Just What We Need - A "Left-Leaning" Democrat

Democrat - No relation

I live in one of those rare Washington State Republican enclaves on the edge of the Seattle liberal-dome. Our representatives, city and county officials tend to be reliably conservative. To the north of Puyallup, where I live there are enough Democrats to elect the governor all by themselves. To the south of us live Washington's version of East Texas only a skootch more conservative. My first men's prayer breakfast of my Graham SDA church ended with everyone loading up and going to the gun show. Our head deacon was buying parts to make a fully automatic AR-15. The elders often met at the gun range to discuss church budget.  

Puyallup is where the tides meet. Currently, builders here are putting up senior-living apartments as fast as they can cut down fir trees to build them. Don't worry, those things grow back fast. I counted the rings on a giant one we cut down last year and discovered that I was quite a bit older than that huge hunk of lumber. There's enough wood in one of those to build a 3 bedroom house.

Seniors are fleeing Seattle, a once lovely city, called the Emerald City by folks who loved the city and they are fleeing in droves. They are fleeing a massive influx of homeless, drug addicts and growing crime and a government that pretty much encourages it. They don't prosecute shop-lifting so long as you can stuff it in your jacket and get out the door. They do prosecute business owners who knock down shoplifters and sit on them till the police come. The "summer of love" we had up here left a whole once-beautiful section of town trashed and storefronts empty as store-owners fled. Apparently the old people followed. They are filling up senior apartment complexes as fast as builder can put them up.

Sadly, the predators who preyed on them in Seattle, seem to have followed them here. We've had a spike in car thefts, porch piracy, vandalism, arson, robberies and mugging have increased dramatically in our little once quiet neighborhood. And the bull-dozing of local woodlands for new senior housing has displaced the local wildlife. We've got a couple of deer herds roaming our neighborhood using the patches of woods around our houses for shelter. Also displaced have been coyotes, bobcats and even a bear, so much so that people's pets are coming up missing.

So into all this, the above announcement appeared on the Neighborhood app letting us know that help was on the way in the form of a "slightly left-leaning Democrat" we might have the privilege of writing in for county council "person". His post sparked a huge, sometimes rancorous debate. I have the right to remain silent but not the ability, so I jumped in on the discussion. I was polite mind you and to his credit so was he. Some folks, however did get a little nasty. I find it's a waste of time trying to communicate with delusional people, but not every leftist on the thread was unreasonable. Though Mr. King lost me at "Left-leaning Democrat", we were able to have a civil discussion about my issues with the Democrat approach to governance. 

My grocery bill doubled starting from the day Joe Biden put his hand on the Bible and was sworn in. Governor Jay Inslee is a nightmare and has presided over massive open and hidden tax increases that have essentially along with Biden's inflation made it harder for those of us on fixed incomes. Now my friend Mr. King wants an opportunity to bring "regressive" leftist notions to our local community (and no I didn't misspell progressive). The last thing we need is solid Democrat representation all the way up the chain to Washington, DC. 

These guys talk a good game, but all they've gotten us with their piles of government programs that sound good is a crime rate that's through the roof (see Seattle), a grocery and gas price increase that's no more 17%, than the moon is made of green cheese. We've suffered an explosion of drug crimes, homelessness and unpunished shoplifting, virtually non-existent borders, and a military that's being gutted and replaced with as many political radicals as they can recruit. We've had a crime wave in our neighborhood that has touched everyone. My wife's meds were stolen from our mailbox. It's so bad that a guy who set fire to the highway last year, was released in an hour, then walked down the street and tried to rob a store. Then a few months later he shows up here and was caught ripping off packages from people's porches and breaking into a car, stuffing it full of stolen packages, then trying to steal the car. Wanna bet he's out again? 

All we need is another elitist leftist trying to tell us how all us members of the proletariat ought to live, think, eat, work, play and procreate, while figuring out how to disarm us and make us subservient to the collective (see leftism = Marxism). Even the left-leaning light agenda of Democrats is riddled with bad ideas, discredited and dangerous notions.

How's that for what I disagree with about left-leaning Democrats? This thread started out openly left-leaning political so the moderators didn't delete the thread. Here in the suburbs, naked hypocrisy is a little too out there. So if the thread were deleted, we'd all know what party's doing the editing and, probably, the vote counting around here. 

Do I sound angry and disgusted with the political left. Well I do because I am. I paid attention in history class and read extensively on the subject over the past 58 years since I was 10 years old. left-leaning is not to be trusted and definitely not something we want to see running our little corner of Pierce County. Puyallup is facing an invasion from the gulag north of us as surely as the border states are being invaded from the South. I get why refugees want to leave Mexico and Seattle. The trouble is they bring the predators with them. If you read our website and count up the car theft, property theft and damage and general crime increase in our once pleasant little neighborhood, you'll see the problem.

