The liberals in the West need to face the reality that not only does the world primarily run on fossil fuels, but energy has also become a powerful weapon in this new Cold War. The West cannot win this new Cold War with its self-defeating anti-carbon energy policies.

a few things were obvious about Trump as a candidate and president.

First, he didn’t have strong political beliefs. Many, including one former writer here a RedState, used to get what seemed to be sexual gratification from calling Trump a “New York liberal.” But, as a salesman, he knew what was important to those who voted for them. To this day, I’m not terribly sure what Trump believes, but I’m also sure that it doesn’t matter.

Second, he didn’t hold Americans in “fly over country” in contempt. I think Trump connected with conservative Americans in a way that no candidate since Ronald Reagan has managed to do because he wasn’t laughing at us to his rich liberal buddies at cocktail parties.

Third, in the words of my Old Man, “ya dance with them what brung ya.” When Trump was sworn in, he had a choice to make. He could stay true to the people who voted for him or yield to the siren call of Washington’s social life. In a singular act of political courage, he chose loyalty to his supporters.

One of those signs of loyalty was Trump’s overt embrace of the Pro-Life Movement. I’m not sure that Trump had ever spent ten consecutive seconds thinking about the issue of abortion. From his life and lifestyle, I’d not be surprised to find that he didn’t have a personal problem with this horrific practice. Unlike President George W. Bush, whom I admired, Trump was not ashamed of us. President Trump became the first president to personally appear at the March for Life rally since its inception in 1974. Neither Reagan nor Bush, all of whom talked big talk about being pro-life, ever made an appearance, but a New York City playboy cared enough to show up. When it came time to appoint justices, Trump delivered three whose records indicated they were pro-life and conservative.

Unsurprisingly, people who made a career out of being “Never Trump” are trying to rewrite history to take credit for something that happened despite their best efforts. //

A pause here for a brief fact check. The famous lists of possible Supreme Court nominees were developed inside the Trump White House by a team led by Don McGahn. The Federalist Society executive vice president Leonard Leo was an adviser. The selections were not by any stretch of the imagination “delegated.” In fact, it was Conservative, Inc. insiders who howled as loudly as the Washington Post editorial board about how the proposed justices would scare moderate voters. //

Sure, George W. Bush gave us Samuel Alito. But, do you know who else he gave us? John Roberts. Roberts is the guy whose concurrence in Dobbs tells the majority that included all three Trump-appointed justices that they were completely wrong in their decision. In a weird way, we are lucky to have John Roberts. We were saved from much worse because Bush couldn’t find enough inbred senators willing to foist Harriet Miers off on us. I agree that Clarence Thomas is a treasure. But do you know who else George H. W. Bush put on the bench? David Souter. Souter wrote the opinion in Casey that sought to forever lock in abortion as a Constitutional right. He voted with the majority in the Lawrence vs. Texas decision that changed or placid “slouching towards Gomorrah” posture into the Usain Bolt-style sprint that put us on the glide path to codifying a cheap simulacrum of actual marriage as the law of the land. //

The Gospel Matthew (21:28-32) contains the Parable of the Two Sons. The story is that a father asks his two sons to go work in the vineyard. One tells his father “no,” but then relents and goes off to work. The other tells his father, “yes,’ and doesn’t go. The question is, who actually did their father’s will? I’m not trying to make a theological argument defending Trump; I am merely using this well-known (at least I hope) Bible reading as a point of departure for a comparison. Trump spent his entire life never giving much thought to governance. Yet once he was president, he governed more conservatively than any president in the past 20 years. Not only on Life but the economy, neutering Iran, the Abraham Accords, and, I’d contend, bullying the freeloaders in NATO into starting to meet their obligations. In essence, he said “no” at first but ended up doing the hard work in the vineyard.

On the other hand, we had “conservatives” who were elected, pledging to defend life. When it came down to nut-cutting time, they still agreed to fund Planned Parenthood, ignore the Pro-Life Movement outside of election year photo-ops, and appointed judges who, to this day, continue to support abortion and anything else the administrative state desires. They are the ones who said “yes,” and decided they liked being invited to the cool parties and maybe moving out of the conservative punditry ghetto more than fighting for causes. So who was actually the more conservative?

Donald Trump won in 2016. He won because he likes to win and because he knows if you aren’t a winner, you are the other thing…that would be a loser. //

There is a place inside the conservative tent for thinkers as well as for doers. What there isn’t a place for are people who fought tooth and nail to keep abortion legal by supporting Hillary Clinton…and Joe Biden…and then claim the Dobbs victory for themselves and their fellow travelers because they had wonderful thoughts and wrote erudite articles.

Remember all these catastrophes are self-induced. They are choices, not fate. The U.S. has the largest combined gas, coal, and oil deposits in the world. It possesses the know-how to build the safest pipelines and to ensure the cleanest energy development on the planet.

