?

To Buffet and Gates’ credit, they’re working hard to give much of their wealth away and there are a lot of true needs and programs where philanthropy is the beginning of a solution. The various charities that build water purification plants in Africa such as “Action Against Hunger” or Doctors Without Borders are good examples, or here at home, the Tunnel to Towers Foundation or the Appalachia Service Project. Do you really want any of those Democrat candidates determining how money should be doled out for such projects? Not all, but the vast majority of Democrat controlled spending consists of handouts to “victims” who with hands out will vote to keep them in power.  

I’d like to be a billionaire too. I wouldn’t buy a yacht. I wouldn’t buy a bigger house. I would still insist that my kids and grandkids work at McDonalds when they turn 16, or stock shelves as mine did. And I’d find those meaningful charities that TRULY support the TRULY needy, or that promote self-reliance, meritocracy, the production of goods and services that advance the frontiers of science and health, human longevity, and natural resource renewal and preservation (NOT ENVIRO-FASCISM BUT CLASSIC CONSERVATION).

Please let’s stop allowing the Left to serve as our nanny, putting spoonful’s of pablum in and wiping the corners of our mouths while congratulating themselves over champagne on how well they’re taking care of us. Please America, just at the point where we’re starting to get back to basics, let’s not empower demagogues such as we saw at the debate last night to spew their utopian fantasies or, God forbid, enact more of their soul-crushing plans.

Schadenfruede

America, Economy, Politics, Reason, Society & Culture, Values

I can think of no better word to describe the feeling I had last night watching the Democrat debate. The spectacle gave whole new meaning to the expression “circular firing squad”. What’s more, it highlighted, again, the absurdity of the Democrats’ positions on just about everything.

Trying to focus on the issues at hand was darn near impossible. It was a food fight extraordinaire…a stage where each tried to out-perform the other. Bloomberg hid behind his lectern (.sic), and acted small, arrogant, smug, and clueless and as he tried hard to stoically look ahead while taking deserved incoming fire. Warren was her usual shrill, unhinged self, screeching #metoo platitudes and demonstrating once again how poorly an academic understands the real world. Sanders with his hand and arm gesticulations continues to look like he might fly away, and while he’s authentic alright, he’s authentically idiotic. Poor Joe Biden with his face lift and newly whitened teeth tried his best to look energetic but appeared the geriatric politician completely disconnected from today’s world, still stumbling and unable to find the right words to insert in his sentences and pitching the “good old days” when his boss was President – coattails on which Obama has made him unwelcome. Pete Boot Edge Edge represented himself, and his whole generation of snowflake millennial spoiled brats superbly, demonstrating his glibness and immaturity at the same time. Finally, Amy Klobuchar, a U.S. Senator believe it or not, looked completely outclassed, childishly defensive: “Are you trying to say that I’m dumb? Or are you mocking me here, Pete?”

What a bunch of clowns!

But I flipped to the Phoenix rally that Trump was holding court over and saw, regrettably, another jester’s performance. Trump really doesn’t act like we should expect a President to act. He still acts like he’s running The Apprentice. It’s embarrassing.

But here’s the kicker…Obama, with his nose in the air and his imperious attitude, his eloquence and presence, was highly ‘presidential’, and spent eight years fundamentally trying to transform America into some two-bit foreign midget while Trump, with his bumbling act, is fundamentally trying to save America from that fate. He may be the most inarticulate President we’ve ever had, and contra-presidential in many ways, but his intentions, his actions and his results have been spot on. I wish I could read what historians will write about him 50 years from now.

If I were a Democrat candidate, and I really wanted to defeat Trump in November, I’d embrace his nationalism, embrace his policies, applaud and thank him for his efforts and suggest that with minor tweaks, the path we’re on could be straightened and smoothed to accommodate the other half of the country who want a more liberal or “progressive” (although I’d avoid that term altogether because it’s a joke) approach. I’d adopt a presidential diction, speech and demeanor and present a serious, no-nonsense persona to contrast myself with Trump’s antics.

I’d still lose, of course, because more than 50% of the population, irrespective of Trump, are happy with the Country’s direction and are optimistic about where we’re going. But at least I’d have a chance to help down ballot Democrats with their runs, and I might even have a respectable run myself.