Why is it important that government be largely local? I sat in on meetings as a reporter in Klickitat County where it was discussed whether or not to copy a neighboring Oregon county and create survey teams with Public Health officials and armed Homeland Security officers to go around and record whether or not families were vaccinated or not, and while they were at it to check for flags (like the Betsy Ross flag which has been declared a white supremacist dog whistle), whether the household possessed any guns, evidence of pro-Trump signs, religious iconography and other potential indicators of domestic white supremacist terrorism.

Fortunately the county commissioners were NOT left-leaning Democrats. When asked if she would organize such a survey team, the county public health director answered, "Oh, hell no! I don't want to get shot!" Having that sort of power at the local level is how we guard our communities from federal meddling. 

For me, it's why not to vote for left-leaning Democrats - to prevent this sort of collectivist nonsense from gaining a foothold. We don't need politicians telling us how to take care of our local problems. I was for 20 years a community organizer in Texas working across party lines. We got things done for our communities that a bunch of central planners in the halls of government had screwed up. We don't need left-leaning Democrats in power here either. We threw them out in East Texas. I recommend we do that same thing in the sensible parts of Washington State. Sorry to ramble on, but I have way too much experience with left-leaning Democrats. They're some bad juju I'm here to tell you. I don't hate them. I've even converted some of my left-leaning Democrat friends. They just have latched on to some bad ideas and run with them.

© 2022 by Tom King 

Conservative Media Must Die (or Big Tech Loses Money)

 

It's all about power and money.

So why is Big Tech targeting new political censorship free social media that competes with the Big Tech approved Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram coalition??? Dennis Prager pointed out in a recent interview that leftists are children. Freedom frightens them. They want to be taken care of instead.

So Big Tech, prefers the more easily manipulated, more vulnerable to advertising, more lucrative demographic made up of the leftist snowflake generation. It therefore feels it must squash social media for adults. "Why?" you ask.

You see the trouble is that the snowflakes are quicker to change brands or political direction in response to clever advertising, but they don't have any money. If older, more conservative consumers move to more freedom friendly, free market social media they would lose the eyes that actually have money to buy things. If those eyes are moved onto conservative friendly social media in large numbers, then the Big Tech supported social media giants lose a vital income stream.They are already seeing massive loss of revenue as conservatives bail on Twitter and Facebook and the rest in favor of new more friendly social media like Parler, MeWe, Minds, and others. Parler in particular with its easy to use interface was pulling millions from Twitter and Facebook and had to be shot down in a hurry, costing Twitter billions in falling stock value.

Leftist social media like Twitter and Facebook need conservatives to give them money because most young leftists don't have any. More than 75% of the liquid cash assets in the United States are in the hands of older decision-makers - a group that becomes notoriously more conservative with every year they age. Young leftist snowflakes, a group less well off financially, therefore less able to contribute to the ad-based economy, are motivated by promises of free stuff from politicians. In exchange they obligingly vote for "progressives" and they obligingly get angry at conservatives who seem to stand in the way of their getting free stuff. Thus the temper tantrum rioting and looting we've seen this past year.

At the heart of it, Big Tech is trying to force conservatives to depend on liberal media. They must shut down any particularly successful conservative and so-called unmoderated (i.e. leftist) social media like Parler, Minds.com, Blabberbuzz and others. If they don't crush the competition, it costs them dearly as Twitter and Facebook have seen with the massive migration of conservatives to these other media.

Sadly, new conservative media must rely on Big Tech controlled resources to operate on the Internet as it currently exists. The servers they exist on and the technology they use is infested with Google, Microsoft and other Big Tech code that will make their platforms fail if access is blocked as Parler found out to its chagrin.

There is a possible solution to the problem on the horizon. Tim Berners-Lee 30 years ago, he wrote the codes that made the world wide web possible. Berners-Lee believes that "Too much power and too much personal data reside with the tech giants like Google and Facebook. Big Tech's darlings are basically silos for amassing enormous stores of data. Tim envisioned the web as a tool for an interconnected world. Instead, Tim says they have become surveillance platforms and gatekeepers of innovation.

Tim wants to restore his original vision for the Internet. The project is called "Solid". The key to his new connectivity vision are PODS (Personal Online Data Stores). PODS store the records of what websites you visit, what you buy, what you view or listen to online. The information stored in PODS would be under the control of the user. Anyone who wants access to your information would have to have your permission through a secure link and would not be allowed to store it. This allows you to control your own data and decide who gets to use it and how.

Big Tech and other corporate bullies would, under the Solid version of the Internet, find it difficult to categorically remove a rival website as they did with Parler and are trying to do with Minds.com. And your data would remain your own throughout.  Members' data would not be salable to just anyone. This would screw up the financial model for some of the more predatory social media sites, but it would certainly keep your data under our own control.

I, for one, plan to sign up as soon as its ready. I am heartily sick of the way the Internet is being tied up to be safer for leftists to continue their overthrow of the American way of life.

© 2021 by Tom King

The El Paso Walmart Shooting - Who Ya Gonna Blame?

