Outside the Beltway

Comments

1. charontwo says:
   Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 05:52

   Some more NAR stuff, at the Mall in DC.

   “NBC”

   JD Vance, Mike Johnson, Project 2025 are all very into this stuff.

   This is why the Trump campaign is airing all those anti-trans ads at football games, etc. Typical fascist demonization of minorities.

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2. Kathy says:
   Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 06:14

   Jokes for a post Project 2025 America:

   At the maximum security prison for dangerous enemies of the people, the warden picks three inmates at random and asks them whet they’re in for.

   The first one says, “I spoke out against JD Vance.”

   “I see,” says the warden. he turns to the second and asks, “how about you?”

   “I spoke out in favor of JD Vance,” the second one says.

   “You sure did.” The warden turns to the third. “And what brought you here?”

   The third prisoner says “I am JD Vance.”

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3. DK says:
   Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 06:42

   Abortion emerges as most important election issue for young women, poll finds (ABC)

   Abortion has emerged as the most important issue in the November election for women under 30, according to a survey by KFF — a notable change since late spring, before Vice President Kamala Harris entered the presidential race.

   Nearly four in 10 women under 30 surveyed in September and early October told pollsters that abortion is the most important issue to their vote. Just 20% named abortion as their top issue when KFF conducted a similar survey in late May and early June.

   The new survey found other shifts among women voters that stand to benefit Harris, including an increase of 24 percentage points in the number of women who said they were satisfied with their choice of candidates and a 19-point increase in the number who said they were more motivated to vote than in previous presidential elections.

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4. Kathy says:
   Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 07:05

   More lyrics free opera, The Marriage of Figaro overture by Mozart.

   2
5. charontwo says:
   Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 07:56

   Apologies for the length, this is part of a much longer piece on Steve Bannon, J D Vance, NATO, Ukraine, Brexit etc,, it’s all pretty scary IMO:

   “VanityFair”

   The best outsider’s portrait of Bannon is a book by the ethnographer Benjamin Teitelbaum, called War for Eternity: Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers. Teitelbaum spent years interviewing Bannon and his like-minded allies and associates, from the late Brazilian “far-right guru” Olavo de Carvalho, as The New York Times described him, to Aleksandr Dugin, the philosopher who was, in the years before Russia launched its shadow takeover of Crimea and parts of Eastern Ukraine, one of Russia’s most prominent public intellectuals, in posh hotel rooms and under-the-radar gatherings. He got unparalleled access to Bannon, and he was able to do so in part because he came to him not as a political reporter but as a scholar interested in an obscure school of thought known as Traditionalism.

   Bannon’s WAR ROOM show is a cross between A DAILY TROOP MUSTER and A POLICY TRAINING SCHOOL, which he uses to TUTOR MILLIONS OF “PEASANTS,” as he likes to phrase his target demographic.

   Capital-T Traditionalism is a mystical philosophy developed by a Frenchman named René Guénon, who converted to Islam and died in Cairo in 1951. His syncretic view held that modern ideologies like liberalism and communism had perverted the natural, sacred, timeless true order of human life. Many inheritors adapted and expanded Guénon’s philosophy, most notably the Italian Julius Evola, for whom the natural order of things meant men ruled over women, and whites and Aryans were above Black, Jewish, and Arab people. Evola used his theories to elaborate a meta-narrative of why nations and empires rise and fall—a small addition to a library of esoteric historiography that now makes for popular fodder in conservative circles. “Traditionalists aspire to be everything modernity is not,” Teitelbaum wrote. “To commune with what they believe are timeless, transcendent truths and lifestyles rather than to pursue ‘progress.’ ”