Inflation was a deliberate Biden choice. For short-term political advantage, he kept printing trillions of dollars, incentivizing labor nonparticipation, and keeping interest rates at historical lows—at a time of pent-up global demand.

The administration wanted no border. Only that way can politicized, impoverished immigrants repay left-wing undermining of the entire legal immigration system with their fealty at the ballot box.

Once esoteric, crack-pot academic theories—“modern monetary theory,” critical legal theory, critical race theory—now dominate policymaking in the Biden administration.

The common denominator in all of this is ideology overruling empiricism, common sense, and pragmatism. Ruling elites would rather be politically correct failures and unpopular than politically incorrect, successful, and popular.

Is that not the tired story of left-wing revolutionaries from 18th-century France to early 20th-century Russia to the contemporary disasters in Cuba and Venezuela?

The American people reject the calamitous policies of 2021-2022. Yet the radical cadres surrounding a cognitively inert Biden still push them through by executive orders, bureaucratic directives, and deliberate Cabinet nonperformance.

Why? The left has no confidence either in constitutional government or common sense.

So as the public pushes back, expect at the ground level more doxxing, cancel culture, deplatforming, ministries of disinformation, swarming the private homes of officials they target for bullying, and likely violent demonstrations in our streets this summer.

According to a recently released poll, nearly half of male Democrats under the age of 50 (44 %) say it’s acceptable to assassinate a politician “who is harming the country or our democracy,” the highest percentage of any age/gender/party demographic.

The poll, which was conducted by Tulchin Research for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), also found that nearly a third of younger Democrat women and younger Republican men agreed with the statement, as did 40% of younger Republican women.

https://www.splcenter.org/news/2022/06/01/poll-finds-support-great-replacement-hard-right-ideas#methodology

Elon Musk @elonmusk
Who do you trust less? Real question.
Politicians 75.7%
Billionaires 24.3%
3,399,953 votes
·
Final results
7:54 PM · May 26, 2022

Elon Musk @elonmusk
Replying to @elonmusk
.@aoc I dare you to run the same poll with your followers
8:01 PM · May 26, 2022

David Weissman @davidmweissman
Let's prove how phony the right’s ridiculous polls are by doing one of our own. Who do you trust more @elonmusk @AOC
Elon Musk 81.2%
AOC 18.8%
375,365 votes
·
Final results
6:28 PM · May 27, 2022

David Weissman @davidmweissman
Replying to @davidmweissman
Not sure how this poll flipped but I won’t delete it and will take the L.
11:19 PM · May 27, 2022

What Mook’s testimony laid bare is that Hilary was fully aware of Mook’s dirty tricks and media plants and approved of them. Nonetheless, to this day, Hillary has continued her media assault on facts, claiming for the better part of five years that Trump was a Putin cat’s paw and an agent of Russia. Russia, according to Hillary, ruined her run for president and it’s that lie she will take to her grave — or prison. Whichever comes first.

Durham’s prosecutors claim Sussmann passed along the same information about Trump and Alfa Bank to the FBI in September 2016 at the behest of the Clinton campaign. Sussmann denies that, claiming he went to the FBI as a private citizen. Sussmann’s defense is akin to a child claiming he didn’t eat the cookies even with crumbs all over his face and hands. Equally, Mook claiming he didn’t know or suspect that Sussmann was, in fact, acting for or on behalf of the campaign, is suspect at best. //

From my perspective, this whole affair is far worse than Watergate. Dozens of politically motivated actors orchestrated and planned an obvious string of lies to bury Donald Trump. Watergate was a bunch of numbskulls LOOKING for dirt, not making it up. A coordinated effort to plant false information with the press and the FBI is a little worse in my mind.

“When the soul enters the body, when life begins—I don’t have certainty on that,” he said. “And yet, you look around society, people seem to have a lot of certainty about that, and then total confusion as to how to deal with people with psychosis. They’ve got it completely upside down.” It boggled his mind that the other candidates running for governor were 100-percent certain about what they couldn’t know, and weirdly unsure about how to fix things that could be fixed.

“Politics should be a means to an end of a good society,” Shellenberger said. “They’re making it the end.” He was referring to the homeless activists who were his nemesis, but he could have been talking about the environmentalists or the pro-lifers in the desert. “Their real goal is control and moralizing and power. Mine is freedom, care, civilization.”

Taylor Lake
5 hours ago
"Lastly, that this judge actually ruled to allow this nonsense to continue is nuts, and given that he did, who knows how he’ll actually rule on the matter."
There's a saying, "Who Dares, Wins." I've heard it's the motto of the British SAS, but I don't know that for sure. What I do know is that the American Left has taken it to heart.

When politics is an alternate expression of war, anything goes. Throw anything and everything at your enemy, and see what sticks. The object is to win, not to win "pretty." Have no shame. Show no embarrassment.

