Someone asked me yesterday how I would deal with a child who behaved like Trump. I wasn’t sure what to say but I was curious to get the opinion from here. Is Trump a good role model for the next generation?
Define “behaved like Trump” first.
Waltz should own up and resign forthwith.
Fair point. How about a disregard for truth, a confrontational and divisive communication style, a tendency to belittle others, and a habit of prioritising personal loyalty and self-interest over consistency or accountability.
“Someone asked me yesterday how I would deal with a child who behaved like Trump.”
Bullshit. Never happened. Bugger off, troll.
I would disagree with some of those characterizations. Aside from his tendency to exaggerate his crowd sizes and his personal wealth, I do not find he disregards the truth in public policy matters. His confrontational style gets things done; it’s “divisive” if people don’t agree with his policies. He does value personal loyalty, but has been quick to remove people whose actions detract from achieving goals. His accountability was his election. We knew what we voted for.
Americans on this blog and many other places comment about his personality and communication approaches to say that he’s a New Yorker, and they have known many others like him.
For instance, unless the Walz leak to the Atlantic author was a deliberate ploy, I think Walz should go. We’ll see how long he lasts.
Someone asked me yesterday how I would deal with a child who behaved like Trump. I wasn’t sure what to say but I was curious to get the opinion from here. Is Trump a good role model for the next generation?
==
Are you training people for ordinary life or are you training them for the circumstances in which Trump is actually operating?
English twit. Bertram J Wooster personified.
Good point, Art Deco.
Kate:
Waltz.
Walz is the governor of Minnesota.
The evergreen complaints that Trump has lied or has behaved boorishly or childishly or violated norms or decorum are always ridiculous to me. It’s especially silly when people speak in generalities without any specific examples.
Trump lied? Name me a president, a prime minister, or any significant political figure… or hell – any human being who hasn’t lied. If you’re going to accuse someone of telling lies, please give an example. And particularly, give an explanation as to why you believe the lie was damaging or significant. I can pretty much guarantee that for every “lie” or exaggeration that Trump has said, I could name several examples of lies told by his opponents over the years that were far more damaging and significant to everyday Americans than anything Trump has said or done.
Trump is far from perfect, but time and again those that oppose him have demonstrated themselves to be many orders of magnitude worse in their behavior and actions. It’s not even close.
a disregard for truth, a confrontational and divisive communication style, a tendency to belittle others, and a habit of prioritising personal loyalty and self-interest over consistency or accountability.
==
Trump aside, I would think most of those would be age specific, so you need to be more specific on your definition of “child”. And I’m guessing replacing “Trump” with “Biden” in your question would generate a very different thought process than what you intended. As in:
== I watched Biden’s televised speech with my six year old and she asked me some questions that caused me to think about the appropriateness of saying over and over again “what he meant was…”
It is a very good point by Art Deco, but it is sdferr who hit the bullseye.
the interesting part of the story, was the hint that Vance made re the strike, the time sensitivity, or the advantage that Europe would reap vs the US,
also the Atlantic is an apologist for Hamas Houthis Hezbollah, much like Haaretz and as such likely to tip off the Houthis but that didn’t happen
the kerfluffle is a sign of how cravenly stupid the political culture is,
Said it before and I’ll say it again:
Inveterate non-stop liars keep telling me that TRUMP is a liar.
Inveterate, non-stop criminals keep telling me that TRUMP is a criminal.
Honestly now, what really should one conclude???
Sorry sdfer it really did. We were discussing the idea of role models. Ones from our childhoods – in the UK these were often WW2 related – and today. Strangely I was trying to stick up for Trump – who I really don’t approve of. I was using an argument similar to Nonapod – “Trump is far from perfect, but time and again those that oppose him have demonstrated themselves to be many orders of magnitude worse in their behavior and actions.” Only I wouldn’t say, “It’s not even close”. It would be easy to write a long list of obvious lies Trump has pushed from saying he won the 2020 election down.
But I was wondering what other defences of Trump you had. It is hard to deny that he lies to the extent that even his supporters factor this in when listening to him.
I am not trying to annoy you. I am genuinely curious as to how you see the world and, occasionally, to show a view from one part of England or, when ambitious, Europe in general.
Treat with utter disrespect and condescension, those who deserve it? Sounds good to me.
@David Clayton: Your “apostle to the rednecks” shtick is getting tiresome. If you really wanted to learn anything from us you’d have a very different attitude and you wouldn’t ask questions with built-in tendentious assumptions. What you want to do instead is passive-aggressively lecture us with statements ending in question marks.
So I for one am going to be scrolling right past anything you post, just like I do with anyone else who is clearly not operating in good faith.
I don’t recall “Role-Model-In-Chief” anywhere in Article II of the US Constitution. I did a CTRL-F for it but it didn’t come up.
Maybe “role modeling” is something that parents need to be doing for their children and not counting on Top Men in the central government to do it for them.
in the UK these were often WW2 related
So how would you deal with a child like Churchill or Montgomery? Nelson was also a bit odd.
Gender (i.e. sex-correlated attributes) divide: big boobs on one side and little boobs on the other.
But I was wondering what other defences of Trump you had. It is hard to deny that he lies to the extent that even his supporters factor this in when listening to him.
I’m not trying to deny that he has lied. I’m trying to put in perspective the lies he may have told, their relative significance, and contrast them with those of his various and myriad opponents over the years in terms of their relative significance and damage. But this would require specifics. If you have an example of a specific lie that you feel was very bad and damaging, I could offer my opinion on it as well as counter examples of a lie or lies from his opponents and why I feel they were far worse. If you don’t have the time or inclination to do that, I understand. It’s difficult to have a discussion speaking in pure generalities, but it does take some time and effort to drill down into the specifics.
Chuck Churchill was the very one we were talking about – a deeply flawed character but this country would have been in real trouble without him. Would you want a child to be like Churchill? Well yes in many ways. Well read, brave, determined, honest and deeply faithful to his wife.
Nonapod – I mentioned the big lie. Trump says he won the 2020 election. He did not. He lost. Claiming to have won simply undermines the credibility of the system. There has to be basic shared truths for politics to work. One is who won, who lost and who is President.
Regarding Trump.
A lot of people voted for him as President but still have issues with aspects of his personality. He does exaggerate a lot . I would not hold him up as a personal model in that sense, but he does have endurance under pressure…and he has been ” friendly” to a lot of conservative causes even if he runs his mouth more than many of his own voters would like. And he has been willing to speak out against the lies of Gender ideology cult which has effected thousands of vulnerable kids.
Trump 2.0 is better than Trump 1.0.
Airship one is where the current prime minister and the King grovels to Hamas, to the mobs that threaten the citizenry, where the pursuit of the fanciful net zero, has put the nation’s transportation system at risk,
the security services knew about the Chinese pathogen, and pretended the source was something other,
without the stolen election, there would not have been a Ukraine war or october 7th, the bloodprice of that cynical sham,
the Kabul capitulation would not have happened either, as well as the license the Houthis were given to threaten commercial shipping
Today is Norman Borlaug’s birthday, born in 1914, died in 2009. Raise a glass to his memory.
So many election laws were broken, and there was so much government and government-allied censorship and suppression of discussion in the 2020 election that it’s impossible to say who “won” as if it were a fairly-conducted contest. If you mean the Democrats bent enough rules to produce a winning total, that’s true. Not a model of a genuinely honest election, though.
Read Mollie Hemingway’s book, “Rigged.”
How would you deal with a child who behaved like a persistent dishonest insincere troll?
I smile at these arguments. It’s far past time for anyone to be able to change anyone else’s opinion of Trump, FJB, Obama, McCain, H, Romney or any of the other twits making (or presenting) national news. The lines have been drawn and any of the still undecided will always be wishy-washy. Time’s getting close; keep your powder dry and stay away from crowds.
One would probably prefer to ignore said troll except that this one is rather amusing (as in, what will troll come up with next?)