   Bannon first encountered Traditionalism in his 20s, when he secretly practiced meditation and frequented mystical bookstores while serving on the Navy destroyer USS Paul F. Foster. Teitelbaum does not try to pin Bannon as a devotee, although some people on today’s far right certainly are. The word that best describes Bannon, in quite a few senses, is restless. He’s a compulsive reader, with an ideology that owes more to his own experience, and sense of loyalty to “legacy Americans,” as one Bannon employee put it to me, than to any one philosophy. But as he followed a path into the American elite—from a working-class kid who grew his hair long and lived in a tent while attending Virginia Tech to founding his own Beverly Hills investment firm—Bannon kept up his mystical studies and developed an outlook that shared much with a small-t traditionalist backlash against the financialized and tech-dominated world that was emerging. He saw the “aristocrats” around him as a deadened people, hopelessly disconnected from the blood and sweat and deep sense of shared, spiritual purpose that had made America into a great nation. When he arrived at Goldman Sachs to work in mergers and acquisitions, he discovered he was the only member of his cohort of hires who’d come from a blue-collar background or had served in the military. “The aristos don’t fight!” he told Teitelbaum. “They strictly don’t.”

   Bannon developed relationships with Traditionalist-minded critics of the global system all over the world, from former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. Some of them, like the openly Traditionalist philosopher Dugin, have been deeply antagonistic to America. Bannon and Dugin are hardly allies, even if Dugin welcomes the idea that a nationalist America might rise up alongside the “Solar” Russia he dreams of, borrowing an idea from Evola. But they share an intuitive sense of “the tradition,” as Bannon said when the two met in 2018. More importantly, Bannon and populists throughout the West came to welcome the vision, now Russia’s guiding policy, of a multipolar world order that will rise in place of the American-led order, which Bannon had come to believe was ravaging Americans.

   “America isn’t an idea,” he told Dugin. “It is a country, it is a people, with roots, spirit, destiny,” he said. “And what you’re talking about, the liberalism and the globalism…real American people are the victims of that. We’re talking about the backbone of American society, the people who give the country its spirit—they’re not modernists. They’re not the ones blowing trillions of dollars trying to impose democracy on places that don’t want it. They’re not the ones trying to create a world without borders. They’re getting screwed in all this by an elite that doesn’t care about them and that isn’t them.”

   In August 2019, Bannon released an interview with Farage in which he spoke to a mystery that hangs over much of the upheaval in the world order today—why it’s the right and not the traditional critics on the left who suddenly present the biggest threat to the global world order. “The reason is the immigration—they’re not prepared to take it on,” he said about left populist figures like Bernie Sanders and then UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. “We’re prepared to take it on. It’s a global revolt. It’s a zeitgeist.” To Bannon, and for pretty much everyone involved in his diffuse movement, resisting the empire is bound up in a project of preserving the spiritual character of a nation. And there was another thing he later talked to me about at great length that the left shies away from—in part because, in his view, it would mean throwing into question all hopes and dreams of building a stronger social safety net or slowing climate change.

   This was the global dollar system. Worldwide use of the dollar to settle international transactions and of American bonds as a trusted means for the world’s central banks to store their currency reserves allows the American government to spend far beyond its revenues, secure in the knowledge that financial markets will act as a credit card with an almost infinite limit. This has allowed America to spend $31 trillion more than it has taken in since the end of the Cold War, because America’s military dominance and stable government serve as guarantees. This system, Bannon warned in a series of pamphlets titled “The End of the Dollar Empire” (electronically published in collaboration with his show’s main sponsor, the precious-metals broker Birch Gold), was falling apart—“not quickly, but inevitably.” If the world actually does abandon the dollar, America’s days as the world’s great military power will come to an abrupt end.

   snip

   The war in Ukraine has made painfully clear to the West that money alone doesn’t translate to the kind of raw power it takes to win a full-scale war between modern armies. As our economy became more and more financialized and our manufacturing moved to China, Western leaders began to wake up to a broader crisis of production—which in America has become apparent from the fact that China has 230 times the military shipbuilding capacity of the United States to the fact that the few US factories producing 155-mm artillery shells proved incapable of meeting Ukraine’s needs. Some policy experts here argue that we need to spend far more—6 percent of GDP, even—to rapidly rebuild our defense, guarantee our security to allies from South Korea to Eastern Europe, and prepare for a possible two-front war with Russia and China. The problem is that we really have no way to afford that kind of spending unless we restructure how we pay for benefits like Medicare and Social Security—or add further to our spiraling debt. Europe faces similar impossible decisions.

   Long ago, Vance told me that the first political book he ever read was THE DEATH OF THE WEST, by Pat Buchanan, and that the book STILL SHAPES HIS THINKING.

