Friday Morning Breakfast For The Brain

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Why Electing Joe Biden Will Make The Culture War Even Worse

Via The Federalist

If Biden wins the White House this November, his administration will be run by a shadow team of radicals bent on warping America’s culture to the left.

When contemplating who the next president will be, a decent bet is that it will be Joe Biden’s pick for vice president. This is only a little tongue-in-cheek. I’m not sanguine about President Trump’s campaign or Biden’s capabilities.

Biden’s front-porch campaign has retreated to his basement, and he does not inspire confidence when he emerges. Even if Biden wins and becomes president, his administration will be run by a shadow president, or, more likely, by several people fighting for that role.

Factional differences, as well as ego and ambition, will animate and motivate this struggle. More so than the Republicans, Democrats find themselves riven by class divisions. The Democratic Party is now home for Wall Street and big business, as well as radical leftists who want to go full Robespierre on the rich. The Democrats are the party of socialists but their top tax reform priority is restoring a tax break for the wealthy who live in high-tax blue states. Indeed, their proposed plan for student loan forgiveness would help the well-to-do much more than the oppressed proletariat.

Biden spent his career as the senator from credit card companies. The Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party detests him because he is a corporatist whose style is to cut a deal between big business and big government, not to agitate for a socialist revolution. Amid these factions, someone will have to set an agenda, even if a President Biden is incapable of formulating one. Otherwise, the administration will fracture as disparate factions fight for control. A classic strategy in such cases is to encourage unity against a common foe.

Thus, the culture war will likely escalate under a Biden presidency, as it will be the one thing Democrats will agree on. Some pundits have speculated that a Biden presidency will cool off the culture war, but culture war is a Biden administration’s ticket out of internecine warfare. Fanning the flames will be a way to unite the Democrats who hate the rich and the Democrats who are the rich. This will be an extension of Obama’s “stray voltage” strategy, which consisted of provoking culture war battles the administration thought it could turn to its advantage in energizing its base.

Biden’s campaign is already using culture war issues to appease the radicals in his party. While he was once in favor of at least some restrictions on abortion, Biden now champions taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand until the point of birth. This is an extreme position even among pro-choice Democrats, but Biden’s camp was eager to satisfy the abortion lobby. Similarly, when the Supreme Court rebuked the Democrats for their continued harassment of the Little Sisters of the Poor, Biden’s campaign promised more attacks on the nuns.

There would likely be much more of this in a Biden administration, as whoever runs it attempts to hold the Democratic coalition together by starting cultural fights. And they would be limited only by their imagination. For instance, in education, they could use the IRS to try to shut down Christian schools over LGBT issues while using the leverage of federal money to force the teaching of the ahistorical 1619 Project or dangerous critical race theory in public schools.

In using this strategy, a Biden administration would be following the success of corporate America. Big business is finding that wokeness is an effective diversion: rainbow flags, Black Lives Matter banners and a few donations to “social justice” organization are cheap indulgences that throw a bone to the internal radicals while distracting the online mob.

Read the entire article HERE.

Why Trump (and the GOP) Must Do Better

Via American Greatness

The president and his party must act and act now, lest their supporters suspect they’ve been conned.

Recently, I wrote at American Greatness about the need for President Trump to up his game. That article elicited some thought-provoking responses. Before offering my counter-responses, and for the benefit of new readers, I will summarize both my initial position as well as the criticisms directed at it. I will also take this occasion to qualify a matter or two.

In this unprecedented year, which not coincidentally is an election year, there is only one issue on which the president and the Republicans need to be focused: the Left’s intensified attack on America. .

In 2020, this has been a two-pronged attack: the internment of America under the pretext of combating a cold virus and violence in the streets under the pretext of combating “systemic racism” and “police brutality.”

To be unequivocally clear: Trump and the Republicans (are the latter even still around?) need to clear all other items off of their desks—no talk of rebuilding the nation’s “infrastructure,” China, Russia, Middle Eastern conflicts, or, God help them (and us!), “DACA”—and concentrate on restoring normalcy to America.

They should end, or at least labor tirelessly to convince the rest of us that they are serious about ending, both the internment and the barbarism that has besieged cities throughout the country.

Threatening tweets by Trump, or tweets from other members of Congress, like Ted Cruz, imploring Americans to “fight back” or demanding an “end” to the madness only reinforce the impression of weakness on the part of the president and his party while having the inverse effect of reinforcing another impression—the sense that all of the strength resides in the Left.

