Friday, September 13, 2024

Memphis gun control measures back on ballot, judge rules

By Jon Styf | The Center Square, Sep 12, 2024 - A gun control ballot initiative is back on Shelby County Nov. 5 ballot after Shelby County Chancellor Melanie Taylor Jefferson ruled in favor of the Memphis City Council, according to several media reports.

The ballot questions, which would be unbinding, have been the subject of debate and legal issues over the past several weeks.

The ballot questions ask about preventing individuals from carrying a handgun without a permit, banning the sale or possession of “assault rifles” in most cases with some exceptions and the addition of extreme risk protection orders, often referred to as red flag laws.

The measures were approved by the city council in July and then recently challenged by state legislative leaders, with House Speaker Cameron Sexton threatening to withhold shared state sales tax from Memphis if the referendum were on the ballot.

Memphis received $78 million in shared sales tax last budget year, State Affairs reported.

The Shelby County Election Commission then said it would follow direction from state leadership and not place the issues on the ballot.

Then the Memphis City Council announced it would challenge that ruling in a lawsuit.

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When You're too Crazy for Marjorie Taylor Green, You Must Really be Nuts


Laura Loomer Is a Visible Symptom of Trump’s Problems, Not the Cause of Them

By Jeffrey Blehar, National Review, September 13, 2024 - The former president knows by now the kind of people he wants surrounding him.

As a general rule, I prefer to ignore repulsive internet cranks and lunatics until forced by events to take notice; Greta Thunberg barely interests me anymore, and Tucker Carlson morally and intellectually wrote himself off with his Russia trip -- until his transparent “Nazi-curious” antics got entangled with a presidential race and forced us to pay attention to him for a minute longer. But now I guess I have to talk about another despicable internet nutjob, because Laura Loomer is making real news now, not merely “extremely online” news. It is incredibly difficult to do proper justice to how full-tilt insane and repulsively cheap Loomer’s entire public adult life has been, and to recount it would be to list one shockingly vile or comically stupid act after another. 
... The spread of pure misinformation and paranoid conspiracy theories has historically been her bread and butter. The idea of 9/11 being “an inside job,” which Loomer has endorsed (of course), is only the beginning of it; in 2018 she repeatedly claimed, Alex Jones–style, that the victims of both the Parkland, Fla., and Santa Fe, Tex., mass school shootings were in fact “crisis actors” staging an assault on gun rights. (She also averred that the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooter was in fact an ISIS plant and the truth was being covered up — a conspiracy theory she fought with fellow lunatic Jack Posobiec over for proper “credit.”) (read more)
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..... Loomer went nuclear, accusing both Greene and Graham of being insufficiently MAGA, questioning the senator’s sexuality, criticizing the congresswoman for having affairs that led to her divorce, and comparing her to a “hooker.” ... This week’s 9/11 commemorations led to the resurfacing of past posts made by Loomer in which she questioned whether the U.S. government had a role in, or forewarning of, the attacks on that day. .... she actually called for Kellyanne Conway’s daughter to hang herself
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Thursday, September 12, 2024

Running the Asylum

Do Americans realize how radical Trump’s operation has become?

By Nick Catoggio, The Dispatch, Sep 12, 2024- Nostalgia is a thief and a liar. It steals the pleasure we should take in progress and replaces it with nonsense about the past. If you find yourself pining for days gone by, chances are you’re not pining for an era that was “better.” You’re pining for the simplicity of youth. 

I hate nostalgia, especially as a reactionary political gimmick, but we’re all prone to it. This week, I found myself feeling nostalgic for the relative sobriety and judiciousness of … Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign.

I realize that I’m fooling myself, as nostalgists usually are. After all, from his first moments as a presidential candidate in 2015, Trump was demagoguing illegal immigrants as rapists and drug dealers. He landed on America’s political radar in 2011 by tantalizing suckers with lies about Barack Obama’s birth certificate. He’s always been a cretin and a smear merchant with a taste for intimidating critics. If he had displayed a shred of sobriety or judiciousness as a candidate in 2016, he wouldn’t have become a darling of feral populists to begin with.

But if you were the sort of partisan conservative who was keen to find reasons to support him that year, you could find them. He chose the very sober Mike Pence as his running mate. He ended up with Kellyanne Conway as his campaign manager and RNC Chairman Reince Priebus as a top adviser, both of them old political hands. After he won and began to fill out his Cabinet, he selected sensible figures like business executive Rex Tillerson and retired Marine Gen. James Mattis for top positions. ... Trump would never be sober or judicious himself, but it was conceivable that the political operation supporting him would be.