Vigil for the victims of the El Paso Walmart Shootings

From the first moment after the El Paso Walmart shooting, leftist media began blaming Trump and all us anti-immigrant conservatives for the rhetoric which supposedly inspired this lunatic.

When are you guys on the left EVER going to get it. We're not ANTI-IMMIGRANT. What we are against is millions swimming the rivers, and crawling through the snake-infested deserts with their babies to get into the country. We object to coyotes, drug mules, terrorists and sex traffickers coming with them. We object to illegals being exploited by agribusiness, farmers, ranchers, dairymen and chicken processors, forced to live in colonias without running water, electricity or sewer system on slave wages. If we can close the borders and insure that immigrants and refugees cross over legally, they will be protected by our laws. Exploiters can't treat them like slaves and bully them into submission with threats of deportation.

Trump's already got agreements with Guatemala and Mexico to stem the tide and funnel them through US run refugee centers at the Mexican and Guatemalan southern borders. That way actual refugees can be identified and can come to the US by bus, plane, car and train instead of in the back of trucks and on foot with dangerous people. It would reduce the number of corpses, drugs and filth littering US border ranch land and posing a threat to Americans that live along the Mexican border.

The catch and release policies the Democrats support will only lead to expanding poverty and virtual slavery for these poor people. I get that they are desperate, but entering illegally only takes them from one cruel master to a whole new set of cruel masters. In 1860 Democrats whined that they couldn't get their crops picked without slaves. In 2019, they say we can't get our crops picked, concrete poured or chickens plucked without illegal alien labor. Anybody else see a pattern that seems ingrained in the party of Jim Crow and the KKK?

By the way, this year under President Trump we've had more immigrants become citizens than we have for decades. It's taking time, but the president is doing more than just talking about helping immigrants. He's doing it. We have to stop illegal immigration for the sake of the innocent. They should cross at immigration ports, not through the desert with their babies in the company of sex traffickers, drug smugglers, terrorists and criminal gangs.

Instead of being part of encouraging the enslavement of desperate refugees, how about being part of the solution. Immigrants and refugees should not have to begin their life in America by committing a crime. They should enter as law-abiding would-be citizens with a clear path to citizenship and under the protection of police, the Dept. of Labor, OSHA and other US law enforcement agencies. If they do that, then they can be protected.

The only reason any politician wants to protect illegal immigration is to continue to receive graft from the employers who abuse illegal immigrants.

So who really hates immigrants?

The sick bastard who shot up the mall in El Paso is a product, not of rhetoric by the president, but of the relentless shrieking leftist harpies who bully people who are made afraid by the vitriole coming from the left. Mentally ill kids, and psychologically damaged adults pick up on the seeming don't-care attitude of leftist elite politicians who sit behind their own walls and gated communities and abuse people who see the consequences to neighborhoods of an apparently out of control invasion of their homeland. And they are afraid and lash out. I've seen the colonias and I've attempted to help those people trapped there.  But I'm here to tell you that unless we can cut off the inflow of illegals, we'll never be able to fix the problem. Build the wall, close the border, fix the problem - in that order. And don't trust Democrat promises. Do it in that order. President Reagan agreed to a Democrat proposed solution by agreeing to an amnesty bill. In exchange Democrats promised to close the border. They talked about building a wall.

But they never did. They reneged on that promise, just like Democrats always do. It is not to their advantage to fix immigration. Illegal aliens are just too useful to the DNC.

Shame on them!

© 2019 by Tom King

Has a High Tech Virtual Invasion of Poland Begun?

In another wave of attacks on conservatives, Youtube is blocking and/or demonetizing conservative video producers en masse. I started this rant on Facebook, but decided to move it over to my blog to avoid its being banished to virtual hell by Zuckerberg's Gestapo. I'm not sure, but we may be seeing a fully mobilized, concerted attack on conservative voices beginning in earnest. Here's what's happening.

Despite earlier ruling that Steven Crowder met YouTube guidelines, the Google subsidiary, YouTube, has demonetized his videos en masse, effectively cutting off a major portion of his income in an obvious effort to silence his voice. Meanwhile poisonous leftist sites guilty of doxing, harassment, obscenity and outright lying remain firmly in place on the video host site. Other less-careful, less litigious conservative pundits than Crowder are being outright banned in this latest pogrom of pro-Constitution, pro-conservative websites. Massive numbers of Prager University's tasteful and factually correct videos have been demonetized and I expect another anti-conservative pogrom against PU in the next few days.

Reminds me of 1939 Europe. The war may have been started already as the leftist media ramps up its efforts to remove the president and discredit conservatives altogether before the crucial 2020 election.

It's a war, make no mistake about it. At present it's a cold civil war, but given the history of the left throughout the 20th century, it won't stay cold for long if they gain enough power.

The first American revolution began with the shot heard round the world. It began because the Redcoats were coming to Concord to confiscate the citizens' guns. We may find we're in a second American revolution when the Deep State comes for our guns again. I pray the US military will choose to heed their oath to defend the Constitution because that is indeed what is under assault.

