Hoo boy. Mike over at Cold Fury excerpted and offered some powerful comments on my post The Essence Of Dissident Politics in his post last night: We are all dissidents now. This was important to note:
The thing that really brought me up short was the realization that yes, the aforementioned Haley, Rubio, et al are indeed a quite far cry from Goldwater and Buchanan—a much farther cry than Goldwater and Buchanan were from Washington, Jefferson, Adams, et al. One doesn’t have to expend a whole lot of what Heinlein liked to call “skull sweat” to see that this, in contrast to the usual order of things, is a distinction with one HELL of a difference.
Read Mike’s whole post, it is worth your time.
Buchanan and Goldwater could have had a useful conversation containing common ground with the men who founded this country and many of the political thinkers in the 200 years between the founding and Buchanan’s run for President in 1992. From George H.W. Bush onward? The Founders would have thought they were having a nightmare to think that the nation they created and bequeathed to their posterity would have fallen this far, this fast. I pointed this out in a post a couple of years ago: A Parade Of Small Men In The Highest Office. As the power of the Oval Office has grown, the character and competence of the men who occupied that office has declined at an even faster rate.
Now I don’t normally do this but when I see a comment regarding something I wrote that not only completely misses the point but is egregiously stupid from someone who thinks they are clever and on /ourside/, well it behooves me to ridicule that person. I don’t care if you disagree with me, I often disagree with me from just a few years ago, but at least have the courtesy of trying to understand my point before confirming how dumb you are. The comment in question comes from one “Barry”….
Out of the 384 words Mike excerpted from an essay that spanned 5,762 words and covered a sweeping range of topics, Barry apparently got as far as the first sentence of the second paragraph before having his switch flipped because I was insufficiently obsequious toward our glorious former President.
I am on record, clearly and unambiguously, regarding Trump. I didn’t vote for him in 2016 because I suspected, and was proven correct, that even if elected he wouldn’t accomplish anything he was claiming to run on. I did vote for him in 2020, not because I thought he might win or that he might be more effective in his second term but strictly as a “fuck you” to the ruling class.
The Trump record for his time in the spotlight was a mixed bag.
The good:
– He upset the right people and exposed the media once and for all as the shameless leftist shills we knew they were.
– He spawned a million fantastic memes.
– He unwittingly served the cause of acceleration by driving so many leftists completely insane.
The bad:
– Trump failed utterly to do much about immigration, and actually was all in favor of massive immigration of “high skill” migrants from third world shitholes.
– He was endlessly distracted by personal spats and chasing fads.
– Trump surrounded himself with shysters and hustlers who mostly were working at odds with the 2016 campaign agenda. Then he would fire them and call them names on social media, the same people he hired in the first place.
– He spent way too much time and capital on things like corporate tax cuts, criminal justice “reform” and Israel and very little on the signature issues that got him elected in the first place.
– In 2020 with American cities burning Trump was mostly out of the game, impotently tweeting and threatening while his supporters were systematically silence on social media.
The list of bad goes on and on. He was over his head and not up for the job, constantly getting played by Pelosi and Schumer as well as the traitors in his own party. Don’t forget that Trump came into office with the Republicans holding both chambers of Congress but he failed to secure the border.
Trump in 2016 was great, right up to his “From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first” pledge in his inaugural address. From that point on it was pretty much a disaster. I still think Trump cares about White Americans, far more so than anyone else left in the GOP. Trump was better than Hillary of course and he was better than any alternative the Republicans could have put forward. Trump was the only one who could have won in 2016 because he woke a lot of disengaged White voters out of their apathy to show up for him. But that is a pretty low bar and hardly the sign of excellence.
That brings me to Barry who called me a “moron” (twice) which I found pretty funny.
Apparently “America First” means a Middle-East peace process that went the same place that every other attempt has gone, namely nowhere. Why should I give a shit about two desert tribes squabbling over some sand in the Middle-East when our own country is being invaded by millions of illegals and neo-Bolsheviks are preparing to kick off a new Cultural Revolution complete with a new Red Guard (see: The Cultural Revolution, Take Two! )?
Also, “real growth” means $8 trillion in new Federal debt. That sort of “growth” looks a lot like the “growth” plan we got from Obama and are getting from Biden.
Fighting back against Chinese domination? Yeah, tell me more about how the ChiComs are cowering before us.