Not anymore.

This week, in the span of about 96 hours, a lie about Haitian immigrants killing and eating people’s pets made it from the dregs of online populism to J.D. Vance’s social media account to Trump’s own lips ...Trump visited New York and Pennsylvania on Wednesday to commemorate the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, he brought with him a 9/11 truther who ... Any 2016-vintage pretense that the inmates aren’t running this asylum is gone. The man in charge can’t restrain his worst impulses, ... assuming he ever could, and the people around him seem eager to encourage rather than restrain them.

“Trump has decided to pal around with someone whom MTG thinks is too racist,” ... “MTG,” of course, is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the kookiest, least decorous populist figures in a party that’s chock full of ‘em. Even Greene was offended, though, when MAGA “influencer” Laura Loomer sneered that a White House inhabited by Harris will “smell like curry” and would probably employ a call center with an unintelligible customer satisfaction survey tacked on at the end. .... Perhaps, egged on by his yes-men, he can also no longer resist including some of the sleaziest, most sycophantic demagogues in his movement in his personal entourage.

... A figure like Tucker Carlson doesn’t need J.D. to convince Trump to take his calls, but the advice he gives Trump might prove more influential now that Vance is there to amplify it behind closed doors. 

... Trumpist righties have had lots of practice at creating their own reality. They’re good enough at it to have given their man a 50-50 shot at the presidency after four criminal indictments, two impeachments, and one insurrection. I would not bet against them on this.

Now, the other question: What’s left in this deplorable party for traditional conservatives?

... His operation thrives on threats and propaganda, fantasizes about persecuting its political enemies, hatches malign schemes to install coup-enablers in influential positions, and on most issues, apart from immigration, barely makes a pretense of having a policy agenda. Its popularity can’t even be excused as a reckless backlash to mass privation, as happens sometimes in countries following an economic calamity. There’s nothing civically healthy or politically redeeming about any of this. What on earth are people doing supporting it? (read it all)

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Wednesday, September 11, 2024

A Recommended Read: The Hidden Politics Behind the Nippon-US Steel Deal

Independent Institute:  The Hidden Politics Behind the Nippon-US Steel Deal

by Rod Willliams, Sept 11, 2024- The author argues that there is no rational reason to oppose a Japanese company buying US Steel. There is not a national security interest in preventing the purchase and not an economic objection. He argues that although imperfect, open markets are still the best path to national prosperity.

It has been my inclination to believe this and am pleased to see the argument articulated. In my view, much of the argument for tariffs, for "buy American," for "America First," and opposition to "globalism" is grounded in xenophobia, populist nationalism, and jingoism. I am a patriot and love this country, but being a patriot does not mean one suspends reason.  For most things I buy, I don't care where they are made. I have no preference for "made in America." 

Free trade in the era of Trump has fallen out of favor with people who think of themselves as conservative. Support for a market economy and free trade used to be a bedrock principle. Liberals had been protectionist, to shore up support among labor unions and because they genuinely are less committed to a market economy than are conservatives.  Now we are seeing both parties embrace statism and protectionism.   While there in logic in having secure supply lines and not being reliant on adversaries for critical recourses, we should not abandon the benefits of trade and a more connected integrated world. 

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Monday, September 09, 2024

Knox County Mayor & WWE Superstar Glenn Jacobs Announced as Beacon’s 20th Anniversary Keynote

 

Beacon is proud to announce that Knox County Mayor and wrestling superstar Glenn Jacobs will be the featured speaker at our 20th Anniversary Celebration on Saturday, November 9.
 
Glenn is currently serving his second term as mayor of Knox County. Prior to becoming mayor in 2018, Jacobs enjoyed a successful career in World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE)—most notably under the stage name “Kane”—culminating in his induction into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2021.
 
“We are thrilled to have Mayor Jacobs, a rising star in Tennessee, to help tell the story of why our state is the best place to live, work, and raise a family,” said Beacon CEO Justin Owen. “He has a fascinating story of his own, and he has led by example to defend those values that have made Tennessee great.”
 
A staunch fiscal conservative and fierce advocate for limited government, during his first term as mayor, Glenn delivered on his campaign promise of no tax hikes and was a leading voice pushing back against government overreach during the COVID-19 pandemic. In his second term, he is prioritizing workforce and economic development to make East Tennessee even more competitive in the rapidly evolving innovation-based global economy.
 
