patrick.net

https://slaynews.com/news/billionaire-ex-democrat-bill-ackman-calls-americans-rally-behind-trump-help-him-succeed/

Former Democrat donor Bill Ackman has called on the American people to come together and throw their support behind President Donald Trump.

Ackman, the billionaire founder of Pershing Square Capital Management, announced in January that he’s “no longer a Democrat.”

At the time, he also admitted that, while registered to vote in the Democrat primary, he was funding the campaigns of Trump’s challengers in the Republican primary in an effort to prevent the 45th president from winning re-election.

Ackman revealed he plowed money into the campaigns of former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, and Vivek Ramaswamy.

He had also financed Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign.

In recent months, Ackman had hinted that he may be changing his tune about Trump.

However, after Democrat President Joe Biden’s trainwreck debate performance on Thursday evening, Ackman has now gone public with a complete U-turn.

Trump “is going to win in a landslide,” Ackman wrote hours after the debate.

He said that Trump’s looming victory was an “indictment of the Democratic Party.”

Patrick says

However, after Democrat President Joe Biden’s trainwreck debate performance on Thursday evening, Ackman has now gone public with a complete U-turn.

Trump “is going to win in a landslide,” Ackman wrote hours after the debate.

He said that Trump’s looming victory was an “indictment of the Democratic Party.”

Yup. The donors are starting to rebel:

DemocratsAreTotallyFucked says

Dem party elites led by Obama is trying to put the kibbash on the Biden has to go talk.

To admit he shouldn't be nominated because of the dementia is to admit he isn't fit to finish out his current term too. They don't want to go there. Also, it is an open admission that they have been lying and hiding this from everyone else all this time.

But everyone else doesn't see it that way...including even most of the donors, I bet.





So we shall see.

@davidmarcus

I am crossing the Rubicon and backing the Republican Party and President Trump.

Many — including a former version of myself — get trapped in a mental framework that becomes their identity and prevents them from radically evolving their thinking with new facts and information. I finally broke free from it.

My journey has been a gradual political 180 from where I stood in every previous election. It has been an eye-opening process of disenchantment, zero-basing lifelong beliefs, and rebuilding from there.

In 2017, a good friend enlisted me to pitch the DNC to raise $100M from Silicon Valley founders and executives. The aim was to use these funds and know-how to build a CRM and tech platform to prevent a repeat of Hillary Clinton’s inadequate, outdated 2016 campaign. We met with DNC leadership, who told us we could raise that money, but it would have to go to the general fund; a single-digit percentage would then be allocated to tech. In the wake of one of their most shocking failures, they didn’t want the help.

The next series of realizations began in 2019 while I was at Meta, right after we announced the Libra white paper. I testified before the Senate and the House and subsequently spent significant time in DC, engaging with lawmakers, cabinet members, regulators, and two White House administrations. At the time, I still believed the mainstream idea that Democrats were all about serving the People. However, I was shocked to learn that, for the most part, Republicans cared more deeply about their constituents, while Democrats, in my experience, cared more about government power and control. This is my observation on balance, with many stories to back it up. I also found that more Republicans wanted to understand our project’s goals and took the time to learn about the risks of censoring payments and controlling the network. I found myself remarkably aligned with them.

Then COVID came, revealing more. While I don’t subscribe to the most malicious vaccine conspiracy theories, I do take offense at the censorship machine put in place to hide the origin of the virus from the NIH-funded Wuhan lab and all dissenting voices on vaccinations and lockdowns. At that time, I fully appreciated why Republicans value freedom of speech and preventing censorship.

This trend of spinning and manufacturing a parallel reality to serve the Dem agenda, solidified by complicit mainstream media, hit home with the Hunter Biden laptop story, the coordinated vilification of President Trump and his followers, and President Biden’s cognitive decline — depriving voters of a voice in a proper primary. These examples displayed the hubris of the current Dem leadership. You must think the American people are fools to believe the spin on these issues. I despise this elite vs. general population ideology viscerally.

This version of the Democratic Party is sidelining moderates and centrists and has adopted an increasingly leftist ideology. This drift to the left has dictated policies from which I’ve found myself estranged.