But the Democrats can’t help themselves. They’re so caught up in hysterics, theatrics, hypocrisy, misandry (.sic), megalomania, and victim-celebrating they’ve completely forgotten about the true majority: the millions of Americans with their heads down working hard caring for themselves and their families, supporting their friends and communities, productively contributing to the growth and welfare of our entire Nation. The Democrats have bought into the notion that the disadvantaged, the downtrodden, the tiny minority of true victims should be helped no matter what the cost to the rest of society or the nation.

When I was a kid we used to use the expression “My heart bleeds purple peanut butter for you” when feigning sympathy for a buddy who skinned his knee. I’m not so callous anymore, but I cannot support, for example, crushing the agriculture industry in California by restricting water flows thus jeopardizing farmers and crops and livestock production because some whiny biologists are distraught that a tiny fish might go extinct (I’m referring, of course, to the famous “snail darter” here.)

What about the vast MAJORITY? How about we celebrate the WINNERS? How about we celebrate EXCEPTIONALISM? How about we celebrate INDIVIDUAL ACHIEVEMENT? How about we reserve the use of NANNIES for our toddlers instead of treating everyone as if we needed the government to serve as one.

Trump may be crass, undignified, inarticulate and may appear at times to be off his rocker, but he’s crazy like a fox in that, like Reagan (“just a dumb actor from California” according to the Democrats), he loves this country, he believes a rising tide lifts all boats, that growth (i.e. GROWING the pie instead of trying to slice the pieces thinner and thinner) solves the problems of the vast majority of our people and indeed, for the whole world.

The Democrats whine we’re destroying the planet. While that is simply nonsense (see George Carlin’s famous routine about “Saving the Planet“), my response to the unlikely possibility that mankind will use up ALL of the Earth’s natural resources or somehow so upset Nature that we will all die of carbon dioxide or monoxide poisoning, or that our orbit will decay such that we fall into the Sun, is to go out and find ourselves another planet to live on (which is exactly what we’re doing)!!!

Growth. Prosperity. Equal opportunity, not equal outcomes. To each according to his MERIT, CONTRIBUTION and RESULTS, not his “needs” is the answer. So long as the Democrats continue to whine and stamp their feet, I’ll keep smiling as they seek to destroy one another.

Schadenfreude.

Despicable Them

Morality, Politics

With apologies to the producers and directors of the cartoon movie hit “Despicable Me”, the label “Despicable Them” aptly applies to politicians in general, but to Leftist politicians in particular. As always, it’s a question of degree. The degree to which the Democrat leadership (note I say leadership, not ALL Democrats) exhibits despicable behavior and spews despicable rhetoric dwarfs, as Jupiter dwarfs the Earth, anything the Republican leadership has done or said.

Examples abound but probably the best one is that of Nancy Pelosi ceremoniously ripping the State of the Union speech in half and claiming it was all lies. As regards despicable rhetoric: Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler, Bill deBlasio, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Maxine Waters, Sheila Jackson Lee, Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, Linda Sarsour…the list of those with verbal diarrhea goes on and on. Every time any of these people open their mouths, nothing but despicable falsehoods and bile emerge.

How do they get away with this? Edmund Burke had the answer: The Fourth Estate. In Thomas Carlyle’s book On Heroes and Hero Worship he attributes to Burke: “Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.”[i] He was of course referring to the Press, or in today’s language, the “Media”.

The term “fourth estate” and “fourth branch” are both used to describe what used to be journalism, which clearly doesn’t exist anymore. Someone I know with a degree in Journalism from Columbia University, arguably the pre-eminent journalism school in the country, grudgingly admits that the principles taught there are violated continuously.

Fourth Estate as a term is meant to emphasize the independence of the Media, while the related term “Fourth Branch” suggests the Media is an extension of the government. In my opinion, it’s hardly the latter, but the Media’s ability to influence (i.e. brainwash) inattentive or non-critical-thinking minds is obvious. Abandonment of journalistic principles such as three-source corroboration or the vetting of sources to ensure reliability, coupled with the power of the internet to broadcast the most salacious lies and twisted arguments, has fostered an environment where despicable behavior and rhetoric thrives.