Glenn has appeared on Fox News, Fox Business, CNN, MSNBC, and other outlets, and is the author of the book “Mayor Kane.” Glenn and his wife, Crystal, have two daughters and two grandchildren.
 
Ahead of our 20th Anniversary Celebration, Mayor Jacobs applauded Beacon on its big milestone. “For the past 20 years, Beacon has been the state's most principled voice for individual liberty and free markets,” he said. “Their solutions directly benefit average Tennesseans every single day. That combination of principled leadership and practical solutions is a big deal to local officials like me who are closer to the ground.”
 
Beacon’s 20th Anniversary Celebration will take place on Saturday, November 9 in Franklin, Tennessee. The RSVP deadline isn't until October 9, 2024, but we have extended early-bird ticket prices! From now through September 15, tickets are discounted to $125. On September 16, the price will go up to $200, so grab your tickets and make plans to join us TODAY! To purchase tickets, visit www.beacontn.org/20 or click the button below. 

    Click here to reserve your tickets!

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    Tucker’s 1945 Project

     by Rod Williams, Sept.9, 2024- This is the last I will post about Tucker Carlson's pro-Nazi revisionist history podcast. I keep posting about it because, I just cannot believe that the Republican Paty, which I always viewed as the more patriotic and more anti-authoritarian of the two parties and the party that most strongly advocated bold American leadership in the world, has become a party that tolerates admirers of Nazism and is the party that has become the isolationist party and the peace party.  

    Mostly, I cannot not believe that a man who is an apologist for Hitler and Putin is Republican's favorite pundit and is allowed to speak at the Republican Convention. I can't believe that decent people who I have often agreed with and whose values I normally share, still consider Tucker Carlson a person worth listening to. I guess I keep hoping that if enough current Trumpinista insanity is reported, people will wake up and realize our party, and what was the conservative movement, has become a cult and they will want to take it back.

    The other reason, I am posting this piece is because I love the writing of Jonah Goldberg. He is my favorite political writer of era. Even if he was writing recipe reviews or travelogs I would read him. He is good. 

    I usually try to honor fair use rules and may have violated them with this, but I received this in an email from The Dispatch with an invitation to share, so I am assuming, reposting this is acceptable. I doubt The Dispatch will mind that I reposted it in my little blog and on Facebook. I know this is kind of long, but I think it is well worth reading. 

    If you do not follow Goldberg, follow this link for more and please consider subscribing to The Dispatch. I have done some highlighting in this piece. I just couldn't help myself. 

    Tucker’s 1945 Project

    Tucker Carlson’s ridiculous historical revisionism is the same stupid game the left used to play.