Without going into great detail, there are many, many reasons to be highly skeptical of the 2020 election results. At minimum, it was a highly unusual election for a number of reasons, the most significant being a wordwide pandemic. There was an unprecidented amount of mail-in ballots that were cast which resulted a large number of, shall we say, irregularities. But let’s zoom out and look at the results of the 2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024 US Presidential elections. There were 126.8 million votes cast in the 2012 US Presidential election. There were 128.8 million votes cast in 2016. There were 155.5 million votes cast in the 2020 election. And 152.3 million votes cast in the 2024 election. It’s interesting that there were evidently over 3 million people who voted in 2020 who didn’t vote in 2024, and it appears as if all of those voted for Biden/Harris over Trump/Pence. And this is without going into all the specific irregularities and smaller scale evidence of fraud that has been discovered since that particular election.
But lets leave all of that aside for now. Trump claimed he in won and made efforts to challenge the results. That in and of itself is hardly unprecedented. It famously happened in the Gore/Bush election of 2000. And for years and years many Democrats complained “Not my president!” and the like. Personally the biggest mistake I feel that Trump made was encouraging the stop the steal rally in DC that lead to the events of J6. He fell into a carefully laid trap on that one, one replete with FBI agent provocateurs and compromised capitol police who literally let in protestors, the vast majority of whom committed very little in the way of actual crimes beyond trespassing and “parading”. Many of whom were also disproportionately punished for such minor offenses. But the optics of it all were terrible and gave the Democrats, the Biden administration, and the mainstream media years of ammunition, casting the events of J6 as nothing less than a failed insurection that was conducted by Trump himself, even though there was never any evidence found of such a thing despite herculean efforts to discover it.
Today is Norman Borlaug’s birthday, born in 1914, died in 2009. Raise a glass to his memory.
I think the young lady who did the SNow White review is outstanding!
Amala is a wise young woman, who is well worth listening to.
Yeah, it’s sort of amazing that Norman Borlaug probably saved more human lives than anyone in history, yet few people even know his name.
David Clayton:
When the voting rules are changed so that voting security is gone, trust in the results evaporates. Therefore, to say that Trump won is not a lie, or to say that Biden won is not a lie I also recommend Mollie Hemingway’s book Rigged.
As for world leaders, children, and role models, it’s a silly question IMHO. World leaders ordinarily have characteristics you wouldn’t necessarily want to teach your children, unless you want them to be world leaders or otherwise very successful above all else. They tend, for example, to be ruthless, manipulative, and narcissistic. Trump is hardly unique in those regards. He is also smart, keeps his word more than most leaders, a good negotiator, and apparently a good father. I’d add courageous.I wouldn’t mind teaching a child those things.
it was determined by academia and media that is downstream of the former, that
the notion of an expanding population was bad, of course this conflicts with the demands to import a new people in Western Europe as well as the US
and apparently a good father.
==
He’s able to build relationships with his children and teach them important skills. That’s something to shoot for, if not everything.
Re: Amala Ekpunobi / Snow White
There are a ton of reaction videos on Snow White. I didn’t get to this one because I didn’t know Amala Ekpunobi and it was over 30 minutes long.
That said, the podcast is excellent in its analysis. Other reviews focus on the obvious wokeness of this Snow White and Rachel Zegler. Amala gets down to a critique of the old-school socialism behind the movie and she does it well.
Re: Biden Family / Substance Abuse
It’s not just Hunter.
__________________________________
President Joe Biden has the unfortunate (and perhaps even dubious) distinction of knowing the toll that addiction and substance abuse can have on a family. Five members of the Biden family have been to rehab for drug and alcohol abuse.
This has included Joe Biden’s son Hunter, daughter Ashley, his brother Frank, niece Caroline, and his daughter-in-law Hallie.
My go-to mob guy, Michael Franseze, says all crime families are effed-up.
David Clayton,
As Neo said, at best we don’t know if Trump lost the election, since no court allowed the verification of the signature on the ballot and the signature on file when the election results were contested.
In fact, in Pennsylvania, the courts ruled against any signature verification process. So there is not way to know if the ballot came from the voter on file. The Penn. SoS ruled that any mark of any kind in the signature box on the ballot should be considered a valid ballot.
Based on the lack of basic voter security, it’s as likely (or more so) that Trump won the election as Biden. Don’t forget that total votes don’t count for anything, the American election is 50 individual races and the difference between Trump and Biden was extremely close.
The tight races in the trio of states had a big electoral impact. As NPR’s Domenico Montanaro has put it, “just 44,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin separated Biden and Trump from a tie in the Electoral College.”
You’ve been fed propaganda, repeated so many times, it’s become the truth.
As to Trump’s lies (many/most of which are exaggerations) I would say that the effects of his lies compared to the lies that Biden was sharp as a tack, and never better, until the disastrous debate is miniscule. An entire media complex and an entire administration were lying through their teeth.
Who was running the American administration for some/much of Biden’s presidency? We really don’t know.
Trump’s worst lie pales in comparison.
While it is true that it’s impossible to know what the exact results in the 2020 election would have been had proper election protocols been followed, it is also true that Trump almost certainly would have won.
Biden’s margin of victory came down to 21,000 votes in Wisconsin, 13,000 votes in Georgia, and 10,000 votes in Arizona. In all three states there were gross violations of election rules regarding mail-in ballots. The number of questionable ballots in each state where rules for chain of custody and signature verification were not followed far exceeded the margin of Biden’s victory. Given what we know about the corruption in Fulton County, Georgia; Maricopa County, Arizona; and Milwaukee and Dane Counties in Wisconsin, it is almost certain that rules were deliberately broken to push Biden over the top in these three states.
I don’t know why it should be controversial to claim that it was much more likely than not that Trump won the 2020 election. If you told most Democrats that in order to save the country from four more years of Trump, all it would take is to ignore rules about signature verification on some mail-in ballots, they would have said it’s worth doing.
I think that there is still a great deal of resistance, even among Republicans, to admit that our election system is so flawed and that an election can be stolen without too much effort. There is almost nothing Democrats will fight harder against than revisions to our voting system that require voters to prove that they are who they say they are. They know that a fair system will make winning elections very difficult.
Looks like we are getting ready to
“bomb, bomb, bomb,
bomb, bomb Iran”.
Chases Eagles:
Glad to see someone else is paying attention!
I do believe Trump prefers a negotiated settlement over military action. He did take the initiative of contacting Iran and making his intentions clear. He also gave Iran a deadline, though I’ve heard different numbers.
As I understand it, Iran is close to breaking out with functional nuclear weapons. No more kick the can.
Something must be done, otherwise we face a nuclear-armed Iran. This is our last and best chance to stop Iran.
@ Barry > “One would probably prefer to ignore said troll except that this one is rather amusing (as in, what will troll come up with next?)”
Since we have been following the Adventures of AI with huxley and others, the comment streams from “David Clayton” (is a real-ish name still a nom?) look very similar to the patterns I’ve seen in the AI exchanges that have been shared here.
The main difference is that DC starts the ball rolling, as opposed to getting a prompt from someone, in the way huxley has demonstrated often; but what if the prompter is invisible to us?
Prompter: “DC, give me a comment for [this] blogpost by Neo that will engage the other commenters, using [some specific] approach.”
The prompter then posts that comment and succeeding ones in the blog thread, without having to do any more work than feeding our responses into the AI’s input channel.
The result generated is frequently, as Niketas said, “questions with built-in tendentious assumptions.” Then, for each challenge to the first & succeeding comments, his replies look very much like the ones given by various AI-platforms: trimming his sails to be less confrontational, picking up on cues (“Churchill was the very one we were talking about” — what are the odds?), putting forth “thoughts” that look very much like they came from a Wikipedia article (including the leftist/Democrat bias), and generally “speaking” in a way that strikes me as being in a verbal “uncanny valley.”
If you’ve been around long enough, recall the same sort of thing from Montage and Manju, although I think those were well-trained real people who have now been replaced by automation.