On the domestic front, there has been a total departure from the core American value system of meritocracy, an extreme and weaponized DEI agenda, an open door to massive illegal immigration, and a once-fringe narrative, now mainstream within the party, of vilifying success. This shift is also causing us to fall behind due to an anti-innovation regulatory climate, notably on crypto and soon AI — two non-linear technological breakthroughs that will likely determine tomorrow’s leading countries.

On foreign policy, the administration is exacerbating tensions with Russia through an aggressive NATO expansion narrative focused on Ukraine and prolonging an unwinnable war. This is costing American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, the world hundreds of thousands of lives, depleting the U.S. military arsenal and risking World War III. On Iran, this administration is continuing a misguided Obama-era plan to bring Iran closer to the West by unfreezing Trump-era sanctions, thus giving the Mollahs’ regime the ability to fund terrorism and pursue its anti-America, anti-Israel, and anti-Jewish agenda. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was also handled disastrously. We’re leaving a door open for China to invade Taiwan by coming across as weak. Most importantly to me, concerning Israel, the administration is enabling Iran to fund Hamas and Hezbollah, restraining Israel in its fight against its enemies, thus prolonging another conflict, which is costing more lives on both sides and allowing unprecedented levels of antisemitism to rise at home.

I believe we need a President who is unequivocally pro: America, the Constitution, business, Bitcoin/crypto, innovation, Israel, small government, legal immigration, free speech, meritocracy, and common sense — and anti: regulatory proliferation, illegal immigration, unjust wars, Iran’s current regime, and domestic groups that oppose American values. These issues are central to President Trump’s platform.

Naturally, I disagree with President Trump and the GOP on some issues, particularly women’s reproductive rights. While I’ve come to learn that extreme views exist in both parties, I firmly believe that women should have the unalienable right to make their own decisions on this polarizing topic. President Trump confirmed he was against a national abortion ban and supported the Supreme Court’s decision on maintaining access to mifepristone, which was reassuring and a sign that the party was moving closer to the center.

It’s impossible to close this post without mentioning President Trump’s recent assassination attempt. The courage and resolve he displayed seconds after being hit by a bullet was awe-inspiring for his followers and detractors alike. This was a man, however imperfect, who, at that moment, incarnated the American spirit in the most vivid way, starting to bring a split nation together.

Some claim that reelecting President Trump will bring our democracy to its knees. However, the alternative — having unelected individuals with this much power and no accountability run our government coupled with four more years of bad policies at home and abroad — might present a more significant threat. Neither will likely change in a Harris administration and could potentially worsen.

In this pivotal moment, confronted with the choices we have, I am endorsing and supporting a return to a Republican administration in 2025.

10:27 AM · Jul 31, 2024

39.6M Views

Patrick says

davidmarcus

I am crossing the Rubicon and backing the Republican Party and President Trump.

Many — including a former version of myself — get trapped in a mental framework that becomes their identity and prevents them from radically evolving their thinking with new facts and information. I finally broke free from it.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/07/former-paypal-ceo-announces-he-is-switching-parties/

https://sashastone.substack.com/p/how-did-orwell-know

How did a Barack Obama devotee, an I’m With Her Hillary Clinton supporter, and a Joe Biden faithful from way back find my way into not only voting for Trump but actively trying to help the Republicans defeat the Democrats? ...

Every day on TikTok, I see another person who has gone through something similar. It always follows the same pattern. They become curious about Trump. They investigate. They find out who he really is, and they can’t believe that they’ve been lied to by the media and the Democrats for almost ten years. The truth is out there, but you just have to know where to look.

So here’s the bottom line: I left the Democratic Party after the 2020 election when I saw just how corrupt they’d become with all that money and power.

I decided I would vote for any Republican once I saw that all of the Democrats were behind “gender-affirming care” on minors and that they want gender ideology foisted on young kids and pre-schoolers up through high school.

I kept my politics mostly off my site and my public Twitter because I didn’t want to jeopardize my business. But at some point, I couldn’t keep quiet anymore. I had to use whatever dwindling platform I had to speak the truth.

I decided to vote for Trump when they raided Mar-a-Lago. I became a Trump supporter when he became a convicted felon. I couldn’t believe they went that far, even knowing everything I do about mass hysteria and what happens when it gets into government. ...

The truth is that I haven’t changed. The Left changed. I was part of it. I followed the rules. I spoke the language. But when my survival depended on my going along with what I knew to be lies? That was when I had to jump off the fast-moving train and find solid ground.