We need to all agree on a new video provider - a kind of Youtube 2.0 if we are going to keep from being silenced. I've already moved a lot of my social media traffic to MeWe, which is growing significantly thanks to conservative flight from oppressive leftist social media providers. We need phone apps that support these sites and resources that allow us to dramatically cut our support of web providers who obviously hate us and want us gone.

We should oblige them.

I truly believe we are seeing the beginning of the last movement of Satan's forces against those who are Christ's own.  Not all of these are conservative Christians. Not all of these folk even believe in God. They are simply people looking for Grace in a world filled with hate. These souls hunger and thirst for a world safe for the good, the kindly, the loving and free - people who have no desire to have power over their fellow man; no desire to be Lords of the Earth.

As the last events unfold, remember that Christ's coming is not a conquest, but a rescue. When the good folk who trust in Him or would have if they'd ever met Him are taken up and go, this world will destroy itself in an orgasm of violence and turn itself into a lake of fire. We have the technology to do just that and when God withdraws from this Earth, there will be nothing to hold back the horrors mankind can inflict upon itself.

The wages of sin is death and I really believe that is literally so. I believe sin is self-destructive and inevitably suicidal. I believe we will make our own hell. I don't think God need lift a finger to obliterate evil men from the Earth. All He need do is step back to see the Earth cleansed by radioactive fire!

That may seem a little extreme to extrapolate from a YouTube ban on what it calls "hate speech" to the bloody end of the world.  But then a few German tanks rolling into Austria, Poland, and Czechoslovakia didn't seem at the time to presage anything like the holocaust and the bloody conflict that would cost half a billion lives and plunge the world into horrors unimagined by the free world in 1939.  Nor did it predict that in the aftermath of a World War, Communism would rise up on its hind legs and slaughter hundreds of millions more.  

But it did.

When created, I think the left saw the Internet as a new way to control the proletariat. After all, they had been successfully controlling media for 50 some-odd years. Why not this tool. I mean they all had read Orwell in high school (though admittedly as an instruction manual rather than a warning). To the collective Progressive horror, though, the new communication tool opened doors to free speech, free expression and inexpensive highly effective means of producing quality podcasts, videos and websites for opinion makers who opposed progressivism. Things have been out of hand for a long time. I think our betters have decided it's time to shut us up for good before Donald Trump gets re-elected. I think they are looking to cut the right off from the Internet. All they need is their own Leni Riefenstahl to get the mind-control propaganda rolling.

And I know I sound all paranoid, but I grew up in the 20th century. I know the horrors that can be inflicted on us by those who think they need to control us ordinary schlubs "for our own good". We have raised up a new generation that, as Moses put it, "...knew not Joseph".  Sadly, they will soon know what happens to them when the Josephs of the world are all dead or silenced.

In the meantime, I and millions of others are watchmen on the walls. We cannot be silent.


© 2019 by Tom King

Guidestar, "Neutral" Arbiter of Nonprofits, Swings Openly Left

The venerable* nonprofit organization rating website Guidestar has apparently become comfortable enough with its venerableness to openly shift to the left. This week it came out with a list of "hate group"nonprofit organizations that was long on conservative values and short on actual hate. Not surprising given that the list came from the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that would be genuinely surprised that anyone would NOT consider virtually any conservative Christian nonprofit organization a hate group. SPLC's definition of "hate" seems to be anything that disagrees with the progressive agenda. One Target  on SPLC's list is the American Family Association, a conservative Christian group that opposes redefining marriage, promotes Christian values, and opposes pornography, transgender bathrooms, and abortion. This according to SPLC and now Guidestar makes it a hate group.

Let the pandering to the socialist left begin....

As a semi-retired nonprofit professional, I read trade publications for the industry and utilize websites like Guidestar. Mostly I'm trying to keep organizations I consult with out of hot water with rating sites like Guidestar. Guidestar's raison d'être is ostensibly to serve as a guide to philanthropists, donors, and funding organizations as to the fiscal health and financial responsibility of nonprofit organizations that approach them for donations. Guidestar has, over time, become the most powerful arbiter of legitimacy in the nonprofit world.

Now that it has that power, like other "venerable" nonprofit journals I won't name, Guidestar's leftist underpinnings are beginning to show. One would think that a nonprofit organization should be judged by whether or not it is responsible with its funding and whether it is accomplishing its mission. If it's mission is to promote the creation of a socialist/communist state in America, so be it. Does it accomplish that mission? If you support that mission, then that's something you will want to know before you give them money.

As to the value of that mission, Guidestar should have no judgmental power, at least if it is going to claim "neutrality" in its assessment of America's not for profits. It is not Guidestar's business to arbitrarily apply labels like "hate group" to the charities it rates, especially when their criteria appears to be that the group is conservative. Otherwise, Guidestar needs to label itself "The Liberal Guidestar" in the interest of full disclosure.

I'm just saying.

© 2017 by Tom King

* Or at least as venerable as anything gets in the digital age.