Given that the professional Media is predominantly Leftist, as are the indolent with too much time on their hands to do anything productive but tweet and post (I hasten to defend that the reason I have the time is that I’m retired after working hard for fifty years), the Left are provided with overwhelming covering fire. The saturated with Leftist garbage airwaves thus leave little room for any reasonable debate or reflection. That same cover gives impunity to the most despicable, even immoral Leftist behavior in both the commercial as well as political realms.

The Left is guilty too of what I think is one of the most despicable behaviors: Projection. Albeit in its weak-mindedness much of the Left doesn’t even see it, or its hypocrisy, it’s axiomatic that if they are whining about something, accusing the Right of something, falsely claiming credit for or denying culpability for something, it is precisely what they are guilty of. Just today Chuck Schumer sent a letter decrying Attorney General William Barr’s throwing of the BS flag on the Roger Stone sentencing. Said the spotlight-hog/grandstander/demagogue Schumer: “This situation has all the indicia of improper political interference in a criminal prosecution.” Sure, and the Left has NEVER improperly interfered in a criminal prosecution…Schumer’s statement is stupid as the President and Attorney General are empowered to intervene ex officio, and the public knows damn well the prosecutors are piling on a Trump ally. (But put a microphone and a spotlight within a hundred miles of Schumer and he will RUN to it!).

Projection.

Thank God we now have pro-justice leaders like Barr who are willing to wade into the Swamp with a flame-thrower to destroy the truly despicable, poisonous rot of the Left that has festered for so many years.  

[i] Wikipedia: article – “Fourth Estate”

Perception

America, Politics, Society & Culture, Values

I’ve written about this before, but it’s plain to see that two halves of our population can look at the exact same set of facts and firmly believe positions that are 180 degrees apart. But it is astounding that ANYONE in this country can look at the Democrats’ impeachment antics as credible, or the horrifying (to those of us with brains who are paying attention) stupidity coming out of the mouths of the Democrat candidates for President as believable, yet there are many, even if not 50% of the population, who do. THAT’s what’s scary about what we’re witnessing…that ostensibly ‘normal’ people could buy the nonsense the Left is peddling.

Don’t they get it? How is it that they can’t see how perniciously calculating, conniving, dishonest and hypocritical the Left is?

I have a theory. It goes back to the basic principle that our perception is based on our experience (see my post (https://grumpsreport.com/?s=Briggs). In my opinion, the experiences of half the country have consisted of Leftist indoctrination, read brainwashing.

The Left is brilliant at manipulation, false-impression-creation, misrepresentation, and above all, in knowing how to play on human emotions. They cannot appeal to peoples’ left brains so they go after the right hemisphere and heart strings. Play the right music in the background and a horror film becomes a comedy. Set the lights just right and the ugly can appear beautiful. Put just the right amount of quiver in your voice and twist the story line and you can make anyone a victim. Celebrating losers and victims is their stock-in-trade. Disagree with that and you’re a racist, bigot, heartless, entitled, privileged old white person the product of a discriminatory society bent on crushing the less fortunate.  

Hollywood is of course the crucible in which all the leftist soup is created. The world’s greatest experts in deception and heart-string manipulation, Hollywood has fed generation after generation since the Greatest Generation with emotional drivel which, while entertaining, is taken as reality. It is THIS emotional drivel that has been the diet of those, in my opinion, who believe what the Left is saying and doing.

It’s no wonder therefore that the EXPERIENCE of half the country…the half that have swallowed the drivel with little to no critical thinking, are empty vessels into which the current Leftist nonsense can be easily poured. It fills their souls with emotional satisfaction to hear concepts like “Medicare for All” and Welcoming (i.e. ‘Open’) Borders. And it’s what allows them to believe the lies about children in cages and every other lie put forth by the Left.

It’s not FAKE NEWS, it’s blatant indoctrination, messaging with an agenda, subjective twisting of facts, figures, data to push a narrative that anyone with a functional LEFT brain sees as destructive to mankind and the world. The “Media” is just a court jester, pandering to whomever will buy their verbal diarrhea for the highest amount.

Follow the money. Always. The self-righteous and hyper-hypocritical Left will do whatever maximizes the cash in their pockets, and the quickest way to undeservedly do so is to amass and exercise POWER.

To be fair, there are plenty on the RIGHT who subscribe to this strategy and who take advantage of it. But like so many other things, IT’S A QUESTION OF DEGREE. The Left is guilty of lying, cheating, and indiscriminately acting in ways that benefit themselves thousands of times more frequently than the Right.