I couldn’t live with myself — or live at all — if I did not have a mind that was free. If you take that away, you might as well take everything.

https://slaynews.com/news/california-lawmaker-dumps-democrats-flips-republicans/

California Lawmaker Dumps Democrats, Flips to Republicans

California State Senator Marie Alvarado-Gil said she no longer identifies with the Democrats.

She argues that the party has moved radically to the Left in recent years.

“In the past two years that I’ve been working in the Senate, I have not recognized the party that I belong to,” she told The Steve Hilton Show.

“The Democratic Party is not the party that I signed up for decades ago.”

Patrick says

California Lawmaker Dumps Democrats, Flips to Republicans

California State Senator Marie Alvarado-Gil said she no longer identifies with the Democrats.

She argues that the party has moved radically to the Left in recent years.

“In the past two years that I’ve been working in the Senate, I have not recognized the party that I belong to,” she told The Steve Hilton Show.

“The Democratic Party is not the party that I signed up for decades ago.”

Translation: Her district got redrawn from the 2020 census?

https://sashastone.substack.com/p/the-weirdness-of-manufactured-joy

Has video of woman who achieved enlightenment about the people who go to Trump rallies. I still don't know how to download blob data types, so all I can do is refer you to the page.

@patrick

That sashastone link is just a 23-minute mp3, unless I clicked wrong. I downloaded it, is there a way I can upload an mp3 to your site? I already spit it into 3 so each tract is under the 10-meg limit.

@HeadSet

Try it now. I just added support for mp3 at your suggestion.

Good idea.

Patrick says

Try it now. I just added support for mp3 at your suggestion.

Seems to work!

@NicoleShanahan

California is ground zero for many of the politicians and policies that have allowed corruption and cronyism to destroy the Democratic Party I was once a part of and supported. It has led the charge in eroding common-sense governance and has given modern-day liberalism a terrible reputation. This is my home, the state I love. In recent years, I’ve watched as many of my colleagues and friends have moved to other states, and I understand why—that’s a decision they have to make for themselves and their families. But when our state is churning out some of the worst politicians and policies harming our nation, we need to face reality: we can’t fix our country without fixing California. In the coming weeks, I'll be endorsing several candidates and groups, both in and outside of California, and putting my money where my mouth is. I’m done watching our beautiful state be dragged down by a bunch of ego-driven misanthropes who simply crave power.

9:32 PM · Aug 18, 2024

https://politicallyincorrecthumor.com/

I got involved in politics in the emotional aftermath of 9/11. Although I hated the tax-and-spend side of the party, I leaned Democrat on many issues back then. I remember they were considered the anti-war party. Most Democrat voters strongly opposed the Iraq War, and even those who voted for it did so half-heartedly when polls showed majority support. It probably cost Hillary the nomination to Obama in 2008. John Kerry tried to weasel out of his vote, and his waffling was a big part of his defeat in 2004.

Many Democrats fought against Bush’s encroachment on civil liberties, which were sold as needed to fight the War on Terror. They fought against the heavy-handed approach of Attorney General, John Ashcroft. Entire documentaries and movies were made of the anti-democratic practices and targeting of political enemies.

True, much of the Democrat opposition was reflexively in response to a hated president they viewed as illegitimate, George W. Bush. If you remember, he made it in the aftermath of the incredibly close 2000 election. Democrats screamed about election integrity, hand recounts, machine errors, audits, and so on. It was legal to dispute elections back then. Democrats were largely anti-immigration & pro-border security, mostly because of fear of losing work to Mexicans in a tight job market. My Body, My Choice? Oh yes, it was big back then, especially with a religious pro-life President in office.

Fast forward to today. Democrats have become the pro-war party, spending endless sums on never-ending wars in Ukraine & the Middle East. Although plenty of RINO neocons have gone along with it, the vast majority of Republican voters want nothing to do with them. Dem voters on the other hand have bought hook, line, and sinker to the war propaganda.