ESPN Catches a Lot of Karma

The face of ESPN - 2015 ESPY winner Caitlyn Jenner

Business Rule #1 - Do Not Offend Your Customers

You wonder if today's ESPN sports journalists attended the same leftist university journalism schools as the rest of the mainstream media and never met any actual sports fans before taking up sports reporting. Let me 'splain. You see, sports fans, the kind who burrow down into statistics and player lives and the mechanics of professional sports, the raison d'etre for ESPN's very existence in the first place, tend to lean hard to starboard. That's nautical-speak meaning "to the right" for ESPN reporters who don't cover the America's Cup. 

ESPN laid off a hundred people the other day. Many more are expected to follow. ESPN boss,  and all their PR guys attribute ESPN's massive employee layoffs to a "changing media landscape" and other high-sounding marketing jargon laden excuses. I suspect what ESPN is experiencing is what liberal's who embrace Eastern mysticism call "karma". 

Interesting that ESPN doesn't credit the past year or so worth of increasingly leftist reporting and conservative bashing by the sports network as having anything to do with the staggering loss of conservative ESPN viewers. Turns out a lot of sports fans tend to be conservative, a demographic data point ESPN's marketing people seem to have missed. Not many mainstream news outlets are talking about the possibility that the recent shift to the leftward at ESPN may have fueled the loss of 621,000 subscribers in October 2016 and a full 7.2 million since.

ESPN tries to spin the layoffs as "not my fault" and some sort of cagey business decision. They should have seen the handwriting on the wall when they took back dismal Marxist Keith Olbermann from MSNBC and then had to explain why they fired him again with the usual "taking a different direction" excuse for his abysmal ratings. Since failing with Olbermann's in-your-face leftism, ESPN has allowed it's mainline reporters much more latitude in expressing their political opinions and disdain for all things conservative and Republican, perhaps expecting sports fans to accept their Marxism in smaller doses and not noticing it. The It has hurt them in ways I do not think they expected. In the process they discovered that sports fans are not sheep to be led about by the good shepherd ESPN.

Then came the Arthur Ashe Courage Award this year being given to Caitlyn Jenner. Again ESPN mis-underestimated the cringe factor that would come with that pit of political flag-waving. Fans tuned out in droves.

Another under-reported fact about ESPN's declining fortunes is just what the statistics of viewer vs subscriber losses say about fan disenchantment with the network. It is significant that ESPN has lost more far more viewers than subscribers in the past year.  While 7.2 million lost subscribers may be a relatively small percentage of ESPN's subscribers list, the loss of viewers says much more about viewer revolt, especially if you happen to be an ESPN advertiser. This disparity between subscriber and viewer loss is largely due to the fact that to "unsubscribe from ESPN" you often have to dump your entire cable package. ESPN is included in many basic cable/satellite subscriber packages or in special sports packages. To lose ESPN means you lose the other stuff as well.  As a result, many viewer have not dumped the network. Many sports fans just quit watching ESPN altogether and shifted over to Fox Sports or other less political sports news sources.

This Newsbuster story is a fair treatment of the consequences of ESPN's going hard left and viewers not liking it. They go into the numbers in more detail than I want to get into. The mainstream media have remained relatively quiet about ESPN's troubles, generally accepting the self-proclaimed World Leader in Sports' spin on the problem. One wonders whether the folk at ESPN will actually hear the message or is their political ideology so important that they will cling to it and content themselves with a smaller left-wing sports fan base.

Karma, as they say, is an angry female canine.

© 2017 by Tom King

I Aim to Misbehave: The Myth of the Unbiased Media

I kind of went off on an old friend today. A Ph.D. who apparently took the left path at some point, he posted the poem about "you tired, your poor and your huddled masses" and basically indicated that the concern of the right over the whole immigration issue wasn't "American". In a follow up comment he expressed a desire for a return to the days when reporters were taught, "...that a good reporter never showed his/her personal bias."  Sadly, he said, those days are gone.

Sadly, my friend, those days were never here. Every reporter, even good old Walter Cronkite came to the task with his own personal druthers. Cronkite was an old leftie and everybody knew it. I used to watch him. I liked him, but I was never in doubt about his slant on the story. My friend pointed out that 28% of Fox News viewers also watched MSNBC as though that somehow diluted Fox's influence.

The reason people watch both Fox and MSNBC is because they are pretty much the only two news outlets that are clear as to what their reporters biases are. Fox is at least honest about it. With MSNBC, it's just so blatant you can't miss it, whatever they claim about being unbiased. What I like about Fox is that when a reporter is a conservative, you know it. When he's a liberal you know it. And Fox has both varieties of reporter. More importantly and the reason for their dominance of the news market is that Fox gives conservative viewers the chance to hear a reporter ask the questions that they would like to ask for themselves.