    By , The Dispatch, Sept. 6, 2024- Tucker Carlson’s latest jackassery is to suggest you’ve been spoon-fed a load of guff about … checks notes … Adolf Hitler
    I understand that in an age of hot takes and “well, ackshuallies … ” there aren’t a lot of taboos left to violate, not many places where the “don’t go there” sign hasn’t been torn up. When enough people are addicted to alcohol and the normal supply runs out, watch your mouthwash, cans of Sterno, and Aunt Helen’s rum cake, because the addicts will come for that. And when the supply of plausible “you’ve been lied to” hot takes runs dry, don’t be surprised when the dealers start selling you prison toilet wine with a fancy label. “Hey man, did you hear? Most frogs in the United States are now gay.” The next dealer has something even better. “All those aliens among us? You’ve been sold a bill of goods, man. They’re not aliens. They’re interdimensional demons—and the U.S.government has struck a deal with them.” 
    Not your cup of tea? Okay. How about: Hitler wasn’t really the bad guy, it was Winston Churchill. Oh yeah, that’s the stuff. Put that straight into my veins. 
    Now, I get it. Someone out there is going to say, “Hey, aren’t you the guy who wrote the book with the smiley face with the Hitler mustache on the cover?”
    Yeah, that’s me (it was a reference to a George Carlin bit, as I explain on page 2). But, you know what? I never disputed that Hitler was a bad guy. You know why? Because Hitler was a very bad guy. Even if you take the Holocaust out of the equation—something I do not think morally serious people can ever do, except to make a specific point—Hitler was still a really bad guy. He ordered the murder of countless Germans, including hundreds of fellow Nazis, political opponents, and tens to hundreds of thousands of Lebensunwertes Leben—“lives unworthy of life.” Ever the stickler for etymology, he revived the view that Slavs were, in fact, slaves. The crowd that bleats about America’s “forever wars” and decries “imperialism” should have the baseline consistency to deplore the invasions and annexations of most of Europe. 
    I resent having to argue that Hitler was bad because it means I took the bait. And, yes, I know Tucker and his pet didn’t quite say Hitler was the good guy, they just floated the idea that the “real” bad guy was Winston Churchill, which is almost worse because it’s part of an attempt to undermine America’s and the allies’ moral standing. A lot has already been written about this nonsense. I don’t think I can improve much on Niall Ferguson’s take about this ahistorical claptrap. 
    But I would add a point or two. First, it’s true that in the early 1930s Hitler fashioned himself as a champion of peace—he needed to while he prepared for war. Virtually every serious historian agrees that it was pure propaganda. But it was successful. Its purpose was to buy Hitler time to consolidate power and remilitarize. Germanophiles in America and the U.K. either wanted to believe the Germans didn’t actually want war—or wanted everyone else to. People make mistakes when they don’t have all the facts. Lots of decent people were soft on Germany and Hitler in the 1930s in part because they were desperate not to repeat the folly and carnage of the First World War. Wanting to give Hitler’s Germany the benefit of the doubt so as to avoid a replay was a mistake, but an understandable one. 
    But it’s one thing to believe the propaganda before it was proven to be propaganda. It’s another thing entirely to retroactively believe the propaganda after it was decisively disproved by Hitler’s own words and deeds, not to mention voluminous documentation, and millions of corpses. That’s not what historians do, it’s what cranks and crackpots do. Which is why Tucker found a guy (the author of Twitter — A How to Tips & Tricks Guide) to do exactly that. This goofball takes Hitler’s propagandistic lies and gambits at face value, then Tucker tells everyone: Don’t take my word for it, this guy is a great historian. This is like meeting a ditch digger at a bar who says that drinking raw elk milk will enlarge your penis and, because you either desperately want it to be true or you want other people to believe it’s true, you go around telling people the ditch digger is America’s most important doctor. 
    What’s Tucker doing?
    Does Tucker want to believe it’s true or does he simply want you to believe it’s true? Or does truth not even enter into the transaction? Maybe he just wants the attention, money, and perverse admiration of know-nothings, goobers, bigots, and cranks that comes with controversy? Is he like the Joker and just screwing with people for fun? Or is he, as Nick Cattogio compellingly suggests, trying to burn down all established norms and knowledge because he thinks he can be a powerful warlord in the new illiberal wasteland where the “courage” to spread intoxicating lies is the new standard of “leadership”? My answer to all of these questions is, to one extent or another, “yes.” 
    It doesn’t matter that Tucker doing all those things raises contradictions, because contradictions only matter when one is trying to discover the truth. But when the goal is to make all lies plausible and create personality cults around passionate liars, contradictions are the point.
    Vladimir Putin spews contradictory lies all the time, but he doesn’t care because, for him, truth is a meaningless fiction or a luxury for fools. When the standard of objective truth no longer matters, power becomes a new kind of subjective truth. Some of you may recall my longstanding gripes with philosophical pragmatism—which was ultimately a faux philosophy of power—and Bertrand Russell’s critique: “In the absence of any standard of truth other than success, it seems evident that the familiar methods of the struggle for existence must be applied to the elucidation of difficult questions, and that ironclads and Maxim guns must be the ultimate arbiters of metaphysical truth.” This is Putin’s version of truth-seeking. Saying that Stalin was an ally of Hitler or that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is lawless butchery may be objectively true, but that doesn’t matter if Putin can have you jailed or killed for saying it. The barrel of a gun becomes the ultimate arbiter of truth.
    Of course, Tucker isn’t Vladimir Putin, but he is an apologist for him and his approach to questions of fact. He’s also a practitioner of Steve Bannon’s Putinesque “flooding the zone with s–t.” Contradiction fuels chaos, and chaos—moral, intellectual, political chaos—is Tucker’s preferred medium. 