Most Democrats, both politicians and voters, favor mass government censorship and other crackdowns on civil liberties, using “hate speech,” “misinformation,” and other justifications. They see no problem with political prosecutions of Trump and anyone associated with him, including peaceful January 6th protesters who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They have no problem with using the IRS and DOJ to go after companies whose CEOs oppose the Democratic Party. They see no problem with using underhanded legal tactics to keep 3rd party candidates like RFK and Jill Stein off ballots. Of course, all this despicable behavior isn’t hurting “their side,” so it’s ok.

Illegal immigration isn’t a big problem for them. Yes, there are some drawbacks, but it ultimately helps Democrats maintain power, so the ends justify the means. Election integrity? Definitely not important. EVERY prominent Democrat politician in the country opposes voter ID, in-person voting, election audits, hand recounts, and virtually every other measure proposed to ensure fair & accurate voting. My Body, My Choice? We know now that applies to only one thing — abortion. It’s ok for government to force rushed, loosely-tested, experimental vaccines & medical procedures. It’s ok for government to lockdown businesses and individuals. It’s even ok to take children away from parents who don’t go along with the forced government medical procedures.

We’ve been subjected to 9 years of nonstop hate-Trump propaganda, most of which has been based on total bullshit. Whether or not the hate of Trump is justified, it has blinded Democratic voters from what their party has become. Just imagine if you took Trump and all party affiliations out of the description. Imagine selling a party that kicks out a democratically-elected candidate and installs a new one a few months before the election without a single primary vote. Imagine that party is supported by virtually every billionaire and megacap corporation, gaining monstrous donations from questionable, untraceable sources. Imagine it believes it has the right to set free-speech parameters, and arrest or deplatform any violators. Imagine it hired 87,000 IRS agents with new powers to crack down on tips and anyone with Venmo & Pay Pal transactions over $600.

Imagine if that party sued and/or arrested the opposition candidate as well as every one of his most loyal supporters. Imagine if, because of a few bad actors, they arrested ALL protesters, peaceful or not, if they happened to be in the vicinity. Imagine if that party tried to destroy every kind of election control to verify an accurate result, and made it a federal crime to even question election results. Imagine if, even with all this BS, polls showed the opposition candidate possibly winning, so an assassination attempt was made, with suspicious actions by the Secret Service and FBI investigators that strongly hinted at an inside job.

Do you think the Democratic voters would go for it? Do you think if we flipped the script, and a Trump administration was doing all this to Democrats, there’d be any outrage? True, so much of this has been hidden from the Democratic base by the highly shielded, scripted world of Mainstream Media and Big Tech. Most Democratic voters, especially the young ones, don’t really pay attention or diversify their media consumption. They go along with what seems to be popular, which is why there’s such a coordinated effort by celebrities, influencers, and media lapdogs to construct a likeable, competent image of Kamala. It’s so anti-reality to anyone paying attention or who has a memory greater than a few days.

If you vehemently oppose Trump and can never support him, believe me, I get it. There’s plenty not to like. But his faults are nothing compared to the heavy-handed fascism that has taken over the Democratic Party. Critical thinking Democrats have figured this out and are starting to walk away. Unfortunately, most remain so blinded by their hatred that they’re willingly building an anti-freedom, Orwellian world controlled by a tiny Ruling Class. It’s easy to overlook such egregious actions when your current opponents are the victims and you yourself are not affected. But as RFK, Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, and so many others have discovered–the time may come when that machinery is turned against you. And if things continue the way they’re going, a day may come when you no longer have any way to fight back, short of armed revolution described in dystopian novels.

https://x.com/BehizyTweets/status/1837947127009280081

@BehizyTweets
I think something has lit a fire under Megyn Kelly recently

She's now unapologetically calling out every single lie she hears about Trump

The way she dismantled all of the lawfare arguments against Trump at the All-In Summit is exquisite.

“I didn’t give my opinion”

Lying sack of shit. He conflated criminal and civil cases together and presented the decisions in each as criminal. Yeah it was eventually a question, but a question so convoluted and false in its premise that he can’t possibly play innocent.

It just goes to show, the jews only tolerate the goys, they don't accept them or befriend them. You can even marry your daughters to them (like Trump did), but they'll never accept you as one of the tribe.

I've been observing and thinking about that issue for most of my life. The answer is "It depends." There are indeed Jews who hate white Christians with the same intensity as any devout anti-Semite hates Jews. And some of those Jews deliberately created negative stereotypes like Archie Bunker and Elmer Fudd, because that is how they see the world and they want everyone to see it that way.