I, for one, do NOT long for the good old days when we got fed whatever the top 1 or 2 newspapers, television or radio stations thought we ought to hear. There was no conservative media, then, except possibly for William F. Buckley whom the stations kept around and trotted out once in a while when they wanted us to know they were being fair or when some politicians on the left weren't living up to their potential and they wanted Buckley to spank 'em. They crucified Barry Goldwater in the media and they had no shame about doing it. The only way Reagan got himself elected was because he was able to bypass the news media and appeal directly to heartland America.

I actually studied journalism back in them good old days and what the books were teaching was how to diddle stories to reflect a Marxist agenda. It was that open. Marxism was what the cool guys believed. The assumption was that if you were a journalist, you were a liberal. I withdrew from graduate school psychology because my professors demanded that I not only not believe in God and stop being a Christian, but also that I give up on all this silly monogamy stuff. The three top department heads had all wound up divorced during grad school and thought that if you didn't get a divorce while in grad school, that you weren't working hard enough. Not wishing to abandon my marriage in order to collect my degree, I left higher academia.

I am left with a deep and abiding mistrust of the motives of the left. I have good reason. I have seen them in action and however much most claim to be altruistic and want peace, love, sex, drugs and rock n' roll, underneath it all, the most ardent of leftists have a profound lust to exercise power over those they consider beneath them - the fabled teeming masses. The self-appointed great thinkers of our country think they are superior intellectually and that we cannot manage our lives without them. They think of us in nice statistical groups that, if only they have enough data, they could manipulate us like so many puppets - for our own good, of course.

Since the Garden of Eden it's been all about "being like God" for these people. The only real reason the progressive left has for feeding the starving, clothing the naked or housing the homeless is to relieve their own guilt and to pacify the rabble so they don't rise up and murder the privileged classes in their beds.

Progressivism is nothing less than the ancient idea of the divine right of kings morphed into the divine right of the smug and self-serving pseudo-intellectual wealthy upper classes. America undercut the notion of inherited nobility. The new would-be nobility must undermine America to restore what they see as their right to rule, to look down on a passive motley rabble and order them about as it suits them.

I know that sounds harsh, but every time I bore down into the progressive argument, I find the same creepy smug sense of entitled superiority. I could get along with these people. My IQ is in the top 2%. All I'd have to do is buy into the idea of the elite class and adopt the same ideas they all share for managing the ignorant proletariat and I'm in.  Trouble is, I've thrown my hat in with the proletariat. I'd rather be free with regular decent people than one of the cool guys who think they ought to run things because, according to Marx and Darwin, smart people can make us all better and happy.

Once in a while the proletariat does rise up and reassert its right to not be meddled with - like in the 80's. Trouble is, then we all go back to work and the meddlers start it all back up again. They think that somehow if they pass enough law, hand out enough bread and circuses, they can make people..................better. By better, they seem to mean more submissive.

Maslow was wrong about the whole hierarchy of needs thing. Altruism and productivity doesn't inevitably come as a result of being fed, clothed and housed adequately. Sometimes altruistic is just who you choose to be.  People often stand by their principles even while the priests are piling up wood about their feet and waving torches.

The progressive left believes we smart people can somehow make people better. 

As my favorite spaceship captain, Malcolm Reynolds once said, "I do not hold to that. So no more runnin'.  I aim to misbehave."

© 2014 by Tom King

Time to Change Tactics and Go Guerrilla

New look for conservatives.

I'm a big military history buff and when I think about conflict, even conflict of a philosophical nature, I tend to think in military terminology about a response to something I think is just plain wrong. Ellen White's landmark 1888 book, The Great Controversy, lays out the spiritual history of the world in terms of a momentous conflict between good and evil and it is hard this day and age not to see the great political world conflicts as a similar confrontation between good and evil.

In the past three decades, the political division in the United States of America between liberals and conservatives have become become more pronounced to the point that we haven't seen this level of political nastiness since 1859, right before the Civil War broke out.

Politically, conservatism is losing the battle for the hearts and minds of America in favor of a centrist, socialist bread and circuses dispensing entrenched left-wing government bureaucracy and its allies in the Democrat party. There's a reason we're losing the battle.

Bill Whittle pointed out in this week's Klavan and Whittle members-only episode on PJTV that when you look at the situation from a military standpoint, it's easy to see why we're losing.  The left has air-superiority. Over the past century, the conservatives in America have gradually allowed themselves to lose the battle for the airwaves. The left infiltrated journalism schools, bought up media outlets, TV, radio and newspaper outlets and learned from the communist party how to infiltrate and use music, films and other entertainment resources to sell their message. Conservatives allowed liberals to steal a march on us that wound up with an almost entirely leftist mainstream media by the end of the 1970s.

On the media front, there has been an insurgency led by guys like Rush Limbaugh who took a medium searching for a product and gave it one.  AM radio was dying in the 80s because FM stations did a better job of broadcasting music - less static and interference. Limbaugh proved that people would put up with a little static to hear conservative political talk while driving to and from work or taking a lunch break. Limbaugh tried a brief foray into television, but TV was too entrenched and he shut it down, sticking with what worked. Because of his success, other conservative talk shows took off and soon there were radio stations that were all talk. Then Fox News sprang up on the new cable TV alternative to over-the-air network programming and proved that conservatives preferred a more balanced news source by a rather wide margin.