While I suggested that Trump could invoke the Constitution’s interstate commerce clause to prevent governors from arbitrarily crushing the residents of their states and the Insurrection Act to stop the domestic terrorism in America’s streets, I should add that these are just two prescriptions that come to mind. Doubtless there are more, and probably less dramatic, courses of action that the president could take either instead of, or in addition to, these suggestions.

The point is, regardless of what he does or can do, Trump must act and act now, lest his supporters suspect they’ve been conned. Present circumstances are untenable.

The following are some of the criticisms I received:

1) “Why should Trump alone be held responsible for acting? After all, with much of his own party against him, he’s virtually standing by himself.”

The author of The Art of the Deal promised to make America great again. He never added the qualifier that he would restore the country’s greatness only if Republicans and Democrats liked him.

It should be clear that this is in no way intended as a justification for the Republicans’ dishonesty and cowardice. They, too, must be held to account. Rather, my point is simply that it is Trump who made history precisely because it is Trump who styled himself “the outsider,” the businessman, who would shake up the Swamp of D.C. and reverse America’s misfortunes.

If Trump deserves no blame for the record loss of jobs (and the astronomical rise of all other misery indicia that accompanies unemployment) because of the obstructionism of an establishment that hates him in 2020, then why re-elect him when this same establishment, presumably, will continue to hate—and, thus, obstruct—him in 2021?

2) “But Trump isn’t acting now so that America can get a taste of what life will be like under Democratic Party rule.”

Ah. So let’s get this straight: Trump’s strategy is to let Americans see just how hellish life has become in 2020 under Republican control so that they can see how even more hellish it will be under Democratic control? Silly.

3) “The last criticism is unfair, for we have a federalist government, and it is in largely Democratic-run states where the internment and the mayhem prevail most powerfully. The president and the Republicans in the Senate, given the constraints of federalism, can’t really do anything to stop the destruction of the quality of life for the residents of those states.”

Think about this for a moment: If, let’s just say for argument’s sake, it really is respect for federalism (it’s not, but let’s just that it is) that prevents the president and the GOP Senate from intervening to stop the madness that is transpiring in blue areas, then, assuming that Trump and the Republicans aren’t planning on abolishing federalism in 2021, won’t federalism prevent them from intervening to stop the madness in these same areas come his second term?

Since (at least in name) ours promises to remain a federalist system of government next year, then, by implication, Trump will be just as incapable of lifting a finger to stop the destruction of much of the country then as he and his supporters claim he is now.

So, how can he promise to restore law, order, and normalcy to America upon his reelection if he can’t do it now because of federalism?

In other words, why exactly should we vote for him if America promises to continue along this same disastrous track upon which it embarked during the Trump era—the track that it is on now, nearly four years after he was elected and Republicans took control the Senate?

There are two additional reasons why this line of defense is self-defeating at best and, at worst, patently offensive to Trump’s supporters:

Read the entire article HERE.

Good Riddance To Drudge

Via Townhall.com

It used to be a thrill for conservatives to get “Drudged” – to have their piece linked on the Drudge Report. It meant traffic (which translated into money) and that a large audience would see it. It probably still means those things, only now it means them to progressive writers and websites. Whatever Drudge was, it’s not anymore.

You’d be hard-pressed to spot the difference between the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post. Aside from his love of weather porn, Tom Brady, and anything Oprah or transgender-related, you might as well go to CNN. At least with CNN you’re getting it from the primary source.

There are all sorts of stories about what happened to Matt Drudge, as happens when someone is a paranoid recluse. Some say he sold the site to anti-Trumpists, others say he’s soured on Republicans because they didn’t build the wall. Rumors are rampant.

He may well have sold the site, it’s his to sell if he wanted to and who wouldn’t at least be tempted if someone drove a Brinks truck to your house and offered it to you so you wouldn’t have to work anymore?

The idea that Matt is upset that the wall isn’t completed doesn’t hold much water. He’s reportedly a lot of things, but stupid isn’t one of them. He knows how government works, or doesn’t.