On the other hand, the majority of Jews don't hold the traditional dislike for non-Jews. Intermarriage was 58% 11 years ago, and is probably higher now:

https://www.jta.org/2013/10/01/united-states/pew-survey-u-s-jewish-intermarriage-rate-rises-to-58-percent

Jews in America continue their rapid assimilation because the barriers between Jews and non-Jews are at an all-time low now. As anti-Semitism rises, that will probably reverse, ironically making anti-Semites the essential force keeping Judaism alive:

https://patrick.net/post/1320320/2018-11-18-can-judaism-survive-without-anti-semitism

But consider other groups. You can't become Chinese either, and they have a bit of a superiority complex too, imho. It's a bit much to be asked to be accepted as Chinese, no matter what you do.

Patrick says

But consider other groups. You can't become Chinese either, and they have a bit of a superiority complex too, imho. It's a bit much to be asked to be accepted as Chinese, no matter what you do.

Maybe that's the nub right there - Jews can "pass" as goys, and vice versa. That triggers the anti-goy and anti-semites equally. Case in point - how to detect a Jew by phrenology/facial morphography.

With Chinese, there's no question of being able to "pass," so it's not as threatening to their racial identity (by racial "pollution"). Obvious exceptions to the rule apply.

Yes, I think the fact that you can't really tell who's Jewish contributes to the paranoia about them.

And it probably doesn't help that so many Jews have changed their names to be less obviously Jewish.

So maybe there is actually less anti-Semitism against Orthodox Jews because they make a point of being very obviously Jewish by the way they dress and having beards.

Exactly - those who choose to segregate themselves are largely left alone until some fucktard decides that they are the ideal scapegoat.

Maybe we've been going about it wrong. Let the various ethnicities clearly identify themselves and be left to their own devices. Then again, there's France and a few other European countries and all those muslims . . . oh, wait . . .

Patrick says

https://x.com/BehizyTweets/status/1837947127009280081

BehizyTweets
I think something has lit a fire under Megyn Kelly recently

She's now unapologetically calling out every single lie she hears about Trump

The way she dismantled all of the lawfare arguments against Trump at the All-In Summit is exquisite.

Awesome. Some people sure can communicate well.

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/f-minus-thursday-october-3-2024-c

The corporate media is badly overestimating how helpful January 6th will be for Democrats as an October Surprise. On MSNBC (of all places), anchor Ari Melber asked an anti-Trump impeachment witness, EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland, to talk about how awful Trump was and so on. But the segment went off the rails when Gordon said he changed his mind. He’s planning voting for Trump now even after trying to help impeach the President. A shocked Melber gets visibly upset:

https://x.com/nataliegwinters/status/1841610591175409839

In a word, Melber was gobsmacked. He demanded Gordon say again whether, after testifying against Trump in the impeachment trial, he really planned to vote Trump. Gordon was resolute, insisting, “It is an absolute yes for me. That is how badly the Biden-Harris team has prosecuted their job.”

An obviously rattled Melber tried again. He read back Gordon’s own words from an old MSNBC interview, reminding the Ambassador that he’d said before that the issue of January 6th and saving democracy was bigger than any other consideration. Gordon admitted he’d said that, and while it was true at the time, now “I am seeing so many attacks on Democracy that eclipse January 6.”

Patrick says

The corporate media is badly overestimating how helpful January 6th will be for Democrats as an October Surprise.

Correct, one of the talking points is that Vance "lost" the VP debate because he dodged the question on Jan 6th and whether he or Trump believe the election was stolen. This, along with the other Jan 6th talking point barrages, is to lay the groundwork to slam anyone who points out the upcoming steal attempts during the 2024 election.

The shift away from Dems is big:

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/hurricane-trump-wednesday-october

The Wall Street Journal ran another encouraging election story yesterday headlined, “More Americans Identify as Republican Than Democrat. Here’s What That Means for the Election.” Of course, it also strongly suggested a reason for why Democrats have blasted opened the country’s borders.

It has been over thirty years since the GOP led in national party identification. But in recent NBC surveys, Republicans led by +2% (42% to 40%) when voters were asked which party they identify with. Similarly, Gallup also found voters identifying as Republican beat Democrats by +3% in its latest surveys. And Pew gave the GOP a +1% lead in nationwide polling this spring.