Next the Internet offered independent, unsponsored writers an outlet in the form of weblogs and the new blogosphere suddenly began pouring forth information that had not been sanitized and politicized by the mainstream media. The contrast between information in the blogosphere and in the traditional news was startling. If we are to keep the conservative viewpoint any kind of force at all, we have to get that message out there in any form we can, using any media available. 

Bill Whittle's assertation that we've lost air superiority is true, but we have actually been fighting back nontraditional resources like the Internet. The blogger groups grew up and established a legitimate place for themselves in news media.  Conservative Internet-based media like PJTV, Breitbart and the Drudge Report have outstripped similar liberal net-based efforts, but the mainstream media still seems to have the power to shout down conservative opinion, at least with what Rush Limbaugh has dubbed "the low-information voter".

It's time we start thinking of the battle for the American soul as if it were a war. It is one.  So, what do you do when your enemy has air superiority?

You don't give them a target to shoot at. You have to feel bad about the public blitzkriegs people like Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz, Herman Cain and Michelle Bachmann have had to endure.  Every time a conservative moves to the leadership, the liberals call in air strikes.  And air strikes they are, because every time a conservative leader rears his or her head, liberal thought police like Media Matters assault the news media with talking points and they all dutifully repeat those talking points over and over and over until the American public is forced to look up from the latest episode of Jersey Shores or Dancing with the Stars and notice that the media is saying that Sarah Palin is stupid.

We are entering a phase in this conflict where a guerrilla war is what we're fighting - at least until (and if) we can take back the big guns. In reality, whether we admit it or not, it's been a guerrilla war for some time.  So how do you fight a guerrilla war.

The first thing we do is take off the brightly colored uniforms. We have to stop labeling ourselves as Tea Party or Conservative or Libertarian. We just have to lead with the awkward questions and avoid labeling the questions as "conservative".  Instead of addressing stupidity about global warming by wailing about how stupid liberals are, which identifies you immediately as one of those evil conservatives Diane Sawyer warned you about, know enough about the issue to ask questions like this one from Bill Whittle, "Oh, and which 'climate' are we protecting from change?"  The Earth has had climates that have ranged from so hot the Earth was covered with jungle to so cold the Earth was covered in ice.  Are we talking about the climate of 2013 or 1944 or 1912 or 1492 or 550 AD or even 1000 BC? Climates change. Who are we to decide which one is best.

George Carlin pointed out in one of his more spectacular rants that we can't save the planet and that it's impossibly arrogant to think we can. If mother nature doesn't like us, she'll just swat us like bugs and move on down the road. Send your friend who is concerned about global climate change, the youtube clip of that little speech of Carlin's without comment. They just love Carlin.

Whatever issue it is, the debt, the budget, entitlements or foreign policy, just stop waving the conservative, tea party or Republican flag. It only calls down the drones upon your head. Instead, use the stealth approach.  Simply make the logical argument or ask one of those questions that's hard for them to answer.  If we ask the unanswerable questions and let the public figure it out for themselves, we are harder to discredit.  The liberals are already trying to do that by posing as conservatives and trying to ask those killer questions that prove the left is right. Unfortunately, for them, what seems obvious from the perspective of their laptops perched on one of those little round tables at the university Starbuck's is not so obvious when you look at it from out in the real world. Logic, it turns out, is the conservative's friend.

Like a SEAL team working "in-country", we have to hold back on the machine gun fire and take the time to win the hearts and minds of the real people if we ever hope to at least come out ahead in all this. To do so, we may have to forgo the flags for a bit. We need to stop leading with labels and lead with logic. We have to approach with kindness and simple questions, not hostility. We have to treat those who do not understand what is going on as if they were our neighbors and share information with them in a neighborly fashion.  

It will likely come as a surprise, for some of our conservative, tea party, patriot, Republican, Libertarian compatriots that the folk we need to be reaching actually are our neighbors and that we need to treat them as we would have them treat us - with respect.
© 2013 by Tom King

Answering "Zingers" from the Left.

Have you ever noticed that when you argue with a Democrat they jump on you with one of a specific set of responses designed to strike you down and leave you speechless. They are as follows:

1) You're a racist.
2) You don't understand what it's like to be poor.
3) You see everything in black and white.
4) It's George W. Bush's fault.
5) You're stupid and ignorant (I get this when they really run out of logical arguments).
6) The Republicans obstruct everything Obama tries to do.
7) You only get your information from Fox News.
8) (My personal favorite) I'd really like some of whatever you're smoking.

I have decided to go ahead and answer these "killer" arguments all at once so I can just post the link to this page and not waste an hour trying to reason with someone who's working a set of talking points.  Let me start with an observation.  Each of these arguments is an excuse for two things:  1) a lack of a real argument and 2) the obvious failure of the Democrats to accomplish anything more than collapsing the economy, extending the recession and so burying American business in regulation, taxes and debt that millions of Americans have flat our given up looking for work - the only thing that has reduced the "unemployment" rate.  So, let's just start with that on the table.  