If you are a live human, David, I apologize; however, being able to emulate a high-level AI is no small accomplishment.
And that doesn’t mean you aren’t a troll.
We certainly get engaged, though, and a lot of good rebuttals are generated, which might be useful to other readers of the blog.
Artificial Imbecile?
Um, no, methinks not.
(The genuine article, most likely…but then these days, who can truly tell…)
In any event, this one’s for the usual suspects…even if it will, dollars to donuts, go down the drain…
(Though I would add, “…particularly if it comes from the corrupt media…”)
in that link, we are reminded the financial times, doesn’t understand finance,
we already knew their lead editor ed luce, the most insufferable mandarin wannabe, doesn’t understand politics,
AesopFan – wow – “ being able to emulate a high-level AI is no small accomplishment” I would put that on my CV – if I ever felt like going back into the world of work.
But you are right to at least wonder about any contributor being AI – it is increasingly hard to tell. But I assure you I am not. Just an old man doing the traditional old man thing of watching the world go to hell in a handcart 🙂
Also to AesopFan – you got me thinking and so I asked ChatGPT if there was evidence your comment was written by AI.
You may be pleased to know that it’s said the following.
“ Could it plausibly be an AI?
Only if deliberately written to sound like a slightly eccentric human with a blog-commentariat style. But that would require high-level prompting and probably editing. There’s a naturalness to the syntax and social referencing that strongly suggests a human with time on their hands and opinions to share.
?
So what should you make of it?
If you’re “David Clayton,” it’s not so much an insult as a kind of backhanded compliment. The commenter is intrigued, unsettled, and ultimately engaged. The ironic punchline—“doesn’t mean you aren’t a troll”—keeps things ambiguous, but the tone suggests grudging admiration.
Would you like help crafting a witty (or pointed) reply? Or want to explore how “AI-ness” might be detected—or faked—in more depth?”
Needless to say I haven’t taken it up on the offer
Aesopfan “lot of good rebuttals are generated, which might be useful to other readers of the blog.”
I couldn’t agree more!
Re: 2020: there was so much wrong with that election.
I’m disappointed that this country — “civilized”, so some think — can’t enforce these 2 incredibly vital requirements:
1. Voter ID
2. Chain of custody
Also disappointed by how awful the multiple courts were, to rule that the plaintiffs had no standing to trigger examining the evidence! Those judges were cowards, at best.
@David Clayton
Firstly, and this isn’t really to you David (if you’re not lying about that too), but to the others. You notice how our trolly British “Friend” virtue signals to no end about how he is a European Conservative, but have you ever notice him go after the likes of Starmer? The PRC? For all of my differences with the likes of PhiD (in spite of largely agreeing with them) P does, and Bauxite does as well. While I have had plenty of differences with them and will continue to do so (and in Bauxite’s case had plenty of reason to question their sincerity, such as when I caught them mutilating statistics), they at least are not one dimensional Trump-as-Emmanuel-Goldstein clown shows who seem to think Orange Man is not only Bad, but the Baddest Thing Out There in the West. All while saying fuck all about things like Southport.
It would take a heart of stone to not laugh and cry.
So let’s get on to the latest set of things.
Someone asked me yesterday how I would deal with a child who behaved like Trump. I wasn’t sure what to say but I was curious to get the opinion from here. Is Trump a good role model for the next generation?
Firstly: There is no good way to interpret this. Either you are flat out lying in one of the classic “Twitter Leftist giving artificial anecdote” thing, or you actually have someone who in over their head that they think asking someone so blatantly dishonest, immature, and unaccomplished. Should such a being exist, they are to be pitied.
Secondly: Trump has a whole host of different behaviors. Are you talking about Trump when he quietly and solemnly went to military graveyards on his free time? Or Trump when he was in front of a camera ragging on Zelenskyy (and even then when during the failed photo op summit or after)?
This is why there’s no substitute for having a better overview of the behavior in question. Even truly awful people can be capable of “good behavior” (see: the difference between Yoritomo and Yoshitsune upon entering Heian-kyo/Kyoto in the Tales of the Genji).
Thirdly: There are far worse role models than Trump for the next generation. Far worse. And indeed Trump’s diligence in work, endurance under great pressure, and personal generosity are things to be emulated in much the same way as his egotism, pettiness, and infidelity are not.
Fair point. How about a disregard for truth,
The pot calls the kettle black. In your misbegotten portrayals here, you have shown a far greater disregard for truth than Trump has, compounded by an egregious disregard for conservative principles and basic legal and constitutional ones, as we will see here.
Trump is a braggart, exaggerator, and liar, and those are far from the most appealing facets of him, especially as while many of his lies or exaggeration are either of little effect or used tactically to draw the enemy into mistakes (such as the transsexual mice thing), many others are not (such as the “started the war” BS to Zelenskyy said in anger, or the cloying “I don’t think (George Washington) did (own slaves)” when talking about the very real removal of the Founders from public life).
But he is vastly less egregious and hurtful in those cases than not only his leftist opponents such as Biden, Obama, and Clinton, but that of many supposedly more “respectable” “conservative” opponents like Haley (who I previously liked) or McMullin.
He also has been subject to vastly greater disregard for the truth weaponized than he has. Trump has shown vastly less interest in imprisoning his political enemies (even when he has legal justification to do so, such as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden) than his political enemies have shown in imprisoning him, often on blatantly bullshit metrics like creating a “novel” (read; nonexistent) “theory” f a case where what would normally be unprosecutable out-of-statute-of-limitations misdemeanors into felonies.
Moreover, I would far more favorably compare his regard to the truth than just about any European leader, “conservative” or otherwise. Or do you really wish me to go over the likes of Farage and Johnson and Mutti Merkel?
a confrontational and divisive communication style,
So like Obama but more sincere and less polished?
It’s an unfortunate necessity in an atmosphere where endemic, hegemonic left wing control of the media is a known factor and nice guys tend to struggle.
I don’t have to like it, but it gets much better and truer results than trying to lose in a genteel fashion.
a tendency to belittle others,
One of his pettier, more indiscriminate, and less honorable traits (which is saying something), but also endemic to politicians of his age, on both sides of the Atlantic. Again, kindly compare how Nigel Farage or David Cameron have treated loyal members of their party to how Trump has treated outright turncoats.
Let’s also not kid ourselves about the belittling going both ways, or even being outright demonization. I have objected to his conduct in many cases like with Cruz and Zelenskyy, but in several others such as with Obama, Clinton, McMullin, Mattis, and a host of others he has been more generous than the other side.
and a habit of prioritising personal loyalty and self-interest over consistency or accountability.
Trump prioritized personal loyalty and self-interest less than any President since at a minimum Dubya was kicked out of the White House, and less than such Halycon idols as JFK. Obama and Biden engaged in much more flagrant and probably illegal loyalty tests, purges, and persecutions, made worse by outright using the organs of state to imprison lay political enemies in conditions worse than 9/11 Plotters suffered.
And the fact that this was tied to personal loyalty and self-interest can be seen by things such as the very public declaration of a hold on a deal for the 9/11 masterminds during election season, only for that to be reversed there, the BLATANT and unethical (even if possibly legal) blanket pardons going for years, and the dropping of multiple voter intimidation and terrorist cases against the likes of AntifA.
But God Forbid Trump attempt to ensure basic legal accountability to prevent people like Milley from illegally informing the PRC of classified military intelligence.
Sorry sdfer it really did.
Hence why I phrased my prior statement, and why I pity whoever was foolish enough to do so if they exist. Stranger things have certainly happened and will certainly happen again. But your credibility is in deficit here, as I’ve pointed out.
We were discussing the idea of role models. Ones from our childhoods – in the UK these were often WW2 related – and today.
Which I would believe, and is similar here. Of course the irony is we often overlook many of the flaws in our role models, especially given the very blatant at the time stage managing (for instance, FDR having his infirmities covered up by the press and Attlee’s disastrously rationing continuation).