   After I’d checked in, I got a text asking if I’d like to visit the small Alexandria house that JD Vance calls home when he’s in Washington.

   There is a lot more.

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6. charontwo says:
   Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 08:11

   @charontwo:

   I think fear and moral panic are Trump’s secret special sauce. He calls himself the “Protector.” the macho tough guy, the strong man (right out of Ben Garrison cartoons or McNaughton paintings).

   The suckers are afraid of change, modernity, lack of religion and they gobble this swill right up.

   I think the Democrats need to attack this, make him look weak, incoherent etc.

   3
7. DeD says:
   Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 10:18

   Historians: He’s a fascist. Political scientists: He’s a fascist. His own aides: He’s a fascist. The NYT: He shows a wistful longing for a bygone era of global politics.

   https://open.substack.com/pub/margaretsullivan/p/about-those-new-york-times-headlines?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=9qjyo

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8. charontwo says:
   Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 10:36

   @DeD:

   I showed these headlines and stories to my graduate students at Columbia University’s journalism school on Friday morning. I didn’t ask leading questions or try to tell them what to think. They didn’t hesitate in identifying the problem.

   So the NYT flunks Journalism 101, not a new observation, and getting no respect in its quest for interviews. And not open to learning.

   This goes way back, Whitewater, Judith Miller, Buttery Males etc.etc.

   8
9. charontwo says:
   Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 10:46

   @charontwo:

   More from the Vanity Fair linky:

   The IM-1776 event in Nashville was a party and talk with Erik Prince, the Michigan industrial scion and former Navy SEAL who founded the private military company Blackwater, and who during the Iraq War became a figure symbolizing the entire cozy alignment of militarism and corporate power that shaped the second Bush administration.

   …

   And then Prince said that America needs to look—as I once quoted Vance saying in this magazine—to Andrew Jackson, “who was a great president, and by the way against central banking,” he said to a loud cheer. He said that the so-called spoils system Jackson had introduced to the federal civil service, allowing a president to freely hire allies and fire enemies, should come back, echoing what Trump has made very clear he intends to do in clearing house across the government. Then Prince brought it back to the dollar. The military had become “so large and unaccountable,” he said, “because of fiat currency, where Congress can just appropriate an extra trillion dollars a year, spending it on itself and on stupidity.… It’s like America on unlimited doughnuts.”

   Mark Granza, the editor in chief of IM-1776, told me that 250 or so people had showed up to the brewery where the event was being held, on the periphery of the massive Bitcoin conference that had brought 20,000 people to town and where Trump himself was soon to give a speech. Prince is a star in these circles, but I was still shocked by how many people I knew who’d shown up—Special Forces veterans and backwoods preppers and a great number of big names from Twitter, some of whom aren’t right-wing. The event was organized in part by Nick Allen, who runs Sovereign House, the downtown Manhattan event space that is the semiofficial headquarters of the Dimes Square scene of edgy and often right-wing writers and artists. Allen introduced me to Prince as I walked in. He was noticeably fit and unassuming, of medium height and dressed casually in jeans and a checked button-down shirt with his sleeves rolled up to the elbow. We chatted for a while about how I’d just been arrested and deported from the Central African Republic under the belief that I was secretly working for an American military contractor (a different one); then I left Prince to the hovering cloud of fans that circled him the whole night. “Stay safe out there,” he told me. “It’s a hard job you’ve got.”

   After the event, which was otherwise off the record, I smoked a cigarette with Granza, and he clarified that I could quote what had been said during the question-and-answer discussion Prince had with an IM-1776 editor.

   The discussion kept circling back to the dollar. The IM-1776 editor noted that today America spends more on the debt’s interest than on the military. Prince had said we needed to take “whatever legal means necessary” to drastically cut the federal budget. “Do you think we’re at a point,” the editor asked, if drastic measures weren’t taken, that “things spin off the rails fiscally?”

   “We are definitely approaching Weimar levels of debt,” Prince said. “And look, the dollar as the reserve currency of the world is underpinned by the illusion of US military hegemony. And when we fail continuously, our friends see that and our enemies really see that, so they’re probing and testing. And the more we overuse sanctions, the more people move away.”