How could this happen? How could this happen despite a ceaseless corporate media assault on “far-right” conservatism that has relentlessly painted garden-variety conservatives as literal nazis? Are people picking nazism?

They will probably blame Twitter.

But this news was, perhaps, not any shock to seasoned political analysts. It is the culmination of a noticeable ten-year trend toward the GOP: Democrats led by +9% in 2012, +7% in 2016, and +6% in 2020. In other words, they’ve seen this coming.

A GOP pollster involved in the surveys quoted for the story called the results “the underrecognized game-changer for 2024.’’ Another X-factor! The change raises the horrifying possibility that Republicans could win the popular vote, which Democrats have long wailed should be the gold standard. But don’t worry. Soon, virtue-signaling lefties will turn on a dime and start whining about the tyranny of the majority.

That they could see this flip coming explains a lot of the post-Trump insanity, like the wide-open borders, the midnight migrant relocation flights into the heartland, and the kitty gobblers. Don’t get complacent. More than a small lead in the popular vote will be needed to clinch the election.

But in broader terms of the surging conservative counter-revolution, this is wildly encouraging news. I suspect that, if anything, absent some catastrophic blunder, the trend toward the GOP will continue to pick up speed...

Patrick says

The shift away from Dems is big:

The election will be decided by whoever counts the votes in the critical precincts in the swing states.

Patrick says

They will probably blame Twitter.

They are blaming Stein. As usual.

Arab Americans, who used to back Democrats over Republicans by a ratio of 2-to-1, now are closer to an even split between the parties. That is not growing enthusiasm for Trump. America's support of Israel as an ally, through shipments of weapons used to kill Hamas but also tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza, is driving this disengagement.

But within that division there are more fractures. Abandon Harris, a new Muslim American organization seeking to defeat the vice president in swing states, on Monday endorsed Jill Stein of the Green Party for president.

Stein has made criticism of President Joe Biden's administration about Israel and Gaza a key component of her campaign.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2024/10/09/abandon-harris-stein-michigan-arab-american-voters/75561456007/

HeadSet says

Patrick says

The shift away from Dems is big:

The election will be decided by whoever counts the votes in the critical precincts in the swing states.

This is why votes should be on paper and held for 10 years and open to recount by anyone.

https://sashastone.substack.com/p/why-this-california-liberal-is-voting

For many of us, 2020 was like Devil’s Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. We all had the same idea all at once, but we didn’t understand it. We might have come from everywhere, but we all ended up in the same place.

For some, it was the government’s authoritarian crackdown on masks and lockdowns. For others, it was the lies about COVID. But for me, it was suddenly seeing that unseen hands were manipulating us as a form of social control.

It sounds paranoid. I’ll grant you that. I don’t know how else to explain it. I was very much inside the insular feedback loop of the Left. I genuinely believed everything they said on CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Times.

They turned on a dime from COVID hysteria to “systemic racism,” which allowed millions to pour into the streets - the largest protest in American history - amid a global pandemic that had closed schools, churches, and businesses. What was going on? ...

It wasn’t until Bari Weiss resigned from the New York Times after exposing their unwillingness to publish the truth about what was happening on the streets for fear it was racist even just to report on it, that I realized I had to separate myself from the hive mind whose sole mission was to support the Democrats. And that’s how it went for the rest of the year. It was “don’t ask, don’t tell” for a once-mighty movement that now cowered in fear.

But for many of us, it was the summer when we stopped trusting our institutions and our legacy media to tell us the truth about anything.

Everything that happened in 2020 was designed to push Trump out of power. I watched them all but rig the 2020 election using the same unseen hands. I walked away from that election no longer a registered Democrat for the first time in my life. ...

The attacks against Trump supporters began right around 2015 when Trump’s warnings about the border were interpreted as Hitler-esque racism. That is what justified punching, kicking, spitting on, and, in some cases, even killing Trump supporters. ...

I’m not getting my hopes up, considering that the powerful people who now control our government have turned to corruption just to cling to power. What won’t they do to stop Trump and drag the unprepared Kamala Harris over the finish line?

But it doesn’t really matter. They might win the battle. They won’t win the war.