Strangely I was trying to stick up for Trump – who I really don’t approve of.
Again, stranger things have happened, but I hope it is very clear why the reaction of most of us is “pics or it didn’t happen.”
In any case, on the subject of role models you’ll probably want to compare a lot of the issues you’ve listed about Trump with those of say Churchill or Monty or Attlee.
I was using an argument similar to Nonapod – “Trump is far from perfect, but time and again those that oppose him have demonstrated themselves to be many orders of magnitude worse in their behavior and actions.” Only I wouldn’t say, “It’s not even close”.
And you wonder why you have a credibility deficit.
The United States saw politicized purges of the military and government at the hands of Obama and Biden, unadulterated blood libel (reading the attempts by left wing hacks in uniform and academia to try and square the circle of “Bush Lied about Iraq” with what they had to admit about the ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda as well as the actions and statements of many of their doyens on the matter makes for morbidly amusing – if enraging – reading as they tried to hang their hats on Saddam’s admittedly tense relations with AQ and other Sunni Jihadis and the tendency of the Iraqi Baathists to funnel resources through one-or-two-steps-removed cutouts or vassals of Al Qaeda such as Al Shabaab to talk about there being “no direct link” between AQ and Saddam, while also ignoring strong circumstantial evidence to the contrary like luxury treatment of AQ, Taliban, and associated VIPs like Zarqawi getting luxury medical treatment in Baghdad in the aftermath of the NATO invasion of Afghanistan). Literal riots and arson were allowed to go unpunished or barely punished, while our borders overflowed and the likes of Garland spent vast resources hunting down people that attended January 6 peacefully or lawfully lodging complaints about school policy.
While we’re on the subject of lies, one thing I do hold against Trump was his failure to pursue and follow through with “Lock Her Up” in the first term regarding Hillary Clinton. But his opponents sure as hell made sure to lock up and worse. Nor is this in any way unique to Britain. For whatever your opinions of Robinson/Yaxley-Lennon, the FACT that he is being treated more heinously and strictly than the “Welsh”-Rwandan possible Jihadist terrorist and certain Totalitarian Violence Fetishist mass murderer Rudakubana is an outrage, and sadly far from the only one in your benighted islands.
All while we are supposed to uncritically accept the vote returns of politicized, machine dominated sewers like Milwaukee (which had the dubious distinction of turning in literally IMPOSSIBLE voter returns in several wards with more than 100% turnout, which was then downgraded to “merely” the PRACTICALLY impossible, with theoretically-possible but completely uncharacteristic voter turnouts that would have us pretend the city dwellers voted at Italianesque rates while the rest of the state had people vote at Portuguese rates, violating every possible warning sign for fraud in accounting imaginable and leading to results worse than those that triggered the Orange Revolution in Ukraine).
And this is one thing where Trump is a very worthy role model. He fights and does not allow blatant injustice to be done to him or to his followers or those deemed collateral damage. He does not always fight well, or for the right causes, but fight he does. And if we had elected a Cameron, a Johnson, or a Farage to office our borders would have not been shored up and political prisoners (whether the outright innocent or those guilty of having whatever justified punishment they deserved corrupted by reversible, corrupt persecutions or utterly disproportionate and inhumane punishments) would still be locked up.
It would be easy to write a long list of obvious lies Trump has pushed from saying he won the 2020 election down.
The fact that you think it is in any way an “obvious lie” that Trump said he won the 2020 election speaks volumes about your bias, lack of awareness, and ignorance. I’ll be honest and say I think he went too far in that (if only due to optics). But believing he did not win the 2020 election involves uncritically believing corrupt jurisdictions like Milwaukee, with voter security that was horribly inadequate and inferior to many third world countries.
Moreover, the persistent stonewalling and destruction of evidence does not engender confidence. Nor does the blatantly unequal treatment with Al Gore and his lawyers continuing Florida litigation in 2000 far after any legal or ethical justification, complete with advocating for blatantly contradictory standards of counting from one precinct to another in an attempt to gain the most ballots because no one standard would allow him to win. Until the Supremes finally rejected this.
And yet the idea that Bush “stole” 2000 and that Al Gore was the rightful President has remained as at best an eccentricity and at worst a deadly earnest conspiracy theory on the mainstream in the left.
Why on Earth you think any conservative movement or party on Earth – or any other movement or party – should tolerate such blatantly unequal, unfair double standards is beyond me.
But I was wondering what other defences of Trump you had. It is hard to deny that he lies to the extent that even his supporters factor this in when listening to him.
Agreed, but that is sadly common for many. However, he has also done far more to try and shore up US domestic economic resilience and to clean the corruption out of the bureaucracy than most. To say nothing of enforcing voter integrity laws and the immigration laws.
I am not trying to annoy you. I am genuinely curious as to how you see the world and, occasionally, to show a view from one part of England or, when ambitious, Europe in general.
Fair enough, but then we will respond in kind. And feel free to call you out when and if we feel you are not being sincere.
AesopFan – wow – “ being able to emulate a high-level AI is no small accomplishment” I would put that on my CV – if I ever felt like going back into the world of work.
For whatever our differences I guess that is one thing we share in common.
But you are right to at least wonder about any contributor being AI – it is increasingly hard to tell. But I assure you I am not. Just an old man doing the traditional old man thing of watching the world go to hell in a handcart ?
Fair enough, and indeed it is. I fear for the Dead Internet. But I digress.
In any case, I encourage you to look up the Motor Voter law and the concerns about voter fraud tied to it. And ask yourself how statistically probable it is that Biden won the most votes of any US Presidential candidate in history, but they were concentrated in such few bellwether states in contrast to the general loss of Dem voter share, especially among traditional coalition members like non-white males.
FDR having his infirmities covered up by the press
==
I seem to recall this meme got started in the magazine press ca. 1982. Rank-and-file members of the public (e.g. my mother, who was 14 when Roosevelt died) were perfectly aware he was disabled. See, for example Ron Nessen’s crack in 1978 about one of Jimmy Carter’s campaign appearances (“He did everything to evoke the founder of the New Deal coalition other than roll out in a wheelchair smoking a cigarette in a long holder”); Mr. Nessen was born in 1934. The March of Dimes was founded in 1938, btw.
@Art Deco:Rank-and-file members of the public (e.g. my mother, who was 14 when Roosevelt died) were perfectly aware he was disabled.
My great aunt, who was about 30 when he died, was not aware until a friend of hers who had seen him in a public appearance told her, and she did not believe her friend.
Certainly photographs of him were staged to give the impression he was not confined to a wheelchair, often with someone strategically standing next to him.
==
He was capable of standing with the aid of leg braces, just not perambulating around much.
== My great aunt, who was about 30 when he died, was not aware until a friend of hers who had seen him in a public appearance told her.
==
Don’t know how she missed the founding of the March of Dimes.
@Art Deco:Don’t know how she missed the founding of the March of Dimes.
Now there’s no need to snark about my great-aunt. You have an anecdote, I have an anecdote, that’s why “anecdotal evidence” is not very conclusive.
There is a big difference between knowing that Roosevelt had had polio (as many people had in those days, though I guess the experts have decided since that this wasn’t what Roosevelt had) and knowing that he was unable to walk or stand unaided.
I think the public knew that Roosevelt had had polio. That he was unable to walk or stand unaided was kept from the public. Two different things, you see.
@ David Clayton > “Only if deliberately written to sound like a slightly eccentric human with a blog-commentariat style. But that would require high-level prompting and probably editing. There’s a naturalness to the syntax and social referencing that strongly suggests a human with time on their hands and opinions to share.”
Okay, ya got me, ChatGPT.
But make that a “very carefully cultivated blog-commentariat style” and “way too much time on her hands.”
As for having opinions – my kids threaten to engrave my tombstone with the warning: “Don’t get her started.”
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Someone asked me yesterday how I would deal with a child who behaved like Trump. I wasn’t sure what to say but I was curious to get the opinion from here. Is Trump a good role model for the next generation?