   There are a lot of these people, they are well connected and dead serious.

   3
10. Lucy's Football says:
    Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 10:53

    So the key issue for the Trump campaign is anti-immugrant. That is almost their own focus, and it seems to be working. The immigrants are stealing your job, your housing costs too much because of them, all crime us from immigrants and FEMA is out of money because they spent it on immigrants. I would not be surprised if the origin of the Haitian s eating pets is the campaign itself. If Trump wins, I give him two years at the most and then they push him out, and Vance will be in. Then the billionaires and competent crazies will be running things.
11. charontwo says:
    Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 11:06

    This is such a good piece (Vanity Fair quoted above), I feel guilty and tedious about excerpting such long quotes, but it’s paywalled so …

    “Vanity Fair”

    I first reached out to Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama’s most influential foreign policy adviser, by email while I was at the NATO summit, hoping to talk without the filter of press minders and handlers. We both live in LA, so when I got home we met for coffee in Venice. He wore a faded black T-shirt and a Zabar’s baseball cap, and he seemed in some ways still exhausted from his years in government. He was very quick to say that the American system was indeed an “empire,” and he had clearly thought a great deal about what this meant.

    “There’s two ways of looking at this,” he said. “I think the lazier way is that the US has hundreds of military installations all over the world and has territories that most Americans don’t even know we have.” But this was just the obvious part. “The more accurate version is that most of the system under which the world functions is US-created, -managed, -perpetuated. So everything from the global financial system to the network of security alliances” that we’d built around the world “were all built to plug into American wealth.”

    “The dollar is the world’s currency,” he went on. “The US controls the global financial system, the US consistently weaponizes sanctions to try to compel countries to do what we want.” He seemed bemused by the idea that a system like this was anything other than an empire.

    “People separate out our military footprint from our financial footprint,” he said. “But the reason that people have to trust that the dollar is a reliable currency is because it’s literally backed by the United States military, even though that’s not what we say the mission of the United States military is.”

    We ended up talking for three and a half hours, about the tiring complexity of this system and the incredibly difficult problems he’d experienced in helping manage it. He’d helped negotiate the deal to normalize relations with Cuba, the Iran nuclear deal, and the Paris climate accords. He shares, in fact, many criticisms of this grand imperial system that are being raised now on the populist right.

    I guess where we differ,” he said, “it’s this effort to evolve the system while keeping it roughly in place.” He’d just published a piece in Foreign Affairs arguing for a new global arrangement that would acknowledge an emerging multipolar order while leaving in place America’s system of alliances and the basic plumbing.“ “I don’t believe in just pulling the plug.”

    We talked a lot about why he’d moved to LA with his wife and two kids, away from the DC world where people thought constantly about this stuff, and why he had no desire to go back. It had put him in an impossible bind. “I think the innovation of the Bannon and Vance project,” he said, “is that it’s forced the left to become defenders of the very institutions they’re supposed to be skeptical of, like the CIA, like the broader intelligence community, like NATO.”

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12. Jay L Gischer says:
    Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 11:09

    @charontwo: So, a guy who runs a paramilitary, mercenary company thinks the US spends too much on its military.

    Why hire and train people, where you can just pay Eric Prince when you need troops? Troops that won’t be troubled by niceties like oaths to the Constitution and so on.

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13. Jay L Gischer says:
    Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 11:13

    Weimar levels of debt? Only in your motivated-reasoning, cherry-picked dreams.

    Also, where were you when Rs proposed tax cuts that made the debt worse? Cheering them on?

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14. charontwo says:
    Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 11:28

    Who knows what Vance really cares about, if anything besides his own ambition and power.

    He will team with anyone Thiel, Wallnau, Trump, Musk anyone he can use to get some more.

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15. Joe says:
    Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 11:46

    The problem is that we really have no way to afford that kind of spending unless we restructure how we pay for benefits like Medicare and Social Security—or add further to our spiraling debt.

    Fascinating that the only solution is entitlement cuts and not tax increases on the highest earners.