I am so proud to be an American today. I finally know why. I know that “Whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” That’s the wild beauty, the untamed spirit of the American experiment.

https://www.newstatesman.com/us-election-2024/2024/10/letter-from-michigan-no-one-i-know-is-voting-kamala-harris

Letter from Michigan: “No one I know is voting for Kamala Harris”

Will Donald Trump win the struggling swing state?

There is very little left to learn about Donald Trump the man. So when I attended one of his town halls this autumn in Michigan, I was mostly curious about his supporters. What kind of people were they? What could I ask them to help me make sense of the whole thing – that a convicted felon accused of trying to subvert American democracy is on the verge of returning to the White House?

As I arrived outside the event in Warren, Michigan, a long line had already formed through the car park. These were not the sophisticated edgelords I have come to know from online discussions on social media. They were salt-of-the-earth types, most without a college education, brought together by a common sense of economic disadvantage.

After an hour waiting outside the sports centre where the town hall was taking place, and two more hours wandering around inside before Trump arrived, I had time for a dozen short conversations. They were mostly about how difficult life has become for people in Michigan. Factories keep closing or laying off workers, and inflation has wiped out a large chunk of their income and savings. Drugs and alcohol are everywhere.

This is an America with no visible signs of wealth. From downtown Detroit to Dearborn and Warren, and then the rural counties north of Flint, there is rampant poverty, dwindling opportunities and an ageing population. By next year, more than 40 per cent of Michigan counties will have more than a quarter of their population older than 65. Many attendees told me they were unemployed. All complained about grocery prices. They spoke with little ambition for their jobs, careers, and even for their children.

But why is Trump, a billionaire from New York and Florida, capturing their vote? One factor is that he speaks his mind, with few or no restrictions. Many of the exchanges I overheard were about some particularly brazen or unfiltered sentence their candidate had recently uttered. I left thinking that for people who would like to talk this freely, Trump is an exemplar. For people working in jobs with diminished social status, being able to call everyone you dislike an idiot, as Trump is fond of doing, must look like the highest form of freedom. The other factor is that he has been going through a bad patch: Trump has been hit with court cases, was convicted of falsifying business records, and almost got killed by a bullet. They see themselves in his struggles. A majority of his supporters in Warren wore shirts emblazoned with “I am with the felon”.

It may be difficult for Europeans to understand how dysfunctional much of America has become. Nothing works. Bathrooms in bus stations and fast-food joints have often been closed for months. Public facilities are invariably old. Streets are spectacularly dirty. Service workers may go on small, local strikes no one hears about. Supermarket shelves may be empty because of shoplifters. In Erie, Pennsylvania, two days before the Warren campaign event, I took a train in the middle of the night. Outside the station, the homeless begged to enter the waiting room, only to be denied by the station master, who promptly fell asleep on the floor. I was told that many people try to jump on moving freight trains as they have no money for tickets. Once the station master woke up from his drunken slumber, he told me a “bum” had been run over by a moving train while sleeping on the tracks just a few days before. Now he worries because no one is checking the tracks every night.

Of course, things still work very well in America if you have money, or if you have a lot of it. And no one with money would travel by train or make regular use of public bathrooms. But while the moneyed America lives in a separate world, even the destitute can vote in an election – and they may well decide the outcome of this one.

I did not meet many African Americans at the Warren town hall, but the young black men I talked to in the bars in downtown Detroit seemed to have some sympathy for Trump. I would not call it a political inclination by any means, but Trump the Celebrity is someone they can relate to. One young man was visibly distraught that he had missed the event the day before and wanted me to tell him all about it. I doubt he will vote Republican in November, but neither will he bother to vote for Kamala Harris, about whom he knew nothing. Reports suggest that young African American men might feel disinclined to vote for a woman. A week ago, Barack Obama went so far as to make an appeal to these young men to overcome their prejudices. “Part of it makes me think that you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president,” he said at a Harris campaign event in Pittsburgh recently, “and putting women down… is not acceptable.” ...

In this particular contest, Trump is doing well. I left Michigan convinced that he will win the state and likely the election as well. Michigan may prove decisive. Biden won here in 2020 but only by a narrow margin. Without it, Democrats have practically no path to victory.

https://x.com/jeffreyatucker/status/1849888094809440751

@jeffreyatucker
Like many others, including J.D. Vance, I’m very much on record in warning about Donald Trump from 2015 onward, including articles and an entire book (which is still valuable) on the rightest version of collectivism.