Define “behaved like Trump” first.
Waltz should own up and resign forthwith.
Fair point. How about a disregard for truth, a confrontational and divisive communication style, a tendency to belittle others, and a habit of prioritising personal loyalty and self-interest over consistency or accountability.
“Someone asked me yesterday how I would deal with a child who behaved like Trump.”
Bullshit. Never happened. Bugger off, troll.
I would disagree with some of those characterizations. Aside from his tendency to exaggerate his crowd sizes and his personal wealth, I do not find he disregards the truth in public policy matters. His confrontational style gets things done; it’s “divisive” if people don’t agree with his policies. He does value personal loyalty, but has been quick to remove people whose actions detract from achieving goals. His accountability was his election. We knew what we voted for.
Americans on this blog and many other places comment about his personality and communication approaches to say that he’s a New Yorker, and they have known many others like him.
For instance, unless the Walz leak to the Atlantic author was a deliberate ploy, I think Walz should go. We’ll see how long he lasts.
Someone asked me yesterday how I would deal with a child who behaved like Trump. I wasn’t sure what to say but I was curious to get the opinion from here. Is Trump a good role model for the next generation?
==
Are you training people for ordinary life or are you training them for the circumstances in which Trump is actually operating?
English twit. Bertram J Wooster personified.
Good point, Art Deco.
Kate:
Waltz.
Walz is the governor of Minnesota.
The evergreen complaints that Trump has lied or has behaved boorishly or childishly or violated norms or decorum are always ridiculous to me. It’s especially silly when people speak in generalities without any specific examples.
Trump lied? Name me a president, a prime minister, or any significant political figure… or hell – any human being who hasn’t lied. If you’re going to accuse someone of telling lies, please give an example. And particularly, give an explanation as to why you believe the lie was damaging or significant. I can pretty much guarantee that for every “lie” or exaggeration that Trump has said, I could name several examples of lies told by his opponents over the years that were far more damaging and significant to everyday Americans than anything Trump has said or done.
Trump is far from perfect, but time and again those that oppose him have demonstrated themselves to be many orders of magnitude worse in their behavior and actions. It’s not even close.
a disregard for truth, a confrontational and divisive communication style, a tendency to belittle others, and a habit of prioritising personal loyalty and self-interest over consistency or accountability.
==
Trump aside, I would think most of those would be age specific, so you need to be more specific on your definition of “child”. And I’m guessing replacing “Trump” with “Biden” in your question would generate a very different thought process than what you intended. As in:
==
I watched Biden’s televised speech with my six year old and she asked me some questions that caused me to think about the appropriateness of saying over and over again “what he meant was…”
It is a very good point by Art Deco, but it is sdferr who hit the bullseye.
the interesting part of the story, was the hint that Vance made re the strike, the time sensitivity, or the advantage that Europe would reap vs the US,
also the Atlantic is an apologist for Hamas Houthis Hezbollah, much like Haaretz and as such likely to tip off the Houthis but that didn’t happen
the kerfluffle is a sign of how cravenly stupid the political culture is,
Said it before and I’ll say it again:
Inveterate non-stop liars keep telling me that TRUMP is a liar.
Inveterate, non-stop criminals keep telling me that TRUMP is a criminal.
Honestly now, what really should one conclude???
Sorry sdfer it really did. We were discussing the idea of role models. Ones from our childhoods – in the UK these were often WW2 related – and today. Strangely I was trying to stick up for Trump – who I really don’t approve of. I was using an argument similar to Nonapod – “Trump is far from perfect, but time and again those that oppose him have demonstrated themselves to be many orders of magnitude worse in their behavior and actions.” Only I wouldn’t say, “It’s not even close”. It would be easy to write a long list of obvious lies Trump has pushed from saying he won the 2020 election down.
But I was wondering what other defences of Trump you had. It is hard to deny that he lies to the extent that even his supporters factor this in when listening to him.
I am not trying to annoy you. I am genuinely curious as to how you see the world and, occasionally, to show a view from one part of England or, when ambitious, Europe in general.
Treat with utter disrespect and condescension, those who deserve it? Sounds good to me.
@David Clayton: Your “apostle to the rednecks” shtick is getting tiresome. If you really wanted to learn anything from us you’d have a very different attitude and you wouldn’t ask questions with built-in tendentious assumptions. What you want to do instead is passive-aggressively lecture us with statements ending in question marks.
So I for one am going to be scrolling right past anything you post, just like I do with anyone else who is clearly not operating in good faith.
I don’t recall “Role-Model-In-Chief” anywhere in Article II of the US Constitution. I did a CTRL-F for it but it didn’t come up.
Maybe “role modeling” is something that parents need to be doing for their children and not counting on Top Men in the central government to do it for them.
in the UK these were often WW2 related
So how would you deal with a child like Churchill or Montgomery? Nelson was also a bit odd.
Gender (i.e. sex-correlated attributes) divide: big boobs on one side and little boobs on the other.
I’m not trying to deny that he has lied. I’m trying to put in perspective the lies he may have told, their relative significance, and contrast them with those of his various and myriad opponents over the years in terms of their relative significance and damage. But this would require specifics. If you have an example of a specific lie that you feel was very bad and damaging, I could offer my opinion on it as well as counter examples of a lie or lies from his opponents and why I feel they were far worse. If you don’t have the time or inclination to do that, I understand. It’s difficult to have a discussion speaking in pure generalities, but it does take some time and effort to drill down into the specifics.
Chuck Churchill was the very one we were talking about – a deeply flawed character but this country would have been in real trouble without him. Would you want a child to be like Churchill? Well yes in many ways. Well read, brave, determined, honest and deeply faithful to his wife.
Nonapod – I mentioned the big lie. Trump says he won the 2020 election. He did not. He lost. Claiming to have won simply undermines the credibility of the system. There has to be basic shared truths for politics to work. One is who won, who lost and who is President.
Regarding Trump.
A lot of people voted for him as President but still have issues with aspects of his personality. He does exaggerate a lot . I would not hold him up as a personal model in that sense, but he does have endurance under pressure…and he has been ” friendly” to a lot of conservative causes even if he runs his mouth more than many of his own voters would like. And he has been willing to speak out against the lies of Gender ideology cult which has effected thousands of vulnerable kids.
Trump 2.0 is better than Trump 1.0.
Airship one is where the current prime minister and the King grovels to Hamas, to the mobs that threaten the citizenry, where the pursuit of the fanciful net zero, has put the nation’s transportation system at risk,
the security services knew about the Chinese pathogen, and pretended the source was something other,
without the stolen election, there would not have been a Ukraine war or october 7th, the bloodprice of that cynical sham,
the Kabul capitulation would not have happened either, as well as the license the Houthis were given to threaten commercial shipping
Today is Norman Borlaug’s birthday, born in 1914, died in 2009. Raise a glass to his memory.
So many election laws were broken, and there was so much government and government-allied censorship and suppression of discussion in the 2020 election that it’s impossible to say who “won” as if it were a fairly-conducted contest. If you mean the Democrats bent enough rules to produce a winning total, that’s true. Not a model of a genuinely honest election, though.
Read Mollie Hemingway’s book, “Rigged.”
How would you deal with a child who behaved like a persistent dishonest insincere troll?
time to cut their funding for once,https://www.thefp.com/p/columbia-president-says-one-thing
I smile at these arguments. It’s far past time for anyone to be able to change anyone else’s opinion of Trump, FJB, Obama, McCain, H, Romney or any of the other twits making (or presenting) national news. The lines have been drawn and any of the still undecided will always be wishy-washy. Time’s getting close; keep your powder dry and stay away from crowds.
One would probably prefer to ignore said troll except that this one is rather amusing (as in, what will troll come up with next?)