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16. Modulo Myself says:
    Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 12:28

    Guys like Bannon and Vance are the most obvious signs of decline. They’re like a barbarian who took the Marcus Lucius Augustus in 410 after looting a library, and the idea we need to upend our entitlement program in order to finance defense spending for a war that is not on the horizon or really even imaginable is an end of the empire MLM scheme.

    3
17. Mimai says:
    Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 12:52

    @charontwo:
    Non-paywalled version.

    2
18. Stormy Dragon says:
    Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 13:51

    @DK:

    I don’t even think it’s just abortion specifically. Abortion is like a stand in for the entire array of “abusing women” positions that the Republican party supports

    6
19. CSK says:
    Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 14:16

    An upstanding young male Trump fan says he won’t vote for Harris because she’s an abortion-loving whore:

    http://www.rawstory.com/trump-supporter-christian/

    Talk about incels.

    1
20. just nutha says:
    Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 14:17

    @Joe: Not as much as you might think. Not paying taxes is foundational to the beginnings of the nation.

    2
21. Gustopher says:
    Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 14:28

    @Joe: “restructure how we pay for benefits like Medicare and Social Security” could include raising taxes.

    It probably doesn’t, but it could.

    It could also include creating a special task force to rob citizens at gunpoint. Highway Robbery as a funding mechanism. Perhaps in other countries.

    2
22. Gustopher says:
    Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 14:50

    I’ve been thinking about the 3/5ths compromise lately, as one does, and how the 13th Amendment bans slavery and involuntary servitude except for people convicted of a crime.

    Many states effectively require prisoners to work while in prison. For House districts, shouldn’t those prisoners only count as 3/5ths of a person?

    This sent me down a shallow rabbit hole to Section 2 of the 14th Amendment:

    Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

    That takes away the 3/5ths compromise, but arguably adds a new wrinkle — if the right to vote is denied or abridged in any way, the states representation shall be reduced in proportion.

    Before I wander further down this rabbit hole — as it is a lovely day outside and the litter box needs cleaning and I should either spend the day outside or scrubbing a litter box — shouldn’t this mean that a state’s number of representatives be directly affected by voter suppression?

    Also, it would seem to very explicitly penalize any state where the legislature were to appoint electors — which might come up in the next election, as Trump and his cronies wanted it to come up in 2020. Granted, I don’t think the American Republic of Trumpistan would feel particularly obliged to live up to the US Constitution.

    I really do not want to clean that litter box.

    2
23. Kylopod says:
    Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 15:13

    @Gustopher: What you’re describing is directly relevant to a chapter from a book I read recently, which I highly recommend: One Person, One Vote: A Surprising History of Gerrymandering in America, by Nick Seabrook.

    It delves heavily into the topic of gerrymandering from its inception (tracing its roots to a phenomenon in the Middle Ages known as rotten boroughs) to the present day. But it also discusses phenomena that may not fit the technical definition of gerrymandering but which are closely related, and one of those is prison gerrymandering.

    That’s literally what it’s called–there’s a group called the Prison Gerrymandering Project, aimed at fighting this problem. What it refers to is the fact that prisons tend to be located outside of the areas in which the prisoners lived when they were free citizens, and often that means people from more urban areas being relocated to rural areas. They get counted in the census as residents of the areas where the prisons are located, despite having little to no contact with the surrounding communities and (apart from a couple of states) being unable to vote. As a result, the districts containing these prisons get disproportionate representation. So it’s basically a version of the 3/5ths situation all over again, a fact underscored by the prisoners being disproportionately minorities, lending undue representation to white rural areas.

    And that’s not even getting into the way forced labor at prisons constitutes a loophole (laid out explicitly in the 13th Amendment) to the ban on involuntary servitude.

    3
24. Stormy Dragon says:
    Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 15:17

    Question of the day: what are the NATO Article V implications of Israel launching a chemical weapons attack on Italian peacekeeping troops in Southern Lebanon?

    UN says Israeli tanks burst into base, Israel gives different account

    1
25. CSK says:
    Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 15:37

    DNA testing reveals that Columbus was a Jew from Spain; he concealed his Jewishness to avoid persecution.