Not until the weak-minded and gullible face REAL reality ( I can’t believe I’ve had to use such a term ) or have their heart strings pulled by Goodness, Grace, God or the Holy Spirit, or whatever universal positive Force you subscribe to, or, alternatively, have an experience or experiences that wake them up to the real world, will they make their way back to the realm of the grounded human race with traditional values and practices, and will our Country revert to its position as Light Shining on the Hill.

Fake (Medical) News

Health Care

Should I or shouldn’t I get a PSA test? Should my wife get a mammogram or not? Is coffee bad for me, or good? Will I die sooner if I eat bacon and eggs? What about red wine? One day the gurus pronounce one thing. The next it’s 180 degrees the opposite. Can we trust ANY experts in medicine?

My kids used to tease me, chanting in unison “Gingko” whenever I exhibited a brain cramp. Gingko, a few years ago, was supposed to improve mental acuity. Now it’s apoaequorin (the stuff “originally found in jellyfish”). Since no one knows how to pronounce apoaequorin everyone just says “Prevagen”!

Resveratrol (in red wine) is another of these miracle supplements. It falls under the category “anti-oxidants”. These are supposed to purge those free radicals from our bodies and help us resist all kinds of nasty things like cancer and heart disease. (I wish there was resveratrol for free-radical LEFTISTS)!

I moved a few years ago and changed doctors. One insisted at my age getting a PSA test for prostate cancer was useless. “What would you do if you it came out positive? Prostate cancer is so slow growing that you’re likely to be gone before it does you any harm,” he said. My current doctor says, “If it were me, I’d want to know and go ahead and treat it!” Who’s right?

As with most things, we have to make our own decisions. For my part, I go to the Mayo Clinic website and WebMD. If what they say about one thing or other is consistent, I figure it’s pretty good advice. If they conflict, I keep on researching until I either get frustrated or bored, then usually make a non-decision or flip a coin.

But it’s confusing, and if you really need medical advice and want to do some homework on your own, you have to really really use critical thinking and good judgment before coming to any conclusions.

Bear in mind that many physicians and health care professionals have gone from Hippocrates (.sic) to Hypocrites (.sic). Follow the money. Physicians have been forced to practice not just defensive medicine, but also profitable medicine. Even solo practitioners can’t survive unless they PRACTICE so as not to lose money!

One of the unique features of medicine is that physicians and other health care professionals can prescribe demand for their own services. “Take two aspirin and come back to me in a week. Sally, please make a follow up appointment for Mr. Smith for next week.” What are you going to do? Say, “No doc, I don’t want to have to pay another out-of-pocket co-pay in a week. I’ll call you if I need you.” Well, some might say that, but the majority of patients do not.

Doctors used to plan on 20 minute time slots per patient. That then went to 15 minutes. At 10 minutes the doctor shuffles between examination rooms and you can see he or she is rushed. At 8 minutes you’ve come to understand the meaning of one of my favorite terms: “Mis-managed care.”

The layering of regulation, bureaucracy, profit motive, misleading, false or downright harmful information in social media or on quack websites have all contributed to a general decline, in my opinion, of our health care system. The Left, of course, to which is attributable most of the destruction, is trying to capitalize on the deteriorating system as they usually do, by claiming that if they control the system (i.e. universal or single-payer government health care) they will take care of all of us.

On that I throw the BS flag. Competition, rewards for practicing medicine based not on effort or cost but on OUTCOMES is what’s needed. Transparency and understandable-to-the-layman report cards and performance indicators will make that possible, not “Medicare for All”.

Keep dreaming and lying and pushing your utopian nonsense Leftists…I’ll do everything I can to take care of myself, take aspirin, put on a sweater like my mother taught me, and tune out all the fads and above all the FAKE MEDICAL NEWS.

Be well.

Sparring with Mutants

America, Reason, Society & Culture, Values

I live in a community filled with limousine liberals. Many do take limousines, around here referred to euphemistically as “cars”, but mostly they just drive themselves around in $80,000 Land Rovers and Mercedes AMG’s.

