“When you’re glued into politics, reading blogs, scrolling through social media, you get inundated with niche issues and everyone is trying to convince you that this is the defining problem that will swing an election. . . . Right or wrong, the economic woes of the public will always be put at the feet of the president. If the stock market sucks, it’s the president’s fault. If you can’t afford DoorDash like you used to, it’s the president’s fault. The midterms are the way for the American public to punish the president in power. Yes, the typical political discussions matter, like quality of candidates etc. However, if people are angry and emotional, they don’t generally make rational decisions. If the reason for them voting is based on spite, do you really have a chance of changing their minds? You can’t fact your way out of shifting an emotional voter.” ~~ Adam Coleman

“Their economic doctrine is neo-feudal central planning wrapped in environmental hysteria. By mandating the death of the internal combustion engine, outlawing natural gas, and tethering the world’s greatest industrial powerhouse to intermittent windmills and Chinese-made solar panels, they are engineering energy poverty by design. Tripling electricity rates and normalizing rolling blackouts are features of a system built to break middle-class independence. While coastal elites lecture working families from private jets, they push national rent control policies proven to annihilate housing supply. Driving private landlords into bankruptcy clears the field for the state to become the sole arbiter of shelter, reducing self-reliant property owners to desperate tenants begging federal bureaucrats for a roof.

In the streets, they have unleashed a regime of calculated lawlessness designed to terrorize the productive class. Abolishing cash bail for violent predators, downgrading felonies to misdemeanors, and installing rogue prosecutors who legalize rampant theft have turned once-thriving metropolitan centers into boarded-up wastelands. They release career criminals into your neighborhoods and prosecute the lawful citizen who dares to defend his family. Exporting this urban carnage to suburbs and rural towns is a deliberate strategy: manufacture unbearable chaos until a terrified populace surrenders its liberties in exchange for authoritarian state control.” ~~ Saggezza Eterna

“Our thought for the day, riffing a bit off of one of Pournelle’s thoughts on peace: “Communism” is the name of the alleged ideal we attribute to an oligarchy under which, by the cover of pleasant sounding political and social (and genetic) nonsense, that cannot bear objective close scrutiny, all power is gathered into the hands of a new, tiny, highly nepotistic, amorally familistic, corrupt and completely unprincipled ruling class, itself backed up by control over the means of information, a massive propaganda administration, unbounded by even a stunted sense of integrity, a lapdog judiciary, and a secret police with unreviewable powers of incarceration, enslavement, torture, life, and death, in order to advance themselves and their heirs under the lie of advancing mankind. Contrary to the common mantra, not only has it not “never been done right,” it has _always_ been done _exactly_ right for its true purpose, cited above.” ~~ Tom Kratman