    The only prominent “What is Tucker doing?” theory I disagree with is the idea that he’s trying to get Kamala Harris elected. The number of things Tucker could say—truthfully!—that could get Trump in Dutch is very long (including things he’s said to me). Choosing to boost Hitler apologetics to get Kamala Harris elected is some four-dimensional chess fantasy stuff. I do think causing headaches for Trump and J.D. Vance is a benefit for him, because forcing them to either kowtow or denounce him is a flex move. Vance has already made it clear he won’t criticize Tucker, which is a demonstration—in Tucker’s estimation—of his power.
    No, the most likely explanation is that he likes Nazi apologetics, either on the merits or because of the reaction, or both. 
    So what’s to like? Again, I dismiss entirely the suggestion that he thinks he’s telling the truth. He might have convinced himself he believes it, but veracity isn’t the point. So what is appealing about the idea that the West took a wrong turn by opting to destroy Hitler? Giving antisemitism and Holocaust denial some lebensraum might be part of it, sure. I’m not trying to minimize the evil of that. 
    But I think that to the extent there’s an ideological project behind Tucker’s latest schtick, antisemitism isn’t the primary motivation. Sure, pissing off “the Jews” has its joys for him. But that’s probably gravy. Tucker is an acolyte of Patrick Buchanan and sees himself as the Buchanan of the 21st century. It’s worth recalling that Buchanan fell—or leapt—into the same intellectual bog Tucker is rolling in now. In 2008, Buchanan wrote Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. As bad as his argument was, it was far more serious than the nonsense spewed by Tucker’s “historian.” 
    Buchanan’s larger project, laid out in that book and several others, was to make the path America followed after World War II a “wrong turn.” In the postwar era, America turned its back on many of the things Buchanan thought made America “great.” Now, Buchanan’s version of greatness is saturated with just-so stories, nostalgia, dyspepsia, grievances, and a lot of correlation confused for causation. But in his telling, we became an “empire” and stopped being a “republic.” We admitted a lot of immigrants who had no business becoming Americans. Feminism, gay rights, Israel, free trade, civil rights, and other “problems” emerged in the postwar era. If “the past is a foreign country,” he liked that country better. 
    Buchanan was by no means entirely wrong in all of his criticisms of postwar America, but his fixation that it was all both entirely lamentable and entirely avoidable was entirely wrong. Buchanan changed as he got older (I was friendly with him, as were my parents). He got bitter and cranky. Tragically childless—no one tell J.D. Vance!—I think he was cut off from the best ambassadors of the country-that-is-the-present we can have in this life: our own children.
    The advantage of Tucker’s 1945 Project is that it’s easier to sell than the similar Wrong Turn projects swirling on the right. The new right nationalists and postliberals have been peddling the idea that we took a “Wrong Turn” with John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, England’s Glorious Revolution, or the Enlightenment generally. It’s hard to sell the poorly educated or miseducated on that stuff, in part because most of them have no idea who John Locke was or what the Enlightenment was about. But everybody’s heard of Hitler and Churchill. 
    The one problem with selling people on the idea that everything went ass-over-tea-kettle with World War II is that you have to say the 1950s were the beginning of the bad times, rather than the last years of the good times. The standard conservative complaint is that Happy Days was awesome—who didn’t like the Fonz?—and the damn hippies ruined everything. That’s basically Donald Trump’s vision of American Greatness. The upside of saying World War II was the fons et origo of our problems is that it lets you open a can of whup-ass on American global leadership, free trade, the U.N., Israel, immigration, feminism, civil rights, etc. It’s a way of saying the original America Firsters warned us about all of this. I have no idea if Tucker has thought all of this through to that extent, but he’s on a path of discovery toward this theory. 
    What amazes me is how unoriginal all of this is. The new right is simply taking the techniques of the radical left and retrofitting them to a right-wing narrative. In A Peoples’ History of the United States, Howard Zinn explicitly sides with the victims, the losers—in a crass political and economic sense. He writes:
    Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-­ American war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America.
    There’s a place for this in history. But for Zinn and the radical left, the losers aren’t just worthy of sympathy, the losers are always right. The marginal and marginalized always have the better argument, the powerless are always the victims of the powerful. Being a winner is proof you’re the villain of the story. This oppressor-oppressed garbage is the motivating passion behind so much of the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas garbage of the left, and increasingly segments of the new right. 
    For most of my life, the radical left owned this space (except for a few marginal right-wing cranks) and this technique in their denunciations of “American Empire,” “neoliberalism,” even anti-globalism (which was still a major neo-Marxist obsession well into the early 2000s). But now, the radical right wants in on the action. The left used to make wild claims on behalf of the white working class, but now thanks in part to the left’s obsession with race, the white working class has moved to the cultural right, and it’s the new right’s turn to attack the “American regime,” “American empire,” “neoliberalism,” etc. 
    The specifics of the argument vary here and there, but strategy is the same: Take things that normal Americans are, and should be, proud of and say they’re bad. They use the same Nietzschean and Foucauldian analysis to reduce everything to victims and oppressors, to sow distrust of elites and power, to demonize “the system,” only this time instead of fomenting righteous grievance on behalf of sexual or racial minorities or persecuted Communists, the righteous victims are Christians, heterosexuals, white men, etc. Proclaim that our enemies are actually the good guys, and we’re the baddies. “Hitler was misunderstood” is the new right’s version of the old left’s “Stalin was misunderstood.” It’s the same game, just with different jerseys. 