So my answer to the 8 Deadly Excuses is as follows:

1) You're a racist:  I grew up in a small college town in North Central Texas. We had kids from all over the world. I never understood racism. I stood with black friends on civil rights. When my own kids grew up in the same town, our house looked like the United Nations with young people of every race and color represented.  I worked for 40 years as a teacher, therapist and director of nonprofit agencies working with people from every race, class and economic level. 

2) You don't understand what it's like to be poor:  I grew up in a home where boloney sandwiches were a treat. We were dirt poor most of my life. I worked 40 years in the nonprofit sector. They don't call them nonprofits for nothing. I've been on Food Stamps. I once had to ride a bicycle to town to buy groceries for my hungry children and rode back with 3 sacks balanced on my handlebars along country roads dodging dogs.  I once got a job after 3 months unemployment, the loss of my car and home where I had to get up at 4 am and ride a bicycle through the country (again dodging angry dogs) 7 miles each way to catch a bus to ride 45 miles each way to work as a laborer on a nuclear power plant in order to feed my family.  We've been so broke we've made a meal off wild food we gathered.  Don't tell me I don't understand being poor.  What I understand is how hard it is to escape poverty when the government reduces you to dependency and then punishes you for even trying to lift yourself back up.

3) You see everything in black and white:  I spent 40 years working in the nonprofit sector picking up the wreckage of a child welfare system and government "helping". I worked with kids who were brutalized, battered and sick and watched bureaucrats shuffle them around, plugging them into boxes trying to meet their agendas with little ability to get them real help. In some cases they didn't care - after all they get paid every Friday.  I watched one-size-fits-all, designed-in-Washington social programs fail and fail and fail till it made me sick.  I saw it all and in full color. Many of my colleagues gave it up because they just couldn't take it anymore. I'll tell you who sees everything in black and white - political ideologues and bureaucrats who are more concerned about ticking off boxes on their evaluation sheets than they are about whether people in trouble get any real help or not.

4) It's George W. Bush's fault.  It take 18 months for the laws and budgets of a US Congress to show an effect in the economy. In 2006 the American people gave the Democrats control of the House and Senate.  18 months later in the summer of 2008, the housing bubble burst and the economy began to collapse despite assurances over the past decade by Democrats that there was nothing wrong at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and that they were doing great things. Apparently they weren't and George Bush in the middle of a war against terrorism and with a Congress working against him had precious little to do with it.  Once Obama was elected it was an all Democrat show and it's pretty much been downhill all the way since then. Might as well blame it all on Ronald Reagan for all the sense that argument makes.

5) You're stupid and ignorant.  I tested out of my Freshman year of college, I have a bachelor's degree in communications and I had the highest GRE scores in my graduate school psych program. I'm a published author, have written more than 2000 articles for which I was paid and have a measured IQ that makes me eligible to join MENSA. I read the equivalent of one or two books a week and have done so since they started letting me check out books from the library in 3rd grade.  Mentally, I'm okay.

6) The Republicans obstruct everything Obama tries to do:  Thank God they do or we'd be in a worse mess than we are.  The president can't even get a budget past the senate which has a Democrat majority.  Since he took office he has yet to get a budget through Congress because his own senate won't allow it. He had two years at the beginning of his administration where he had both the house and the senate.  His great triumph?  Obamacare which, to this day, he keeps giving exemptions to Obamacare for his cronies in the unions and to big corporations that supported his presidential campaigns. A little obstructionism from Republicans is probably the only reason we're not in a massive Depression right now with a socialist government and gulags.
  
7) You only get your information from Fox News:  I should get my information from the Huffington Post?  ABC/NBC/CBS/CNN?  The New York Times?  The left-leaning partisanship of these media outlets is shameless.  I do watch them by the way.  I actually get most of my headline type news from Yahoo News which is no right wing news organization by any means.  I listen to speeches, read political opinion pieces, and am a student of history (you should check my bookshelves if you don't believe me). I've read HG Wells' History of the World for the Progressive view of world history.  I get most of my history, however, from the works of actual historians like Catton, Ryan, Foote and from the actual historical figures like Churchill, Grant and Einstein  and not filtered through agenda laden "textbooks".  My information comes from many sources and I form my own opinions thank you.

8) (My personal favorite) I'd really like some of whatever you're smoking:  No you wouldn't.  The only thing I smoke are the biscuits when I forget I have some in the oven because I'm writing a blog post or working on a book I'm ghost-writing.  I never bought the "better living through chemistry" approach. I'm a teetotaler, avoiding alcohol, coffee, hallucinogenic drugs, chewing tobacco, snuff or other mind-altering substances so far as possible.

To my friends on the left:  I hope this helps us avoid the need to go over this same stuff again next time we talk.

© 2013 by Tom King