So, are they preparing Joe’s retirement dinner?

The New Neo Posted on by

It would appear so, from the number of at least slightly negative articles that have been written lately about Biden. For example, as Steven Hayward of Powerline points out:

First, Maureen Dowd, the weather wane of respectable centrist feminist opinion at the New York Times, delivers a well-deserved scolding for Joe Biden’s directive to make his son Hunter’s love child with a stripper into a non-person: “The president’s cold shoulder — and heart — is counter to every message he has sent for decades, and it’s out of sync with the America he wants to continue to lead.”

There’s also an Axios piece that reveals the deep dark secret [sic] that Joe Biden is not the genial avuncular guy of the press’s propaganda:

Behind closed doors, Biden has such a quick-trigger temper that some aides try to avoid meeting alone with him. Some take a colleague, almost as a shield against a solo blast.

The president’s admonitions include: “God dammit, how the f**k don’t you know this?!,” “Don’t f**king bullsh*t me!” and “Get the f**k out of here!” — according to current and former Biden aides who have witnessed and been on the receiving end of such outbursts. . . Senior and lower-level aides alike can be in Biden’s line of fire. “No one is safe,” said one administration official.

The puzzlement is not that the press has ignored this till now – they ignore what they believe is in the interest of the left to ignore – but how even the most gullible reader of the MSM could have failed to see it for him or herself. There is nothing about Joe Biden that telegraphs “nice” to me – and I felt that even back when I was a Democrat, as did most Americans who failed to support him in various presidential bids over the years until 2020, COVID, the press, and Trump Derangement Syndrome apparently helped many to change their minds. Or perhaps they forget, or never knew, or weren’t paying attention. At any rate, the myth of Joe’s congeniality was always a hard sell.

So the betting is on for when Joe will be ushered gently out the door. It’s been on for a long time, pretty much since he took office or even before. Originally, many people thought he’d be pushed out by June of 2021. That didn’t happen. Then the theory was that they would wait till he’d served for two years, so that Kamala could get two and a half terms out of it. But she turned out to be a dud, and so here it is two and a half years later and Joe is still president.

We can argue about how active he is in his own administration, but I have long been of the opinion that although he’s being manipulated somewhat by others, he’s more in charge than most people on the right believe. I also think he’s stubborn and still highly ambitious and prideful about himself, and won’t be pushed aside easily. And then there’s the conundrum of what to do about Kamala. I don’t think that problem has yet been solved, and until it is I think Joe is staying.

One thought that strikes me – and not for the first time – is how supremely insincere all the left’s whining about the advanced age of presidents and candidates was. Remember when Reagan was too old? And McCain, for goodness sake? But in 2020 they showed no hesitation to run a man who would be 82 before his first term was up, if he stayed in office till the end. Hypocrisy is too weak a word for it.

The lost art of épaulement

The New Neo Posted on by

Alla Shelest was virtually unknown in the West, but she was an eminent dancer in the USSR during the 30s, 40s, and 50s. Here she is trying to teach a younger dancer what’s known as épaulement, which is “the nuanced positioning of the head, shoulders, and neck” which makes dancing “better, richer, and more artistic.” Shelest’s efforts here to convey her own knowledge are somewhat in vain. And this is a while back; today’s dancers tend to be even more deficient in épaulement. In this video, it is the older yet luminous Shelest to whom the viewer’s eyes are drawn rather than to the soloist she’s coaching.

Those government agents in the crowd on January 6th

The New Neo Posted on by

Tucker Carlson has said that, when he interviewed Steven Sund, who was the chief of the Capitol Police on that January 6th, Sund stated that on January 6th the crowd “was filled with federal agents.”

We’ve pretty much known that for quite some time, haven’t we? But the questions I have about it are: what does “filled with” mean? And how involved were the agents in inciting the crowd?

We already know, from information that came out during the Proud Boys trial, that there was quite a bit of involvement with and encouragement of that particular group. But is that just the tip of a large iceberg? And if so, how large?

There is no question that the answers to these questions are known by the government. There is also little question in my mind that we will never learn the answers. And yet those answers are incredibly important.

I also believe that, were we to somehow discover that the entire thing was heavily orchestrated by the FBI and/or other government agencies, and that most of the incitement that day was at their hands, then the vast majority of Democrats would deny it or justify it in some way. That’s how cynical I’ve become about things like this.

And then there’s Wiki

The New Neo Posted on by

I often use Wiki for reference, although I’m aware that it’s better for some things than for others. It’s pretty good on non-political topics, and some historical events. It’s an easy shortcut to getting the gist of a topic, and it’s mostly an amalgam of quotes from other sources, which can be found in the bibliography for each entry. For politicians, it’s especially handy for finding out birthdays and ages, and what years the person held certain offices.

