Thanks!

I do a lot of reading on the net, of both “reporting” and opinion. I’ll read the various perspectives on a given issue or event, draw my own conclusions from the information available, and move on. Every once in a great while, I come across something that stops me dead in my tracks.

While you clearly prefer longish-form writing (hence the blog), your comment on 9/2 at 6:01 stunned me such that I re-read it a number of times. Never before have I seen such a clear, concise, cogent, and brief explanation of Trump’s persona, and it absolutely rings true. This is the nut paragraph (though you buried the lede 🙂 ).

“Same thing with Trump in the political realm. His good traits – his ability to fight, his nose for hypocrisy, his incredible energy, his sharp humor – are linked, I believe, to the traits people don’t like: sharpness, insults, exaggeration, and whatever else they don’t like. I don’t think one can be separated from the other.”

When I stopped to ponder that, I couldn’t conclude anything but that it was deadly accurate, in particular the summary sentence.

Excellent!

Forget Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis or Kenosha. The worst violence have been in deeply red areas. It’s just tragic what has been happening in Wyoming and North Dakota. Those nightly scenes from Casper are especially jarring. Night after night, marauding bands of middle aged and elderly white guys in MAGA hats rampage through the downtown, burning and looting. And Governor Mark Gordon is just unwilling to take a strong stand against the violence. Indeed, he has intimated sympathy for the protestors’ rage.

And then there’s Grand Forks! Poor Grand Forks. All those conservative church ladies smashing storefront windows with rolling pins, stealing casserole ingredients right and left. Once again, GOP Governor Doug Burgum is unwilling to do much of anything to put a stop to it.

Of course, the right wing media is partly to blame. How many more times can Tucker Carlson insist that these protests are “largely peaceful”??? How many more editorials will the Epoch Times publish rationalizing the looting? Thank goodness for Joe Biden and the Democrats issuing strong condemnations of all this right wing violence and taking a firm stand on the side of law and order!

worry not about this election in which he wins
worry about the next one where there is no one to take up the baton

Yuri Bezmenov’s ideological demoralization explains it well, via ytube.

It is about a combination of virtue-signaling and groupthink.

But in the case of many of my friends, they really don’t follow the news very much. They don’t watch Colbert, they don’t even watch MSNBC. They’re not interested. Why should they be? They know what they think – their political views were formed aeons ago, and they are surrounded by people who think the same way, and they’re busy doing other things (being with grandkids, etc). They get the basic news (headlines, etc.) and that tells them in a very general way what’s going on and what to think about it.