Fighting ISIS, something likely at least in part created by our own government, and again another Middle-East conflict that I don’t care about.
As for not getting my pony, the last five years have been fantastic for our family financially. Especially 2020 where we made a ton of money. Here is the catch. Just because we have more money in the bank and more stuff than before, it doesn’t mean it was good for America. The last 18 months have been a train-wreck for a lot of people, me having a good year financially doesn’t offset the suffering of others or the long term damage done. There are more important issues than the GDP or stock prices.
Barry is inadvertently right about one thing. Often people who claim to be on /ourside/ are a greater danger than the Left and right at the top of that list are the MAGAtards who still think the God-Emperor memes reflect reality and are excited about MOAR VOTING MOAR HARDER for Trump in 2024.
The Trump MAGA cult is incredibly counter-productive. Trump probably won’t run in 2024 and if he does he will not win. They already cheated twice in the last two major elections and they are perfecting the process. We will never have another fair election in this country and voting is completely fake and gay. At best Trump gets a D+ as President and there is nothing to make me think he would do better in a hypothetical second term. He had his shot and missed wide of the mark by a mile.
That means that we need to red-pill all of those Trump zealots into realizing that he isn’t coming back and he wasn’t great the first time anyway. The MAGA types are even worse than the people who are constantly looking for the next Reagan. That country is long gone and what we need now is not another political candidate to save us.
Trump made memes great again but America? Still heading over the cliff. Trump didn’t stop it or even slow it down much but to be fair no one could have stopped it at this point. The Trump era is over and now we are in a post-political world. Better figure that out now because the time grows short to teach the confused and dumb.
the kinda guy who gives boomers a bad name
" … We will never have another fair election in this country and voting is completely fake and gay. At best Trump gets a D+ as President … "
A couple of minor quibbles with you here. There is a possibility — a pretty remote one — that someday there will be a "country" here, recognizable as such, and there might be a fair election. But even that remote possibility is on the other side of a great deal of bloodshed.
And Trump's grade … I give him the dreaded "one-legged A." He made no serious attempt to implement any of his worthless promises. In my mind, the closest thing he has as a claim to merit is that he didn't — technically! — start any brand-new wars. And, on my grading scale, that's well short of even a D-.
I followed the Cold Fury link. I'll have to say that the miserable quality of his commentariat was a disagreeable surprise. But that might be a site that I should add to my daily online reading.
They don't need the help
Whatever country replaces this one might have free and fair elections but as currently constituted we are all done.
"Whatever country replaces this one might have free and fair elections but as currently constituted we are all done."
Yep. Have been for some time. The America I grew up in—I am 68—is long gone. Has been for decades now. Now we are just fighting over the corpse. The physical, mental and spiritual foundations of the Old America do not now exist in sufficient numbers to reclaim our heritage.
The same was true of Rome. All the elites of Rome, as the corruption set in, claimed they wanted "to restore the Republic." Think 133 BC – 30 BC. After one hundred years of civil wars, of foreign wars, of depredations by the patricians, all those who remembered the Republic and how it had been built and maintained were dead. The Romans cried out for a Caesar, and a Caesar came.
It will be the same in the US. One day Americans will cry out for a Caesar. A Caesar will come. I hope we like it.
I went and read cold furys post and the comments are ridiculous. How would you be the horse ass bidet rode up on? Like it boggles the mind?
These people are at a site with the middle finger wrapped in a confederate flag with bfytw
banner and the dink getting capped to show how to end communism and they are bitching at your post. Are the democrats?
It's stuff like this that makes me wonder if we are ever going to get out of this mess.
Trump was better than any other options at the time. Anyone can agree on that, but it's like saying cleaning up cat shit is better than dog shit because it's smaller. It's still shit. Or it's better to clean vomit of the carpet than diarrhea. It's still a shit job.
Like you said, the best part of trump were the memes.
I didn't bother to go back and read the subsequent comments, one idiotic comment was all I could handle today.
95%+ of official Washington was against him. He managed that poorly. What would change in 2024?
I never put much faith in Trump. As you stated, he exposed the media as a propaganda machine for the elites, not as true journalists. He opened eyes to the breadth and depth of 'The Swamp," but he was powerless against it. Some theorize his presidency was planned to lull conservatives into letting their guard down. The Q phenomenon was a giant psyop. Sadly, some people still hold out hope in Q, just as some still think Trump will return to save us.