"It worked, didn't it?"

• Harry Reid

Lawfare is just another weapon in political warfare. The Left knows this, and practices it. Conservatives still think that it's dirty pool, but then too many conservatives have been slow to understand that they are at war. Too slow. It has cost them a stolen election, and now we are witnessing assorted attempts to criminalize their participation in the political process and haul them before courts and "commissions." It's not about what's true, or even real. Just use every weapon at your disposal and see which ones work.

"I reject your facts."

• Nancy Pelosi

If holding views about the 2020 election meant a justice couldn’t decide legal issues arising from it, then all nine would have to recuse themselves.

How’s the old idiom go? When in Rome, do as the Romans?

The Democrat Party has been “symbolism over substance” for decades. While I’m not suggesting the Republican National Committee’s launch of a voter registration initiative at gas stations across the country amid a continuing sharp rise in gas prices comes anywhere close to a trick from the Democrat playbook, it is perfectly symbolic given the reality of untold millions of angry Americans.

What better place to launch a voter registration drive?

As reported by The Hill, a source said “the RNC will be holding several voter registration events across the country in the coming weeks.” They added that “[t]he first event took place in Arizona Saturday, where volunteers and staff registered Americans to vote from 1 p.m. – 3 p.m. local time.”

Ben Petersen, the communications director for Arizona’s RNC, told The Hill that gas stations are the best place to have conversations with Americans angry about the price at the pump.

In his new book, “The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism,” Matthew Continetti applies what scholars of all persuasions should do with American conservatism, treating it as a complex, contradictory movement, often at war between its populists and its intellectual elite wings. He pithily captures the liberal mindset with its refusal to treat conservatism as a serious intellectual force. //

“The Left sees conservatism as a long-running, berserk refusal to submit to the ministrations of liberal rule,” he writes.

He focuses less on what held the right together — the unifying issue of Cold War anti-communism until the Soviets imploded in 1991 — than on what tears them apart. Like any historian or pundit, he examines the past through the lens of the present. The election of Donald Trump with his “protectionism, immigration restrictionism, religiosity, and antipathy to foreign entanglements” was simply the latest skirmish between right-wing populism and intellectual conservatism. //

Continetti effectively documents this tug between conservative elites and conservative populists but does not really provide a way for them to come together. Without the “elites,” you don’t have articulated positions and “sweeping narratives” that inspire voters. Without the populists, you don’t have the true energy behind winning campaigns.

Until conservatives can reconcile the two the road ahead, even the fight against lightweights like Joe Biden will be rough.

Sen. Rick Scott recently did what no one else in the Republican Senate thought important: he released an agenda ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. Up to this point, Senate Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, appeared content to proudly run on no strategy at all, convinced that simply pointing at Democrats and shrieking about how bad they are will crown them victorious.

As a point of electoral politics, this is not completely irrational. Polling shows Democratic policy failures and broad cultural overreaches are driving voters to Republicans in record numbers.

But as I’ve written previously, a content-free campaign only gets you so far. In many cases, the voters now identifying with Republicans are non-traditional GOP voters. To get them to stick around—that is, to actually expand the base of the party while continuing to motivate traditional base voters—you have to tell them what you’re for, what you’re going to do. And then you have to go and do it.

Establishment politicians dislike agendas because they’re a measure of accountability. An agenda is a tangible reminder of what a majority said they were going to do. On the contrary, traditional establishment rhetoric routinely plays down expectations about what’s possible, makes vague hand gestures about “the long game” (usually undefined), and generally avoids anything that would force them to roll up their sleeves and attempt to legislate on the hard things—that is, what their base voters care about

May our unchanging concentration on our Savior at a time that makes many anxious be a testimony pointing to his sovereign grace. //

There’s a lot of panicked chatter about World War III lately. Twitter is awash in propaganda from both sides of the Russia-Ukraine border. Instagram is flooded with pro-Ukraine posts and profiles are painted with the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag.

NPR wants to make sure you know, amid the Russia-Ukraine conflict, how to self-care. Not to be outdone, Fox also has a primer on how to cope with the stress of news of war.

Many of those reactions aren’t bad. It’s good to celebrate stories of courage and to vocally support peace. It’s also good at times to walk away from the news cycle and be present in your own daily responsibilities.

But there is a real danger to thinking that you, as an American Christian who is not on the ground in Ukraine, can do the most good by getting sucked into the online informational meatgrinder. While there’s certainly nothing wrong with using a post or a hashtag to show support for suffering people, it would be a mistake to use such a contribution to pat ourselves on the back for “helping” — as many well-meaning Christians posted black squares on Instagram in 2020 that did little but alleviate their own sense of wanting to be able to say they did something.