But it has a decidedly leftist cast when it enters into any sort of editorializing on some of its entries, in particular modern-day pundits and politicians. In line with today’s earlier post featuring a James Lindsay video on Gramsci, I decided to look up Lindsay’s Wiki page. I’ve listened to many of Lindsay’s videos, and I ordinarily find them comprehensive and informative. Yes, he has a point of view, but it seems fairly grounded in reality and in line with my own observations. I wouldn’t doubt that he’s said a line or two with which I might disagree, but I don’t often hear anything like that from him.

And yet on Lindsay’s Wiki page he is discounted as a “conspiracy theorist” right in the very first sentence: “James Stephen Lindsay (born June 8, 1979, known professionally as James A. Lindsay), is an American author, cultural critic, mathematician and conspiracy theorist.” I guess it’s a case of nothing to see here; move along.

And what are his supposed conspiracy theories, according to the extremely objective folks at Wiki? Why, this sort of thing:

(1) “He is a proponent of the right-wing LGBT grooming conspiracy theory and has been credited as one of several public figures responsible for popularizing ‘groomer’ as a slur directed at LGBTQ educators and activists by members of the political right.”

I happen to have heard Lindsay expound on that, and I recall his explanation being that those who push early sex education in public schools go way beyond the sort of sex education that most people would support: the dangers of STDs and that sort of thing. Now, says Lindsay, they are getting very explicit about sex practices, encouraging children to talk about their own sexuality and to acknowledge their own sexual needs, and pushing hard on transgender ideology at younger and younger ages. Lindsay has explained that his use of the word “groomer” is not meant to accuse them of actively molesting young children, but to say that getting very young children accustomed to talking to strangers about sex is to “groom” them in ways that will make them more susceptible to actual molesters, and also to undermine whatever their parents might have to say on the subject.

Here’s a quote from Lindsay:

They are bringing up sexual topics with children, normalizing discussions of sex with children, telling children to hide it from their parents. These are all behaviors that if it was predatory pedophiles, we would immediately apply the word ‘groomer,’ but they’re doing it for cult purposes, using the same subjects….

The goal is to destabilize people. The goal is to destabilize these kids. It’s to make them unsure of their identity, to put them in a position where there’s going to be conflict with their family, where there’s going to be conflict with their faith. Many will withdraw from family and faith. And the reason that they’re using this technique is because they know it works…

Once those seeds of doubt are planted in a potential target, Lindsay said, the next step is to have them recite humiliating in-group creeds, such as stating their “preferred” personal pronouns or citing land acknowledgements, stating that the land Americans live on was stolen from Native Americans.

(2) According to Wiki, Linday supposedly said that if CRT goes much further there will be a genocide of white people. However, Wiki doesn’t provide the actual quote; it just mentions one of his critics – Claire Lehmann – and what she said about what Lindsay said. I believe I’ve located Lindsay’s quote, which is here:

I said that the Woke ideology contains the seed of a genocide. The evidence for that is actually overwhelming. Perhaps Claire doesn’t know what seeds are or how they work.

(3) Another example Wiki provides of Lindsay’s conspiracy theories is this:

Lindsay has promoted the far-right Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, which alleges a concerted effort by Marxist critical theorists to infiltrate academic and cultural institutions in order to destroy Western civilization. The theory has been wholly rejected by mainstream scholars…

Why, that does it! The “mainstream scholars” – many of whom are probably on the left – have rejected it! So we should ignore the evidence right before our eyes, because of course it isn’t happening at all.

Wiki adds that this theory “has been characterized as antisemitic by the Southern Poverty Law Center and others.” So if that other bastion of objective analysis, the SPLC, has declared something to be antisemitic, that’s all ye need to know.

The sad thing is that, if I were to recommend Lindsay’s work to most people I know, and they looked Lindsay up, they would probably discount anything he said as being wild crazy conspiracy stuff. That’s the aim of a Wiki entry like that, and Lindsay is hardly alone. And the SPLC knows exactly what it’s doing to further the leftist line.

James Lindsay on Gramsci

The New Neo Posted on by

I highly recommend this video for anyone who wonders how we got to our current situation vis a vis the left. Answer: it was not an accident.

As with all videos that are basically talks, if you get impatient – as I often do – I suggest listening to the audio speeded up somewhat. If you click on “settings” you will see various choices for that:

Progress report on Gerard’s book

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve finally done some actual work on Gerard’s book – using the Amazon self-publishing platform, which my research points to as the most user-friendly. However, there’s still a steep and rather tedious learning curve there, and so I’m nowhere near finished although I have about a third of the content up. Even once all the content is there, I’ll need to do a lot of formatting and fine-tuning.

The current plan is to offer an e-book version and a hard copy print-on-demand version. The latter will, of course, be somewhat more expensive than the former. The book will probably contain between twenty and thirty of Gerard’s long-form mostly non-political essays, with pictures.