Whatever it was that changed, the website has changed. Drudge doesn’t do original reporting, the idea that he’s a journalist was always laughable. He gets emails from reporters with the title of their piece and a link, then editors decide if it’s worth putting on the site. The “original reporting” he’s done, to the extent that he’s done it, is sent to him the same way, usually stories editors at other organizations spike or teasers for stories still in development. When someone in conservative media said “Drudge is reporting…” it was usually about a story that was going to run in the next couple of days at the Washington Post, New York Times, or somewhere else, not something he worked on. He doesn’t do that.

What Matt did do, better than almost anyone else, was find the nugget buried in a story that either wasn’t highlighted and should have been, or undercuts the liberal narrative. Drudge and his editors filtered through thousands of stories (emails, actually) to find those nuggets and shine a bright light on them. Since he turned on Republicans, that aspect from the Drudge Report is gone.

But did he really turn? Was Matt Drudge really a conservative or just an opportunist?

Read the entire article HERE.

It’s Gonna Blow: Be a Miracle if it Don’t

By Fred Reed/Unz.com

Hoo-boy. She’s ready to explode, go high order. Smoking ruins, dead bodies, seething hatreds, and a country that can’t be put back together. It may not happen, but she looks ready.

No one is in charge in this collapsing shell game of a country. In Louisville hundreds of armed blacks threaten to “burn the motherfucker down,” meaning Louisville, if they don’t get their way. All cringe before them, with reason. They have guns. Larger numbers marched in Georgia, armed, ready to rock and roll. BLM says it will “go into the suburbs” to get Whitey. Who will stop them? Not the government. It fears them. Weimar Kentucky. An American Freikorps.

America today in video. Scroll down to the New York footage. It’s Planet of the Apes.

Gun sales are way up. A friend in Rhode Island went to a gun shop and found a long line outside. A columnist in Virginia was told that the other stores report long waitlists for prize arms, notably the AR 15. People are afraid, or fed up. They are arming. The spring winds.

There is no leadership, no one in charge. In Trump we have perhaps the weakest President in history, mouthy, preening, ineffectual, much talk and no action. He did nothing while the rioters looted, burned, and vandalized, then disengaged himself from the pandemic, leaving decisions to the states. Much cawing and gaudy feathers, but no bird inside.

Congress does nothing, one parry neutering the other and all bought and paid for by special interests, by Wall Street and the arms makers and the big corporations. Local governments submit to the rioters or stand aside as the burning goes on. This is not society. It is chaos.

To collapsing countries these usually comes a man on a horse. A man with a big stick. You know, 1789, 1917, 1933. That kind of thing.

The media encourage the rioters, inflame passions either deliberately or through partisanship. They have little idea what they are encouraging. It may seem strange to say that the media do not know what is going on—it is their business to know–but they don’t. They were blindsided by the Trump because they had no idea of conditions in the country, in Flint and Gary, in Wheeling. Today they do not know what is brewing out there, or of how much they contribute to it.

After all, nothing out in the great mysterious middle land affects them. Journalists in the Beltway Isolation Cage are rich compared to deplorables in in Gary, live in a city proof against recession. Their decisions are whether to go out for Turkish or Vietnamese, not how to pay the rent. They censor news they don’t like, suppress the seismic rumblings out there in a country they don’t really know. In censoring others they censor themselves. They cannot read stories they cannot write. For example, sickening racial attacks on whites. That would be racism. Perish forfend.

But race is just the most explosive part of an unfunctioning polity. Other things ratchet up the fury. Add economic decay and you get more anger, more pressure. People live paycheck to paycheck, maxed out on credit cards. They don’t have a thousand dollars, or five hundred, for an emergency. The young live in their parents’ basements because they can’t get jobs to buy houses and start families. People don’t see doctors because medical care is both costly and wretched. Student loans crush the young. Grade schools are propaganda mills; parents know it, but can do nothing. Retirement programs vanish as employers turn employees into independent contractors, avoiding the expense of benefits. People see no hope. This makes them dangerous. Watch.

And BLM wants to go into the suburbs to get Whitey. God help us. Then it will well and truly blow. BLM doesn’t know how many white men are sick of the chaos and destruction, sick of BLM. They quietly say, “Bring it on. Let’s settle it.” Laden words.

While these undercurrents grow, the media will chirp and lecture and say virtuous things. Then, boom.

No one is in charge. No one will tell the rioters “No” and make it stick. No one, yet. It can blow.

BLM is cocky, aware of its power, made overconfident by easy victory. It, and Antifa, have never met resistance. If things get really wild, though, they will. They will also find that food does not really grow in Safeway, and that a Safeway burned out does not necessarily return to be burned out again.