    3
26. gVOR10 says:
    Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 15:40

    @charontwo: @Mimai: Thanks for the link. That Vanity Fair article is scary stuff. It sure reads like Bannon wants to burn everything down with nothing to replace it. Maybe just revert to competing nation states. That worked so well up through 1945.

    2
27. Kylopod says:
    Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 15:44

    @CSK:

    DNA testing reveals that Columbus was a Jew from Spain; he concealed his Jewishness to avoid persecution.

    This has been debated for years, though up to now there’s been no conclusive DNA evidence to support the hypothesis and there was a general consensus that it was doubtful. I’m a little skeptical of this new study (which is revealed in a documentary), but we’ll see if it holds up.

    Claims that modern DNA studies prove this or that historical figure to have been secretly of Jewish origin, from Thomas Jefferson to Adolf Hitler, often turn out to be a lot less than meets the eye.

    3
28. gVOR10 says:
    Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 15:45

    @Gustopher:

    if the right to vote is denied or abridged in any way, the states representation shall be reduced in proportion.

    A provision of the Constitution historically more honored in the breach than the observance. In fact, entirely in the breach, despite numerous opportunities for observance.

    2
29. charontwo says:
    Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 16:09

    https://x.com/OurShallowState/status/1845515857541349466

    You don’t have to go that far back. If you went back just 18 mos., the difference in Trump, then and now, side by side, in diction, syntax, vocabulary, affectation, appearance – is shocking. Fast forward 18 mos., based on the same rate of decline, he could be approaching Jell-o.

    2
30. dazedandconfused says:
    Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 17:05

    @Kylopod:

    Ignores the possibility his ancestors converted to Catholicism at some point too, as a significant number of European Jews did, and he might not have even known.

    1
31. CSK says:
    Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 17:14

    Apparently a guy named Vern Miller, 49, a self-proclaimed sovereign citizen was arrested a mile a way from Trump’s Coachella rally carrying a fake press pass, a fake VIP pass, a handgun, and a shotgun with a high capacity magazine. He was later released on $5000 bond.
32. Kylopod says:
    Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 19:07

    @dazedandconfused:

    Ignores the possibility his ancestors converted to Catholicism at some point too, as a significant number of European Jews did, and he might not have even known.

    It’s possible, but most of the conversos were converted under duress and maintained their Jewish identity in secret. Columbus set sail just a few days after the edict of expulsion, and he had conversos on his ship with him. If he was of Jewish descent, while we may not be able to know for sure, it’s likely he knew about it and was keeping it secret to avoid persecution at a time when conversos were a prime target.
33. al Ameda says:
    Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 19:29

    @charontwo:

    … as I once quoted Vance saying in this magazine—to Andrew Jackson, “who was a great president, and by the way against central banking,” he said to a loud cheer.

    And, the historically low garbage president that he was, somehow, even though he hated the central banking system, he ends up on the $20 bill.

    You can’t make this stuff up.

    3
34. Kathy says:
    Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 21:19

    @CSK:

    You know, there’s some irony in that the party calling for violence is the one on the receiving end of so many assassination attempts.

    2
35. DrDaveT says:
    Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 21:45

    @Kathy:

    You know, there’s some irony in that the party calling for violence is the one on the receiving end of so many assassination attempts.

    Or, at least, it gives a bit of insight into what they really meant by “law and order” for all of those years…

    3
36. Kathy says:
    Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 22:01

    On other Weirdo Felon rally news, attendees were stranded at the venue when not enough buses showed up to shuttle them back to the parking area, over 3 km away (about a 2 hour walk).

    the same thing happened in Omaha four years ago. That time under very harsh winter conditions.

    The obvious explanation is El Weirdo cares that the audience shows up, but not about how they get back home. The cult members, though, are inventing conspiracy theories on the spot. This is how they can keep believing the leopards won’t eat their face, as they are eating their face.

    Video commentary on same.

    2
37. Jay L Gischer says:
    Monday, 14 October 2024 at 00:55

    @CSK: One guy gets to shoot his mouth off and lo and behold he’s in national media. It’s a trend story!!! It’s a breathless take!!! It’s based on polls that also have tiny samples, and may be horse shit.

    Yeah, there’s always some guy with a crazy opinon.