I can’t say when it will be ready, but at least I’m out of the starting gate.

They sabotaged Trump from the start and bragged about it openly

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I wrote a post in September of 2019 about how people in the self-styled heroic “Resistance” against Trump planned it out before he’d done anything as president, and bragged openly about that fact. I’ve decided to repeat the post now, just as a reminder of that brazen boldness and that lack of fear of consequences. One thing you can say about the left is that they know how to plan ahead and to coordinate and execute those plans.]

Right after the 2016 election, I read some articles describing people in government who had decided to stay put and secretly sabotage Trump. These articles weren’t exposes written by the right; they were proud confessions from the left, part of the righteous Resistance.

We are seeing the fruit of that today.

I hadn’t noted the links to any of those articles at the time, so recently I got curious to see whether I could find one. Here’s an excerpt from one typical article of the type, published in Vanity Fair on February 1, 2017, twelve days after Trump’s inauguration [emphasis mine]:

Others, however, view resistance as a part of the job. “Policy dissent is in our culture,” one diplomat in Africa, who signed the letter circulating among foreign diplomats, told The New York Times. “We even have awards for it,” this person added, in reference to the State Department’s “Constructive Dissent” award. One Justice Department employee told the Post, “You’re going to see the bureaucrats using time to their advantage,” and added that “people here will resist and push back against orders they find unconscionable,” by whistle-blowing, leaking to the press, and lodging internal complaints. Others are staying in contact with officials appointed by President Obama to learn more about how they can undermine Trump’s agenda and attending workshops on how to effectively engage in civil disobedience, the Post reports.

Let me emphasize that again: whistle-blowing, leaking to the press, and lodging internal complains.

And then we have this, from the same article [emphasis added]:

When asked how the opposition emerging at this stage compares to past administrations, Tom Malinow­ski, who served as Obama’s assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, sarcastically told the Post, “Is it unusual? There’s nothing unusual about the entire national security bureaucracy of the United States feeling like their commander in chief is a threat to U.S. national security. That happens all the time. It’s totally usual. Nothing to worry about.”

The “nothing unusual” part was sarcasm, of course. But the rest was deadly serious. The plan was in place from the start, and it’s not some wild conspiracy-mongering to say so. This is a clandestine conspiracy, but not a completely secret one in the sense that we were told about its general thrust in advance by the proud perpetrators themselves. An interesting detail from those quotes is that “Obama officials” were apparently in charge of orchestrating this.

Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist also noticed the trend back in the beginning. She wrote the following in an article from January 17, 2017. That’s a few days before the inauguration:

Dwight Eisenhower warned that if we didn’t stay vigilant, the military-industrial complex would start creeping into politics with pernicious motives all its own. The intelligence community’s war of leaks against Trump before he’s even taken office is just the latest questionably politicized action in the decades since Eisenhower’s farewell address. And it’s safe to say that the intelligence community pushing unproven and absurd allegations about a president-elect’s sexual perversions is probably way worse than anything Ike imagined.

In order to understand how we got to this perilous place and get a handle on what’s going on, it’s worth taking a closer look at the motives and allegations of political operatives in intelligence agencies, as well as the basic timeline of allegations of Russian electoral interference in the last few months. Far from discrediting Trump, it paints a worrisome portrait of the deep state gone rogue, desperate to stop a man who, whatever his considerable flaws, is an outsider to Washington.

She then goes into a series of warnings issued to Trump to beware of ruffling the feathers of the intelligence community. The most famous one, with which you might be familiar, was issued by Chuck Schumer:

…President-elect Donald Trump is “being really dumb” by taking on the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia’s cyber activities.

“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

Remember, this was before Trump was inaugurated.

More:

Presidential historian Timothy Naftali said on a CNN panel that Trump should stay “silent” lest harmful information be released against him.

NeverTrumper David Frum wrote a tweet that said, “CIA message to Trump: you mess with us, get ready for a leakstorm of Biblical proportions.”

The rest of Hemingway’s article is well worth reading, despite its age. Or maybe because of its age. It’s a reminder of how many things happened very early in the game that are congruent with and basically telegraphed what would happen with Russiagate and now Whistleblowergate.

[ADDENDUM: Not to mention the MAL documents case.]