A country gets what it asks for, and deserves what it tolerates. Most of the social problems engendering chaos result from the failure or collusion of government. Other countries have good national medical care. America does not. Student loans are a calculated scam, just as credit card companies deliberately entice people to buy what they cannot afford and then charge them usurious interest. Retirement plans exist elsewhere. European countries have them. But the Pentagon and Wall Street get America’s money.

It’s gonna blow. Short of a miracle.

The deadliest question is how to accommodate blacks. One mustn’t say what everyone knows, that blacks are the least educable, least productive, most criminal, most violent, most dependent, and least assimilable of the population. If anything can be done about any of these, it won’t be, because no one is permitted to name the problem. No one is in charge.

Read the entire article HERE.

Reversing Course, Trader Joe’s Tells “Woke” Mob to Pound Sand on Racism Demands

Via The New American

It’s amazing what can happen when the silent majority actually speaks up and demonstrates where the “woke” mob’s power really lies: in the illusion that it has power.

An apparent case in point is grocery store chain Trader Joe’s (TJ) decision to reverse course and not change its brand labeling, something demanded by a small group of white “Karen” petitioners who’d called the labeling “racist.” The company’s recent statement on the matter reads, in part:

To Our Valued Customers:

In light of recent feedback and attention we’ve received about our product naming, we have some things we’d like to say to clarify our approach.

A few weeks ago, an online petition was launched calling on us to “remove racist packaging from [our] products.” Following were inaccurate reports that the petition prompted us to take action. We want to be clear: we disagree that any of these labels are racist. We do not make decisions based on petitions.

We make decisions based on what customers purchase, as well as the feedback we receive from our customers and Crew Members. If we feel there is need for change, we do not hesitate to take action.

Decades ago, our Buying Team started using product names, like Trader Giotto’s, Trader José’s, Trader Ming’s, etc. We thought then — and still do — that this naming of products could be fun and show appreciation for other cultures. For example, we named our Mexican beer “Trader José Premium” and a couple guacamole products are called “Avocado’s Number” in a kitschy reference to a mathematical theory. These products have been really popular with our customers, including some budding mathematicians.

… Recently we have heard from many customers reaffirming that these name variations are largely viewed in exactly the way they were intended­ — as an attempt to have fun with our product marketing.

In truth, TJ is doing a little damage-control dance here: Despite the above claims to the contrary, it was just seven days prior to their issuance that the company expressed the following, on July 17:

[While our] approach to product naming may have been rooted in a lighthearted attempt at inclusiveness, we recognize that it may now have the opposite effect — one that is contrary to the welcoming, rewarding customer experience we strive to create every day.

… We made the decision several years ago to use only the Trader Joe’s name on our products moving forward. Since then, we have been in the process of updating older labels and replacing any variations with the name Trader Joe’s, and we will continue do so until we complete this important work.

Nonetheless, TJ should be applauded for finally resisting “the cancel culture that’s taking every minority face off food-label packaging, from Mrs. Butterworth, to the Cream of Wheat man, to Aunt Jemima, to Eskimo Pies, to the Land O’Lakes Indian maiden and more, leaving just the faces of whites on the packages,” as commentator Monica Showalter puts it. Sanity has prevailed, at least for now (though the leftists are currently agitating further against the company), and TJ should be supported.

Moreover, this incident is most significant in that it illustrates some important lessons.

Read the entire article HERE.

Activists Fight Racism By Driving All People Of Color Out Of Pop Culture

Via the Babylon Bee (Satire)

U.S.—Activists are fighting racism by demanding that people of color be removed from all media, brands, logos, mascots, and anywhere else they might pop up.

“Anywhere we see a person of color, we see racism. So we must end racism by making sure people of color are not depicted anywhere,” said white liberal activist Petunia Faucett. “We will not rest until all pop culture icons of color are eliminated. Then, racism will be over.”

Activists across the country cheered as another pop culture icon of color was removed this morning. “We worked hard to achieve this goal, and the day is finally here,” Faucett said. “But our work is not done. We must be vigilant to hunt down people of color on butter tubs, syrup bottles, cartoons, and bags of rice, and take them out of the public consciousness.”

“When only white people are shown as mascots, cartoon characters, and brand logos, we will have truly arrived at our diverse, racism-free future.”

Check out all of the Bee’s takes on politics and culture HERE.

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