Meanwhile, in the UK—no, not terribly amusing…
Wait, what? What the hell took so long?
https://thefederalist.com/2025/03/25/utah-passes-historic-bill-installing-great-books-at-all-state-universities/
Without going into great detail, there are many, many reasons to be highly skeptical of the 2020 election results. At minimum, it was a highly unusual election for a number of reasons, the most significant being a wordwide pandemic. There was an unprecidented amount of mail-in ballots that were cast which resulted a large number of, shall we say, irregularities. But let’s zoom out and look at the results of the 2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024 US Presidential elections. There were 126.8 million votes cast in the 2012 US Presidential election. There were 128.8 million votes cast in 2016. There were 155.5 million votes cast in the 2020 election. And 152.3 million votes cast in the 2024 election. It’s interesting that there were evidently over 3 million people who voted in 2020 who didn’t vote in 2024, and it appears as if all of those voted for Biden/Harris over Trump/Pence. And this is without going into all the specific irregularities and smaller scale evidence of fraud that has been discovered since that particular election.
But lets leave all of that aside for now. Trump claimed he in won and made efforts to challenge the results. That in and of itself is hardly unprecedented. It famously happened in the Gore/Bush election of 2000. And for years and years many Democrats complained “Not my president!” and the like. Personally the biggest mistake I feel that Trump made was encouraging the stop the steal rally in DC that lead to the events of J6. He fell into a carefully laid trap on that one, one replete with FBI agent provocateurs and compromised capitol police who literally let in protestors, the vast majority of whom committed very little in the way of actual crimes beyond trespassing and “parading”. Many of whom were also disproportionately punished for such minor offenses. But the optics of it all were terrible and gave the Democrats, the Biden administration, and the mainstream media years of ammunition, casting the events of J6 as nothing less than a failed insurection that was conducted by Trump himself, even though there was never any evidence found of such a thing despite herculean efforts to discover it.
Today is Norman Borlaug’s birthday, born in 1914, died in 2009. Raise a glass to his memory.
sdferr:
And so say all of us!
more evidence of fraud,
https://x.com/Sultanknish/status/1904573618908188750
Just in case…
_________________________________
Borlaug is often called “the father of the Green Revolution”, and is credited with saving over a billion people worldwide from starvation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug
_________________________________
Norman Borlaug is a saint in my pantheon.
Stewart Brand of the “Whole Earth Catalog” credited Borlaug with torpedoing Paul Ehrlich’s “We are all gonna starve!” Population Bomb scenarios.
Related…
https://instapundit.com/710532/
but of course
https://twitchy.com/samj/2025/03/25/katie-pavlich-rashida-tlaib-n2410424
so this happened while no one was noticing,
https://x.com/eugyppius1/status/1904596671801286981
I think the young lady who did the SNow White review is outstanding!
Amala is a wise young woman, who is well worth listening to.
Yeah, it’s sort of amazing that Norman Borlaug probably saved more human lives than anyone in history, yet few people even know his name.
David Clayton:
When the voting rules are changed so that voting security is gone, trust in the results evaporates. Therefore, to say that Trump won is not a lie, or to say that Biden won is not a lie I also recommend Mollie Hemingway’s book Rigged.
As for world leaders, children, and role models, it’s a silly question IMHO. World leaders ordinarily have characteristics you wouldn’t necessarily want to teach your children, unless you want them to be world leaders or otherwise very successful above all else. They tend, for example, to be ruthless, manipulative, and narcissistic. Trump is hardly unique in those regards. He is also smart, keeps his word more than most leaders, a good negotiator, and apparently a good father. I’d add courageous.I wouldn’t mind teaching a child those things.
it was determined by academia and media that is downstream of the former, that
the notion of an expanding population was bad, of course this conflicts with the demands to import a new people in Western Europe as well as the US
and apparently a good father.
==
He’s able to build relationships with his children and teach them important skills. That’s something to shoot for, if not everything.
Re: Amala Ekpunobi / Snow White
There are a ton of reaction videos on Snow White. I didn’t get to this one because I didn’t know Amala Ekpunobi and it was over 30 minutes long.
That said, the podcast is excellent in its analysis. Other reviews focus on the obvious wokeness of this Snow White and Rachel Zegler. Amala gets down to a critique of the old-school socialism behind the movie and she does it well.
Re: Biden Family / Substance Abuse
It’s not just Hunter.
__________________________________
President Joe Biden has the unfortunate (and perhaps even dubious) distinction of knowing the toll that addiction and substance abuse can have on a family. Five members of the Biden family have been to rehab for drug and alcohol abuse.
This has included Joe Biden’s son Hunter, daughter Ashley, his brother Frank, niece Caroline, and his daughter-in-law Hallie.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/joe-bidens-biggest-problem-all-209288
__________________________________
My go-to mob guy, Michael Franseze, says all crime families are effed-up.
David Clayton,
As Neo said, at best we don’t know if Trump lost the election, since no court allowed the verification of the signature on the ballot and the signature on file when the election results were contested.
In fact, in Pennsylvania, the courts ruled against any signature verification process. So there is not way to know if the ballot came from the voter on file. The Penn. SoS ruled that any mark of any kind in the signature box on the ballot should be considered a valid ballot.
Based on the lack of basic voter security, it’s as likely (or more so) that Trump won the election as Biden. Don’t forget that total votes don’t count for anything, the American election is 50 individual races and the difference between Trump and Biden was extremely close.
The tight races in the trio of states had a big electoral impact. As NPR’s Domenico Montanaro has put it, “just 44,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin separated Biden and Trump from a tie in the Electoral College.”
You’ve been fed propaganda, repeated so many times, it’s become the truth.
As to Trump’s lies (many/most of which are exaggerations) I would say that the effects of his lies compared to the lies that Biden was sharp as a tack, and never better, until the disastrous debate is miniscule. An entire media complex and an entire administration were lying through their teeth.
Who was running the American administration for some/much of Biden’s presidency? We really don’t know.
Trump’s worst lie pales in comparison.
While it is true that it’s impossible to know what the exact results in the 2020 election would have been had proper election protocols been followed, it is also true that Trump almost certainly would have won.
Biden’s margin of victory came down to 21,000 votes in Wisconsin, 13,000 votes in Georgia, and 10,000 votes in Arizona. In all three states there were gross violations of election rules regarding mail-in ballots. The number of questionable ballots in each state where rules for chain of custody and signature verification were not followed far exceeded the margin of Biden’s victory. Given what we know about the corruption in Fulton County, Georgia; Maricopa County, Arizona; and Milwaukee and Dane Counties in Wisconsin, it is almost certain that rules were deliberately broken to push Biden over the top in these three states.
I don’t know why it should be controversial to claim that it was much more likely than not that Trump won the 2020 election. If you told most Democrats that in order to save the country from four more years of Trump, all it would take is to ignore rules about signature verification on some mail-in ballots, they would have said it’s worth doing.
I think that there is still a great deal of resistance, even among Republicans, to admit that our election system is so flawed and that an election can be stolen without too much effort. There is almost nothing Democrats will fight harder against than revisions to our voting system that require voters to prove that they are who they say they are. They know that a fair system will make winning elections very difficult.
Looks like we are getting ready to
“bomb, bomb, bomb,
bomb, bomb Iran”.
Chases Eagles:
Glad to see someone else is paying attention!
I do believe Trump prefers a negotiated settlement over military action. He did take the initiative of contacting Iran and making his intentions clear. He also gave Iran a deadline, though I’ve heard different numbers.
As I understand it, Iran is close to breaking out with functional nuclear weapons. No more kick the can.
Something must be done, otherwise we face a nuclear-armed Iran. This is our last and best chance to stop Iran.
Oh, that: https://x.com/Rasmussen_Poll/status/1904700383936622676
Narrative change, huh.
@Gregory Harper 9:06 pm
Well said.
@ Barry > “One would probably prefer to ignore said troll except that this one is rather amusing (as in, what will troll come up with next?)”
Since we have been following the Adventures of AI with huxley and others, the comment streams from “David Clayton” (is a real-ish name still a nom?) look very similar to the patterns I’ve seen in the AI exchanges that have been shared here.