Their hypocrisy knows no bounds. But it’s ok because they donate to the kids who ring our doorbells in the summer representing so-called Public Interest Research Groups or “PIRGs”, another euphemism for enviro-fascist shake down artists advocating the banning of fracking (which causes, you know, the water from your faucet to ignite) and the banishment of gas pipelines (which, after all, disturb chipmunk and snail darter migrations and can EXPLODE!). And they also have hybrids sitting in their garages which offset the use of the Land Rovers.

Sometimes I want to run screaming for the hills, away from these incredibly shallow, self-absorbed and condescending people who get their out-of-gym exercise by patting themselves on the back for all their wealth and accomplishments. 

I’m tired of having to collect, memorize and arm myself with the facts necessary to defend traditional values, economics, etc. And I’m tired and getting more and more tired of trying to have discussions with these Leftists to whom the rules don’t apply and facts are relative.

Facts simply don’t matter to them. It is impossible to have a rational discussion with a Leftist because all they do is repeat the drivel they hear. Pointing out facts and using logic is pointless. They merely say stupid things like “You have your truth and I have my truth.” It’s like trying to nail jello to a wall, like pushing on a string. Neither reason nor any attempt to explore the disastrous consequences or history of their ideology or the fallacy of their positions resonates.

The image that comes to mind is from a Will Smith movie called “I am Legend”. It’s the post-apocalyptic story of the sole survivor of a plague that transforms humans into bloodthirsty mutants. He wanders alone through New York City, calling out for other possible survivors, and works on finding a cure for the plague using his own immune blood. He is badly outnumbered and the odds are against him, and all the while, the infected wait for him to make a mistake that will deliver him into their hands. They huddle in packs in dark places like subterranean parking lots always facing inwards, shaking and panting. A sound or smell of an uninfected animal or human alerts them at which point they suddenly and viciously turn towards and run at full tilt boogie to brutally assault it.

Today’s Leftists are like those mutants. They wait for a normal, traditional human being to expose themselves and then pounce, spouting nonsense and catch-phrases with one, shrieking voice that seeks to drown out and overwhelm them.

Which reminds me of another movie called Invasion of the Body Snatchers where aliens take over the souls of normal humans and then intermingle with them. To survive, the normal humans mimic the body language and behaviors of the mutants. Should a normal human slip up, all of a sudden there will be a blood curdling shriek from the mutant who identifies the normal person, and then all the mutants will turn and scream and with outstretched arms point to the normal human being.

What we witnessed at the Kavanaugh hearings was a perfect example of body snatchers in unison pointing their fingers at a normal human being and shrieking.

They will stop at nothing to destroy the innocent. Again, facts don’t matter. The consequences of the personal destruction they inflict don’t matter. Lies and hypocrisy are ok because in their minds they are means to an end. All the care about is power and control so they can pursue and achieve their absurd utopian fantasy.

There, I’ve gotten that off my chest. Now I’ll take a deep breath and rejoin the fight to restore sanity to our country and communities.

“When the Left Snatches our Kids” – Verbatim Repost of an Exceptional (!) Article

America, Education, Entertainment, Family, Government, History, Morality, Politics, Reason, Religion, Society & Culture, Values

I pray it is not too late. I pray there are still places in our country where traditional values still prevail. But the other day I read an article in American Thinker: “When the Left Snatches our Kids” by Sally Zelikovsky, to whom all credit is due, that so closely reflects my fears that I’m going to “retweet it”, i.e. reproduce it in full. It is precisely the kind of alarm I’ve been trying to raise for my own children and grandchildren. It isn’t so much prescriptive as a call to arms. It succinctly rifles to the crux of all that’s going wrong with our society.

While I’ve been careful to distinguish between Conservative and Traditional in my writings, one could do a cut and paste, replacing the word Traditional with Conservative in the article and it would remain spot on. The italics are mine.

“I am skeptical that our efforts as conservative parents to produce conservative offspring will materialize.  Even with the best of intentions, the odds are not in our favor to successfully counter the Democrat-Media Complex, the educational system, and pop culture. That doesn’t mean there aren’t success stories (some in my own family), but I hear more about the failure and the disaffection it engenders in conservative families.