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Heather Mac Donald talks about some of the issues she covers in her latest book on equity versus merit, and she certainly doesn’t pull a single punch:

(2) Does anyone on earth think the White House doesn’t know who left the cocaine baggie lying around? Questions from Tom Cotton, in a letter to the head of the Secret Service:

1. Who has access to the White House complex without passing through any security screening? Please provide a complete list of all such individuals.
2. Who has access to the White House complex while subject to lesser security screening requirements than the most complete screening required of individuals accessing the West Wing? Please provide a complete list of all such individuals, along with a description of the lesser screening requirements and the reasons such individuals are not subject to complete screening.
3. The Secret Service’s Annual Report for FY2022 notes that the Secret Service’s Personnel Screening K-9 program screens approximately 10 million “visitors to the exterior of The White House each year.” How many visitors to the interior of the White House are screened by the Secret Service’s K-9s each year? Please provide a description of the circumstances under which the Secret Service chooses not to use K-9 screening for West Wing visitors.
4. In the past five years, how often has the Secret Service encountered illegal drugs at the White House complex? How often were these drugs detected during security screenings, and how often were these drugs encountered inside secure areas?
5. Section 3056A of Title 18, U.S. Code, provides members of the United States Secret Service Uniformed Division with the authority to “make arrests without warrant for any offense against the United States committed in their presence, or for any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States if they have reasonable grounds to believe that the person to be arrested has committed or is committing such felony.” Illegally possessing cocaine is a crime under federal law. If the Secret Service discovers the identity of the individual who brought illicit cocaine into the White House complex, will they make an arrest under this provision?
6. How often does the Secret Service audit its security procedures for the White House complex and adjust those procedures to correct potential flaws? Please provide details regarding the most recent complete audit, including whether it was conducted by the Secret Service or another entity.

Good luck with ever getting answers.

(3) Right before Hunter Biden got his sweetheart deal from the prosecutors, the entire prosecution team was switched. The earlier team was the one that whistleblowers later reported on.

(4) Ben and Jerry’s wants Mount Rushmore given back to the native Americans. Which ones, though?:

According to West, one reason so much Mexican land was there for the taking during the Mexican-American War was it had been depopulated by constant Native American raiding.

Is it too much for Ben & Jerry’s to spare a thought for the Mexicans killed, captured or dispossessed by merciless Native American warriors?

As for the Lakota, they didn’t take control of territory to the west through gentle persuasion.

They gained control of the Black Hills in the late 18th century by expelling the prior occupants.

The history here doesn’t neatly line up with the Ben & Jerry’s call for “dismantling white supremacy and systems of oppression and ensuring that Indigenous people can again govern the land their communities called home for thousands of years.”

Which indigenous people?

And which lands?

(5) Miranda Devine covers the Gal Luft description of more Biden corruption.

(6) Read today’s column from Ammo Grrrll. You’ll be glad you did.

Turley and Greenwald on government-driven censorship

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s Turley:

The question is, when will the evidence of systemic censorship force Democrats in Congress to drop their unified opposition to any investigation of this unprecedented partnership of government, corporate and academic interests? That triumvirate arguably has created the most extensive censorship system we have ever seen.

I believe I can answer that question: never – unless, of course, the right manages some day to grab the reins and do the same thing to the left. Oh, then you would hear the Democrats scream in protest.

Turley sounds a cautionary note here:

The injunction in this case is likely to face tough scrutiny and skepticism on appeal. [Judge] Doughty was previously rebuked by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit when it blocked his order to compel former White House press secretary Jen Psaki to testify in the case.

Here’s an exchange from Turley’s previous House testimony:

The left was once the target of censorship and blacklisting during the Red Scare. Today, they have literally adopted the arguments used to target liberals and socialists.

In my hearing, Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) quoted from the 1919 decision in Schenck v. United States to justify censoring those with opposing views. When I pointed out that he was quoting from a case justifying the arrest of socialists due to their political views during the Red Scare, Goldman shot back that “we don’t need a law class here.”

Nor do they want one. What they want is compliant leftist judges, and there certainly are plenty of them.

Glenn Greenwald also has something to say. He points out that the administration and its defenders first denied that they censored and said those who accused them of it were liars, and then – when they unable to hide it anymore because of the Twitter files and other definitive proof – they claimed that their their censorship efforts were both necessary and good.

ADDENDUM:

While we’re on the subject of Turley, he has some questions for Democrats – questions the left will never answer:

Nonetheless, try a little exercise. Ask yourself if conservatives derided the Court as illegitimate over Roe v Wade. Or was it just “wrong”? Ask yourself if, when the Court opened a small window to racial preferences two decades ago, whether conservatives derided the Court as “abnormal.” Perhaps they did, but we just don’t read those newspapers. Let us know.

Ask yourself a question: When conservatives vote together, why are they tyrants, “unrestrained by public opinion”? But when liberals vote together (which they have done this entire term), they are simply following the law?

And another question: Per the NYT, the Tenth Circuit, et al, an observant Christian web designer should be legally barred from saying no to making a same-sex wedding site. Can a Jewish designer say no to making a Neo-Nazi site? How about a Black designer saying no to a KKK site?

In fact, Chief Justice John Roberts is better known for upholding years of judicial precedent than for wrenching the Court in a conservative direction, as so many media outlets argue.

To the left, the ratchet is supposed to only go one way: leftward. Everything else is illegitmate. You know; the arc of history and all that.