The main difference is that DC starts the ball rolling, as opposed to getting a prompt from someone, in the way huxley has demonstrated often; but what if the prompter is invisible to us?
Prompter: “DC, give me a comment for [this] blogpost by Neo that will engage the other commenters, using [some specific] approach.”
The prompter then posts that comment and succeeding ones in the blog thread, without having to do any more work than feeding our responses into the AI’s input channel.
The result generated is frequently, as Niketas said, “questions with built-in tendentious assumptions.” Then, for each challenge to the first & succeeding comments, his replies look very much like the ones given by various AI-platforms: trimming his sails to be less confrontational, picking up on cues (“Churchill was the very one we were talking about” — what are the odds?), putting forth “thoughts” that look very much like they came from a Wikipedia article (including the leftist/Democrat bias), and generally “speaking” in a way that strikes me as being in a verbal “uncanny valley.”
If you’ve been around long enough, recall the same sort of thing from Montage and Manju, although I think those were well-trained real people who have now been replaced by automation.
If you are a live human, David, I apologize; however, being able to emulate a high-level AI is no small accomplishment.
And that doesn’t mean you aren’t a troll.
We certainly get engaged, though, and a lot of good rebuttals are generated, which might be useful to other readers of the blog.
Artificial Imbecile?
Um, no, methinks not.
(The genuine article, most likely…but then these days, who can truly tell…)
In any event, this one’s for the usual suspects…even if it will, dollars to donuts, go down the drain…
“…Never, Ever, EVER Trust a Breaking News Story That Makes Trumpworld Look Bad.”—
https://instapundit.com/710706/
(Though I would add, “…particularly if it comes from the corrupt media…”)
in that link, we are reminded the financial times, doesn’t understand finance,
we already knew their lead editor ed luce, the most insufferable mandarin wannabe, doesn’t understand politics,
AesopFan – wow – “ being able to emulate a high-level AI is no small accomplishment” I would put that on my CV – if I ever felt like going back into the world of work.
But you are right to at least wonder about any contributor being AI – it is increasingly hard to tell. But I assure you I am not. Just an old man doing the traditional old man thing of watching the world go to hell in a handcart 🙂
Also to AesopFan – you got me thinking and so I asked ChatGPT if there was evidence your comment was written by AI.
You may be pleased to know that it’s said the following.
“ Could it plausibly be an AI?
Only if deliberately written to sound like a slightly eccentric human with a blog-commentariat style. But that would require high-level prompting and probably editing. There’s a naturalness to the syntax and social referencing that strongly suggests a human with time on their hands and opinions to share.
?
So what should you make of it?
If you’re “David Clayton,” it’s not so much an insult as a kind of backhanded compliment. The commenter is intrigued, unsettled, and ultimately engaged. The ironic punchline—“doesn’t mean you aren’t a troll”—keeps things ambiguous, but the tone suggests grudging admiration.
Would you like help crafting a witty (or pointed) reply? Or want to explore how “AI-ness” might be detected—or faked—in more depth?”
Needless to say I haven’t taken it up on the offer
https://www.dailywire.com/news/colorado-lgbt-activist-teacher-trans-husband-house-minor-teen-girl-against-moms-wishes
==
Look who gets hired to teach school in Colorado.
==
Anita Bryant died recently. Back in 1977, she could see where this was going.
Aesopfan “lot of good rebuttals are generated, which might be useful to other readers of the blog.”
I couldn’t agree more!
Re: 2020: there was so much wrong with that election.
I’m disappointed that this country — “civilized”, so some think — can’t enforce these 2 incredibly vital requirements:
1. Voter ID
2. Chain of custody
Also disappointed by how awful the multiple courts were, to rule that the plaintiffs had no standing to trigger examining the evidence! Those judges were cowards, at best.
@David Clayton
Firstly, and this isn’t really to you David (if you’re not lying about that too), but to the others. You notice how our trolly British “Friend” virtue signals to no end about how he is a European Conservative, but have you ever notice him go after the likes of Starmer? The PRC? For all of my differences with the likes of PhiD (in spite of largely agreeing with them) P does, and Bauxite does as well. While I have had plenty of differences with them and will continue to do so (and in Bauxite’s case had plenty of reason to question their sincerity, such as when I caught them mutilating statistics), they at least are not one dimensional Trump-as-Emmanuel-Goldstein clown shows who seem to think Orange Man is not only Bad, but the Baddest Thing Out There in the West. All while saying fuck all about things like Southport.
It would take a heart of stone to not laugh and cry.
So let’s get on to the latest set of things.
Firstly: There is no good way to interpret this. Either you are flat out lying in one of the classic “Twitter Leftist giving artificial anecdote” thing, or you actually have someone who in over their head that they think asking someone so blatantly dishonest, immature, and unaccomplished. Should such a being exist, they are to be pitied.
Secondly: Trump has a whole host of different behaviors. Are you talking about Trump when he quietly and solemnly went to military graveyards on his free time? Or Trump when he was in front of a camera ragging on Zelenskyy (and even then when during the failed photo op summit or after)?
This is why there’s no substitute for having a better overview of the behavior in question. Even truly awful people can be capable of “good behavior” (see: the difference between Yoritomo and Yoshitsune upon entering Heian-kyo/Kyoto in the Tales of the Genji).
Thirdly: There are far worse role models than Trump for the next generation. Far worse. And indeed Trump’s diligence in work, endurance under great pressure, and personal generosity are things to be emulated in much the same way as his egotism, pettiness, and infidelity are not.
The pot calls the kettle black. In your misbegotten portrayals here, you have shown a far greater disregard for truth than Trump has, compounded by an egregious disregard for conservative principles and basic legal and constitutional ones, as we will see here.
Trump is a braggart, exaggerator, and liar, and those are far from the most appealing facets of him, especially as while many of his lies or exaggeration are either of little effect or used tactically to draw the enemy into mistakes (such as the transsexual mice thing), many others are not (such as the “started the war” BS to Zelenskyy said in anger, or the cloying “I don’t think (George Washington) did (own slaves)” when talking about the very real removal of the Founders from public life).
But he is vastly less egregious and hurtful in those cases than not only his leftist opponents such as Biden, Obama, and Clinton, but that of many supposedly more “respectable” “conservative” opponents like Haley (who I previously liked) or McMullin.
He also has been subject to vastly greater disregard for the truth weaponized than he has. Trump has shown vastly less interest in imprisoning his political enemies (even when he has legal justification to do so, such as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden) than his political enemies have shown in imprisoning him, often on blatantly bullshit metrics like creating a “novel” (read; nonexistent) “theory” f a case where what would normally be unprosecutable out-of-statute-of-limitations misdemeanors into felonies.
Moreover, I would far more favorably compare his regard to the truth than just about any European leader, “conservative” or otherwise. Or do you really wish me to go over the likes of Farage and Johnson and Mutti Merkel?
So like Obama but more sincere and less polished?
It’s an unfortunate necessity in an atmosphere where endemic, hegemonic left wing control of the media is a known factor and nice guys tend to struggle.
I don’t have to like it, but it gets much better and truer results than trying to lose in a genteel fashion.
One of his pettier, more indiscriminate, and less honorable traits (which is saying something), but also endemic to politicians of his age, on both sides of the Atlantic. Again, kindly compare how Nigel Farage or David Cameron have treated loyal members of their party to how Trump has treated outright turncoats.
Let’s also not kid ourselves about the belittling going both ways, or even being outright demonization. I have objected to his conduct in many cases like with Cruz and Zelenskyy, but in several others such as with Obama, Clinton, McMullin, Mattis, and a host of others he has been more generous than the other side.
Trump prioritized personal loyalty and self-interest less than any President since at a minimum Dubya was kicked out of the White House, and less than such Halycon idols as JFK. Obama and Biden engaged in much more flagrant and probably illegal loyalty tests, purges, and persecutions, made worse by outright using the organs of state to imprison lay political enemies in conditions worse than 9/11 Plotters suffered.