Conservative parents have learned the hard way that how your kids turn out depends on a host of factors that, at some point during the maturation process, are way beyond our control — friends, personal experiences, a particular book or documentary, brain chemistry, friends, a teacher/professor/boss, personality, a romantic relationship, college activities, pop culture, hobbies, and…friends.  Usually, it’s not one but an amalgamation of several factors and presto chango!  The kid who was once the lone conservative arguing at the lunch table, now thinks David Hogg and AOC are bitchin’. 

We see them everywhere — the emaciated college-age vegans working at Starbucks, hysterical young girls pounding on Supreme Court doors, attractive anti-Semites leading the charge in Congress.  I’m sure some of them had conservative upbringings — you cannot assume they were all raised by liberals.  Yet, in her reporting about out-of-control liberal college students some time ago, I heard Laura Ingraham link their behavior to their upbringing.  Only a parent whose children hadn’t yet attended high school could make such an absurd connection.  We can try but we cannot guarantee what our children will believe.  

Once again, I find myself referencing Red Scare movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It resonates.  We have to be vigilant, stay informed, understand the arguments of the other side and how to combat them.  If we don’t, eventually the pods take us over.  I graduated high school a Reagan Republican whose political arguments were admittedly my Dad’s.  When I arrived at a competitive college filled with smart, often private-school educated Merit scholars, I lost every political debate. I just didn’t have the breadth of information and understanding of history to counter their arguments.  Thus, I graduated college…a Democrat.  In time, I fell back on those critical thinking skills my parents instilled in me.  A desire to understand more as I graduated from law school and entered the work force, led me to self-educate and, eventually, return to my conservative roots. 

That was also in the ‘80s and early ‘90s when life was simpler and more balanced: when “gay marriage” was still an oxymoron; before triggers and safe spaces, the internet, social media, doom and gloom “climate change,” and legalized pot; before we had an alphabet of sexualities to choose from and the ability to change sexes; before blended families became the norm; before hatred became the quintessential reason for all of society’s ills.  

Not all teachers and professors were proselytizing progressives, the media was less corrupt, and your politics were not a factor in getting or retaining a job.  Because of the deep societal changes since then, not every Millennial or Gen Xer has the wherewithal, the background, or the backbone to recognize and then punch back against the forces of propaganda, fess up to and toil with their own ignorance, or simply engage in respectful debate with those who have another point of view — no matter how steeped in conservatism their childhood. 

I am not suggesting we stop lecturing our children about competing points of view, stop teaching them to be skeptical about what they learn in school or from their peers, or stop challenging the false orthodoxies they are barraged with on virtually every topic from sexuality to climate, energy to food, and national security to border security.  We should continue to bang the drum.  We must.  And we must remain hopeful that someday those we lost will return to the conservative fold because they see the wisdom of conservative principles.  But for all of you young parents out there who think you’ll do better than those before you, be prepared for disappointment. 

The conservative path is littered with the bodies of well-intentioned parents who are devastated when their formerly straight kids come out of imaginary closets, transition to the opposite sex, or demand to be called “they”; when their Jewish Day School educated children announce their support for the BDS movement; when their evangelical  children support blatant infanticide; when their happy, well-adjusted kids go off to college and return believing weed is innocuous, struggling with drug addiction, or suffering from mental illness. 

These cultural maladies affect liberals and conservatives alike, but are unusually bitter pills for conservatives to swallow because they are packaged in a lifestyle and value system antithetical to everything we teach our children — resilience, pride, integrity, honesty, open-mindedness, self-reliance, individuality, taking responsibility for our actions, doing right when we screw up, and teaching a man to fish.  Liberals cast us as hypocrites whose principles clash with reality, but what they don’t understand is that we believe in taking responsibility for and learning from our missteps so we constantly evolve into better beings (and don’t get mired in unbridled, misplaced hatred and lifelong victimhood).

Secondly, conservative parents are treated by their children with a level of hostility that doesn’t seem to afflict liberal parents with conservative children.  Loving, nurturing conservative parents find themselves catapulted to Holocaust-denier status and demoted to homophobic, intolerant, racist, privileged, religious zealots.  Relics of an oppressive past. It is painful when your kids reject everything you raised them to value. Despise you. Scoff at you. Turn against you. Align with your political foes. Resent you for brainwashing them with yourhateful, 1950‘s agenda.