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    $16,500 Cut Awaits Retirees if Social Security Isn't Reformed

    Committee For A Responsible Federal Budget, Sept 9, 2024- Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have both said they would “protect” the Social Security program. However, neither has put forward a plan to meaningfully do so and President Trump has proposed changes that would worsen the program’s finances.

    The Social Security Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) trust fund is projected to be depleted by 2033, at which point the law calls for a 21 percent across-the-board benefit reduction. We estimate this would represent a $16,500 cut in annual benefits for a typical dual-income couple retiring at the time of trust fund depletion.

    This analysis is largely an update of our 2023 piece on the same topic.

    Read the analysis.

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    Sunday, September 08, 2024

    We Need to Talk about Tucker, Again

    By Jeffrey Blehar, National Review, September 4, 2024 - I thought I was done with Tucker Carlson after he got fired from Fox News because of his role in encouraging the “stolen/flipped votes” hoax after the November 2020 election, a cynical gambit that helped pave the way to both January 6 and a $787 million settlement bill for the cable network in its defamation-suit payout to Dominion Voting Systems. (Having labelled the man both a “merchant of lies” and a “betrayer of trust,” further commentary felt superfluous.) I was wrong.

    Then I thought I was done with Tucker Carlson after he journeyed to Moscow in February this year, to preach with alarming zeal in a series of propaganda videos about how Putin’s Russia was vastly more humane and civilized than They Want You To Realize, especially compared with the filthy sinkhole that is America in 2024. He then went to an international conference in Dubai to publicly talk down American democracy as being morally comparable to violent authoritarian dictatorships. (A day later Vladimir Putin, in a persuasive counterargument, murdered opposition leader Alexei Navalny in prison.) My contempt for Carlson’s anti-American turn was such that I wanted no more of him.

    I ignored him when he strongly hinted on a podcast that he believes “gray aliens” are possibly hyper-dimensional demons with whom the U.S. government has struck a Faustian bargain for access to advanced technologies and human dominion. I ignored him when he sympathetically interviewed Alex Jones, Andrew Tate, and ....  For I cannot ignore Tucker Carlson when he goes “partway-Nazi.”

    ... Carlson’s “I’m just asking courageous questions and hosting dangerously honest discussions” schtick is nothing new to the world, or even to Tucker; it is the same one he crafted at Fox and drove full-speed into a wall. 

    ... as it turns out, Darryl Cooper has a history of Nazi-sympathizing statements, and this was known well before this interview. I don’t mean that in the sense of “oh he has some politically incorrect views,” I mean that in the honest-to-goodness “Hitler is in heaven now” sense of a “Nazi sympathizer.” He’s not exactly subtle about it, either. This guy popped up on my radar months ago as a member of the Nazi-apologist alt-right subgenre. I saw these tweets long before this week. Am I to believe that Tucker Carlson did not? For a man he described as the “most important historian in the United States,” and not a casual guest? I’m just asking questions, Tucker. (read it all)


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    No, Winston Churchill Was Not the ‘Chief Villain’ of the Second World War

     By Mark Antonio Wright, National Review, September 4, 2024 - The podcaster Darryl Cooper, Tucker Carlson’s most recent guest on his Twitter interview show — and whom Carlson describes as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United states” — has set tongues wagging over his assertion that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain of the Second World War.”

    “Now,” Cooper clarifies, “Churchill didn’t kill the most people; he didn’t commit the most atrocities” — two massive concessions, Mr. Cooper! — “but when you really get into it and tell the story right, and don’t leave anything out, you see that [Churchill] was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did, becoming something other than an invasion of Poland.”

    Cooper tends to ramble when answering Carlson’s questions, but best I can tell, he assigns Churchill “chief villain” status on the basis of several interrelated factors:

    (1) Before the war, when he was not yet in government, Churchill agitated for a British guarantee of Poland’s security, should that country be invaded by Germany.

    (2) As prime minister in the spring and summer of 1940, Churchill refused to entertain German peace feelers and carried on the war even after the Fall of France.

    (3) Because Churchill kept the British in the war in 1940, the war ground on, and this set the conditions for German and Soviet atrocities in the east, which wouldn’t have happened if the war had ended sooner.

    (4) Britain, under Churchill’s leadership,...(read more)


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