And the fact that this was tied to personal loyalty and self-interest can be seen by things such as the very public declaration of a hold on a deal for the 9/11 masterminds during election season, only for that to be reversed there, the BLATANT and unethical (even if possibly legal) blanket pardons going for years, and the dropping of multiple voter intimidation and terrorist cases against the likes of AntifA.
But God Forbid Trump attempt to ensure basic legal accountability to prevent people like Milley from illegally informing the PRC of classified military intelligence.
Hence why I phrased my prior statement, and why I pity whoever was foolish enough to do so if they exist. Stranger things have certainly happened and will certainly happen again. But your credibility is in deficit here, as I’ve pointed out.
Which I would believe, and is similar here. Of course the irony is we often overlook many of the flaws in our role models, especially given the very blatant at the time stage managing (for instance, FDR having his infirmities covered up by the press and Attlee’s disastrously rationing continuation).
Again, stranger things have happened, but I hope it is very clear why the reaction of most of us is “pics or it didn’t happen.”
In any case, on the subject of role models you’ll probably want to compare a lot of the issues you’ve listed about Trump with those of say Churchill or Monty or Attlee.
And you wonder why you have a credibility deficit.
The United States saw politicized purges of the military and government at the hands of Obama and Biden, unadulterated blood libel (reading the attempts by left wing hacks in uniform and academia to try and square the circle of “Bush Lied about Iraq” with what they had to admit about the ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda as well as the actions and statements of many of their doyens on the matter makes for morbidly amusing – if enraging – reading as they tried to hang their hats on Saddam’s admittedly tense relations with AQ and other Sunni Jihadis and the tendency of the Iraqi Baathists to funnel resources through one-or-two-steps-removed cutouts or vassals of Al Qaeda such as Al Shabaab to talk about there being “no direct link” between AQ and Saddam, while also ignoring strong circumstantial evidence to the contrary like luxury treatment of AQ, Taliban, and associated VIPs like Zarqawi getting luxury medical treatment in Baghdad in the aftermath of the NATO invasion of Afghanistan). Literal riots and arson were allowed to go unpunished or barely punished, while our borders overflowed and the likes of Garland spent vast resources hunting down people that attended January 6 peacefully or lawfully lodging complaints about school policy.
While we’re on the subject of lies, one thing I do hold against Trump was his failure to pursue and follow through with “Lock Her Up” in the first term regarding Hillary Clinton. But his opponents sure as hell made sure to lock up and worse. Nor is this in any way unique to Britain. For whatever your opinions of Robinson/Yaxley-Lennon, the FACT that he is being treated more heinously and strictly than the “Welsh”-Rwandan possible Jihadist terrorist and certain Totalitarian Violence Fetishist mass murderer Rudakubana is an outrage, and sadly far from the only one in your benighted islands.
All while we are supposed to uncritically accept the vote returns of politicized, machine dominated sewers like Milwaukee (which had the dubious distinction of turning in literally IMPOSSIBLE voter returns in several wards with more than 100% turnout, which was then downgraded to “merely” the PRACTICALLY impossible, with theoretically-possible but completely uncharacteristic voter turnouts that would have us pretend the city dwellers voted at Italianesque rates while the rest of the state had people vote at Portuguese rates, violating every possible warning sign for fraud in accounting imaginable and leading to results worse than those that triggered the Orange Revolution in Ukraine).
And this is one thing where Trump is a very worthy role model. He fights and does not allow blatant injustice to be done to him or to his followers or those deemed collateral damage. He does not always fight well, or for the right causes, but fight he does. And if we had elected a Cameron, a Johnson, or a Farage to office our borders would have not been shored up and political prisoners (whether the outright innocent or those guilty of having whatever justified punishment they deserved corrupted by reversible, corrupt persecutions or utterly disproportionate and inhumane punishments) would still be locked up.
The fact that you think it is in any way an “obvious lie” that Trump said he won the 2020 election speaks volumes about your bias, lack of awareness, and ignorance. I’ll be honest and say I think he went too far in that (if only due to optics). But believing he did not win the 2020 election involves uncritically believing corrupt jurisdictions like Milwaukee, with voter security that was horribly inadequate and inferior to many third world countries.
Moreover, the persistent stonewalling and destruction of evidence does not engender confidence. Nor does the blatantly unequal treatment with Al Gore and his lawyers continuing Florida litigation in 2000 far after any legal or ethical justification, complete with advocating for blatantly contradictory standards of counting from one precinct to another in an attempt to gain the most ballots because no one standard would allow him to win. Until the Supremes finally rejected this.
And yet the idea that Bush “stole” 2000 and that Al Gore was the rightful President has remained as at best an eccentricity and at worst a deadly earnest conspiracy theory on the mainstream in the left.
Why on Earth you think any conservative movement or party on Earth – or any other movement or party – should tolerate such blatantly unequal, unfair double standards is beyond me.
Agreed, but that is sadly common for many. However, he has also done far more to try and shore up US domestic economic resilience and to clean the corruption out of the bureaucracy than most. To say nothing of enforcing voter integrity laws and the immigration laws.
Fair enough, but then we will respond in kind. And feel free to call you out when and if we feel you are not being sincere.
For whatever our differences I guess that is one thing we share in common.
Fair enough, and indeed it is. I fear for the Dead Internet. But I digress.
In any case, I encourage you to look up the Motor Voter law and the concerns about voter fraud tied to it. And ask yourself how statistically probable it is that Biden won the most votes of any US Presidential candidate in history, but they were concentrated in such few bellwether states in contrast to the general loss of Dem voter share, especially among traditional coalition members like non-white males.
back at the ranch
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2025/03/26/l-a-council-furious-only-4-building-permits-while-hagerty-paid-10-million/
FDR having his infirmities covered up by the press
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I seem to recall this meme got started in the magazine press ca. 1982. Rank-and-file members of the public (e.g. my mother, who was 14 when Roosevelt died) were perfectly aware he was disabled. See, for example Ron Nessen’s crack in 1978 about one of Jimmy Carter’s campaign appearances (“He did everything to evoke the founder of the New Deal coalition other than roll out in a wheelchair smoking a cigarette in a long holder”); Mr. Nessen was born in 1934. The March of Dimes was founded in 1938, btw.
@Art Deco:Rank-and-file members of the public (e.g. my mother, who was 14 when Roosevelt died) were perfectly aware he was disabled.
My great aunt, who was about 30 when he died, was not aware until a friend of hers who had seen him in a public appearance told her, and she did not believe her friend.
Certainly photographs of him were staged to give the impression he was not confined to a wheelchair, often with someone strategically standing next to him to whom he would cling.
Certainly photographs of him were staged to give the impression he was not confined to a wheelchair, often with someone strategically standing next to him.
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He was capable of standing with the aid of leg braces, just not perambulating around much.
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My great aunt, who was about 30 when he died, was not aware until a friend of hers who had seen him in a public appearance told her.
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Don’t know how she missed the founding of the March of Dimes.
@Art Deco:Don’t know how she missed the founding of the March of Dimes.
Now there’s no need to snark about my great-aunt. You have an anecdote, I have an anecdote, that’s why “anecdotal evidence” is not very conclusive.
There is a big difference between knowing that Roosevelt had had polio (as many people had in those days, though I guess the experts have decided since that this wasn’t what Roosevelt had) and knowing that he was unable to walk or stand unaided.
I think the public knew that Roosevelt had had polio. That he was unable to walk or stand unaided was kept from the public. Two different things, you see.
@ David Clayton > “Only if deliberately written to sound like a slightly eccentric human with a blog-commentariat style. But that would require high-level prompting and probably editing. There’s a naturalness to the syntax and social referencing that strongly suggests a human with time on their hands and opinions to share.”
Okay, ya got me, ChatGPT.
But make that a “very carefully cultivated blog-commentariat style” and “way too much time on her hands.”
As for having opinions – my kids threaten to engrave my tombstone with the warning: “Don’t get her started.”