Now, some of that is typical teenage/young adult angst and rebellion.  When frontal lobes are soothed by the right combination of hormones and our insecure little monsters segue into more confident adults, those nasty side effects often dissipate. But much of the antipathy they are exposed to is encouraged by “the man” in the liberal camp — we’ll call him “the burning man.”  He instructs us to hate authority, hate anything established, hate tradition, hate the moral code you grew up with, hate anyone who is white or successful, and hate those who embrace any of this. Hence, hate your parents.  Hate your old neighborhood.  They are the problem.  And while today all you have to do is oppose them, someday you might have to actively go against them, even “turn them in.” The burning man says this is okay because you are right and the end justifies the means. I’m not being paranoid. Our entire educational system is based on appropriating the minds of our children and undoing all they have learned at home, turning them into weapons of mass societal destruction in the burning man’s toolbox. 

We have all participated in holiday dinners and family vacations ruined by dissension and door-slamming.  Family harmony devolves into family discord, function into dysfunction, and closeness morphs into estrangement.  Parents are instructed to just shut up already! Politics and religion are off the table.  Dinner conversations revolve around silly cat videos and trivial drivel.  Soon there is little left to discuss.  After all, everything is political now — from your sneakers to your bus commute during Pride Month. 

Once upon a time, we could fall back on cultural interests like music, movies, theater, travel, and sports to avoid potentially explosive conversations at family gatherings about politics and religion.  Now, virtue signaling is so ubiquitous that everything seems to fall into the Realm of the verboten.  It becomes more and more difficult to find common ground.  Constructive input I like your haircut and simple questions Did you decide on a major?  What are you doing for break? How do you like your job? are potential triggers.  Family get togethers are so contentious there is an increasing tendency to minimize interactions.  Even life’s big “hatching, matching, and dispatching” events are often fraught with tension — relatives who couldn’t be seated together because of some family squabble are now separated because one has a worldview the other finds detestable.

Some parents give in. They don’t want politics or values to stand in the way of their relationships with their kids, so they re-visit their Weltanschauung.  Constant pressure from your 20-year-old bubelah goes a long way towards re-educating Mom and Dad. Senator Rob Portman was against gay marriage until his son came out and then… he evolved.  I’d rather fight than switch is a paean to another time. 

This is nothing new.  Many parents drank the Kool-Aid and became part of the 60s counterculture their children brought home.  Ironically, many of their hippie children became yuppies and did the unthinkable — morphed into their conservative parents.  Hmm.  I suppose we can be clear-eyed about the transformative societal and political forces pulling our children away from conservatism, at the same time we cling to the hope that our liberal progeny will switch and fight for conservative principles and maybe even cling to their bibles and the Constitution, too.”

Wish I could have said it like that!

Comment by DOC DURACOAT August 3, 2019:
“All you people should move to Boca Raton, Florida! Our public high school has been rated A for the last 10 years straight. We have a very active ROTC program, and it is routine to see these kids in the halls wearing military uniforms. The flag is respected, everyone stands for the pledge of allegiance, even the minority students. Graduation rates and college acceptance rates are very high. 

Discipline is enforced, disrupting class is not tolerated. My kids and their friends all graduated as sports playing, modest dressing, great conservative kids. Come on down and bring your guns and bibles! Your kids will graduate with a great education and strong conservative moral values.”


Delusional Malice

Politics, Society & Culture

The Left’s all out assault on traditional American values is approaching a crescendo. As they see their beloved utopian dream continue to implode they no longer profess to “go high”. Rather, they seem to revel in taking the “low road” at every turn.

Credit to David Limbaugh who penned a wonderful piece on what the true meaning of Make America Great Again means and from whom I learned the phrase “Delusional Malice”. For that describes perfectly what the Left is up to.

Delusional describes the Left’s hopes and dreams:

  • That everyone will live happily ever after with government provided healthcare for all;
  • That confiscating everyone’s guns will eliminate gun violence;
  • That taxing “the rich” (which really means everyone who has a job) will pay for all of government’s social programs, including the provision of universal healthcare;
  • That eliminating plastic shopping bags and straws, large fountain sodas, incandescent lightbulbs, gasoline powered vehicles, etc. will “save the planet”;
  • That we can all live happily in a perfectly integrated, multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-lingual and multi-religious society where we will harmoniously “all get along”;
  • That the distinction between genders will be eliminated so there will be equal opportunity, equal pay, equal time on sports fields, irrespective of merit, experience, or accomplishment;
  • That abortion may be used as contraception in lieu of continence;
  • That God and religion are eliminated from our schools, discourse, laws and society generally;
  • That we will no more have borders or have to worry about national sovereignty once we become one global family;
  • And so on and so forth…