Since winning her election back in November and then being sworn into office last month, Winsome Sears has been making her mark as Virginia’s first black female Lieutenant Governor, and Monday was no exception.

Whether it was via a prankster or it legitimately went missing, the gavel that is normally used to bring the State Senate in order was nowhere to be found. So Lt. Gov. Sears decided to improvise – courtesy of a high-heeled shoe.

As she did so, Sears uttered a quote which, like the shoe itself, is the stuff of legends.

“One shoe can change your life. Just ask Cinderella,” she stated, according to Washington Post reporter Laura Vozzella, who tweeted out the below image of the now-famous shoe:

Over half of states have rolled back public health powers during the pandemic, which experts say permanently weakens states’ abilities to protect their constituents’ health.

“Both the fundamental legal authorities of public health, as well as the people who are practicing, are being threatened in ways we’ve never seen before,” said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. He warned that even more legislative rollbacks would take place this year across the country, as well as court rulings limiting public health authorities.

This stripping of public health powers doesn’t just mean that unpopular covid restrictions will end, he said. These curbs often cripple public health’s ability to fight other scourges.

The potential irony of this decision is just too much to contemplate. Activist groups suing Alabama over a 30-year-old district map could potentially destroy the racial gerrymandering grift for the entire country.

Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie
.@SpeakerPelosi is seriously considering this person to serve as the chairwoman of the Transportation Committee.
0:45 / 0:45
10:43 AM · Jan 17, 2022

https://mobile.twitter.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1483102654100385797

Now, the video is from 2015. Roll Call reported it at the time as the “worst parking job ever” and “abandon all hope, ye who happen to park anywhere near geometrically challenged-motorist Eleanor Holmes Norton.” Now we should note that she later claimed to media that there was no damage to the other cars and the Capitol Police said no report had been filed about any damage. But yeesh, how do you park like that, to begin with, and then how do you leave the car that way? And what does that say about you if you do?

Can we talk about how this is a metaphor for the Democrats in general not knowing where they are going? And if this is how she was driving in 2015 when she was 77, what is she driving like now when she’s 84? Roll Call noted this wasn’t the only bad parking job that could be attributed to her, noting she allegedly blocked a handicap ramp with her car and then took off. A female meter/ticket person observed the incident but then did nothing, according to their sources.

Brad Slager - Incontinent On Another Continent
@MartiniShark
You heard zebras are running loose in the Maryland-D.C. area? Well, Rep. Elanore Holmes Norton has released a statement declaring she was not behind setting the animals free. She even claims to have an alibi.
This, of course, shoots her right to the top of the list of suspects.
2:53 PM · Sep 10, 2021

REPORTER: "Should members of congress and their spouses be banned from trading individual stocks while serving in congress?"

PELOSI: "No…We are a free market economy. They should be able to participate in that." pic.twitter.com/2SNqSCwFEU

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) December 15, 2021

Turns out that within a few days of that, Pelosi and her husband Paul bought millions in call options for Google, Salesforce, Roblox, and Disney stocks.

The Pelosi family’s trades this month include Google and Salesforce call options worth between $500,000 and $1 million each, as well as Roblox call options valued at between $100,000 and $250,000. The duo also bought up between $250,000 and $500,000 in calls for chipmaker Micron Technology and between $100,000 and $250,000 of Disney call options in disclosures that were earlier reported by Congresstrading.com.

Paul Pelosi runs Financial Leasing Services, a real estate and venture capital investment and consulting firm. In recent years he’s made big-money bets on companies his wife is supposed to regulate, including Amazon, Apple, and Google.

Jennifer Rubin, honorary Assistant Press Secretary to the Biden Administration, recently decided that we shouldn’t be focused on the case numbers for COVID-19 anymore and, instead, we need to focus on hospitalizations and deaths. This was reflected in Joe Biden’s admission of defeat again the virus, where he said there is no longer a “federal solution” to the pandemic.

Several folks in the media are slowly making this shift as they have realized that the omicron variant does not appear to discriminate between vaccinated and unvaccinated when it comes to infecting someone. The severity of the cases seems largely dependent on vaccination status, but in all likelihood, we’re going to see omicron become the dominant strain in the U.S. fairly quickly (if it isn’t already).

While the case rate is going up pretty dramatically in a lot of areas around the country, the hospitalization and death rates are not moving up at the same rate, which reinforces the idea that this surge is led by a strain that is not as severe as prior strains. //

case numbers are high in Florida, so while high case numbers aren’t a bad thing for Joe Biden, they apparently are for Republican governors.

Because science, I suppose.

All of the people who are going after Republican governors like DeSantis are doing so largely because they are still caught in the grip of fear over the virus, despite the evidence that the worst of it has passed. We’re at the point now where the virus is probably going to be around forever (like the flu), will have yearly vaccines available to fight it (like the flu), and isn’t a death sentence (like the flu).