Malice describes the insidious nature of how the Left is advancing its agenda:

  • By calling everyone who disagrees with them a racist, fascist, homophobe, xenophobe, etc.;
  • By indoctrinating and exploiting children to advance their aims;
  • By hijacking the vocabulary and promoting the use of definitions and memes that reflect their views;
  • By outright lying both by omission and commission;
  • By enlisting Hollywood and its supreme ability to make fiction and fantasy seem real to generate heart-string tugs and subtly brain-wash receptive audiences;
  • By dumbing down deviance, i.e. trivializing evil and wrong (e.g. “it’s just sex”);
  • By projecting, in the psychological sense, their aberrance and uncivilized notions onto traditionalists, conservatives and true patriots;
  • By open physical harassment and “in-your-face” confrontation of anyone who opposes them;
  • By refusing to condemn violence and unconscionable behavior in the name of “restraint” and “tolerance”;
  • By exuding hypocrisy to the point of pathology;
  • By seeking to suppress the speech, appearances, writings, even the posts and tweets of anyone who calls out their bilge for what it is;
  • By claiming “science” backs their views when in fact the exact opposite is true;
  • By saturating the air with so much drivel and vituperation that all vestiges of traditional mores and values are obscured.

As I’ve noted before, it’s difficult for Traditionalists to fight this cancer. We care about the High Road, and have been taught that we mustn’t “descend to their level”. We want to be left alone to live in peace as we know we can and should.

But Delusional Malice is becoming more and more manifest as each day goes by, as the Left continues to try to overwhelm the system and create an almost apocalyptic chaos from which only they can save us.

It is not enough to set an example and rise above all the mayhem. We must step up our counteroffensive, calling out lies and Leftist propaganda whenever and wherever we see it. We must push back against the onslaught, against the REAL fascism and bigotry, by opposing in every lawful way each and every initiative of the Left that would seek to drag us further down the slippery slope.

I don’t have any evidence or statistics to support this, but I’ll bet the majority of the attendees at the July 4th celebration on the National Mall two days ago were Traditionalists. It’s inspiring to see so many patriotic people come out and show their support for our flag, our country, and by extension, traditional American values. The Silent Majority spoke up. May we continue to do so and pull ourselves back up that slippery slope!

It’s a Question of DEGREE!

Society & Culture

When information is presented to us, the conclusions we reach at first glance may be what the presenter wants us to conclude, and may not reflect reality. For example, how MUCH hypocrisy; how MUCH falsehood; how MUCH racism; how Much of ANYTHING (!) is relevant and important.

Split a screen in two. Put a Leftist on one side and a Traditionalist on the other. Let the subject be Hypocrisy. The Leftist will cite example after example of conservative icons demonstrating hypocritical behavior. The Traditionalist will cite example after example of liberal/’progressive” icons demonstrating hypocritical behavior.

The casual viewer will conclude, “Both sides do it, they’re EQUALLY wrong!”

Here’s the problem. The split screen and selection of examples demonstrate that the sin of hypocrisy exists on both sides. What it DOESN’T show is the DEGREE to which each side engages in it.

It’s like the games played with representations of statistics. The following two graphs show identical data. Which presents the rosier picture of growth?

Back to the Hypocrisy graphic. By splitting the screen into two equal parts and by showing the same number of examples on each side of the argument, one would be led to believe that the Left is no more prone to hypocrisy than the Right. Usually, the argument devolves into a shouting match (either figuratively or literally!) in an attempt to bludgeon the opponent.

Whom to believe? What are the FACTS?

I wish we could tell you. Unfortunately, all we can do is give you our OPINION. We recommend that you employ critical thinking, do your own research and arrive at your own conclusion on virtually any subject. JUST DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ OR SEE!

PS, our OPINION is that the Left’s circle in the Hypocrisy diagram above is in reality a hundred times larger than the one on the Right. Think of the representations you’ve seen comparing the circumference of the Earth compared to that of the Sun. THAT’s a better depiction of the imbalance!

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