As we approach election day, my opinions have undergone a shift, particular in the last three years watching as Biden/Harris marshaled a massive ruling class propaganda and compulsion machine to push everything I oppose the most: state consolidation, corporatism, censorship, inflationism, central planning, and compulsory injections of experimental medical products.

It all seems surreal to me. I think back to what worried me the most about Trump: demagogic nationalism, nativistic protectionism, executive centralization, and the leadership cult. Features of his last term confirmed my worst fears, particularly his green lighting of lockdowns for Covid and disregard for religious and personal freedom in the period. He also has a terrible record on spending, mitigated in part by solid efforts toward deregulation and higher quality picks on the bench.

To my amazement, when Trump realized he was wrong on Covid controls and began to argue for opening up again, he was denounced by the whole of the political opposition! Then once he was out of office, everything became vastly worse, including mask mandates, forced closures, and finally the unconscionable forced shots that have no only killed and wounded many but demoralized and subjugated the population in ways that can only be compared with wartime conscription.

As regards Trump himself, what we’ve seen emerge since then is a changed man in many ways, or so it seems. He has new appreciation for the wicked power of the deep state and the toxicity of lawfare of which he is a main victim. The kinds of people he has gathered around him, including RFKJr and Elon, is also encouraging.

At the same time, I’ve changed too on many topics on which I thought I had settled opinions.

On nationalism, I had never imagined the conditions in which that impulse would favor rather than oppose liberty, and amount to a form of decentralization from what is called globalism. The Covid response was largely dictated (from Feb 26, 2020) by the World Health Organization, which is mostly funded privately as a corporatist racket pushing pharmaceutical products. This is why the Covid response was the same the worldover (but for three nations). Even the CDC claimed to defer.

And that’s just the start of it. It’s true for censorship and financial power too: both are global initiatives pushed by corporate elites, as we see in Europe. The treatment of Elon Musk for daring to permit speech is indicative: they really want to turn the Internet into a curated information machine controlled only by stakeholders. I’m not making this up. This is what they say!

Indeed, the problem is even deeper. There is a machine being built globally that necessarily disenfranchises voters the world over. Once they have power, democracy is at an effective end, which means that citizens no longer have any possibility of influencing the shape of the regime under which they live.

Nationalism in this case means taking back power from usurpers. (Generally speaking, as I’ve long written, whether nationalism is good or bad for liberty depends on circumstances of time and place.).

On the matter of immigration, I never imagined that I lived under a regime that would deploy the free movement of peoples as a weapon of vote manipulation and power consolidation. Voters in the UK saw it, and Murray Rothbard saw it as a possibility as early as 1993 but I couldn’t imagine it.

I was wrong. It became our reality. The liberal and broad-minded impulse to welcome strangers has been weaponized as a vote-getting scheme operated at taxpayer expense. This has nothing to do with freedom and everything to do with the aspiration for a one-party state and premeditated demographic upheaval to break up opposition to state consolidation.

On matters of trade, I’m with Rand Paul in opposing tariffs as industrial protection. That said, the loss of domestic manufacturing is driven in part by a bad monetary system that broke all monetary settlement mechanisms that had smoothed trade in the 19th century and replaced it with a one-way industrial policy that came at the expense of the citizenry.

It has become clear, in addition, that the longing for a system of fiscal financing via tariffs rather than income taxes is on the table, as in the 19th century. That would certainly amount to an improvement over the current system. If that kind of nostalgia drives Trump’s tariff push, there is some basis for it and not automatically a form of what I feared the most.

The number one shift I’ve undergone in my thinking concerns the source of the real problem in the US. It is not the politicians elected by the voters as such but the permanent state structures that exist on three levels: shallow, middle, and deep. The consciousness of this is as new as it is ominous.

The deep state refers to the intelligence community which very obviously exercises massive power not only internationally but domestically as well. I’m not sure I was fully aware of that.

The middle state is the civilian bureaucracy, some 2 million strong plus 400 agencies that imagine that they are the real and permanent rulers of America.

The shallow state is the retail end of this machine: the media, the medical systems, the tech companies, and the corporate structure itself whether it controls advertising or philanthropy or banking or financial markets. The corruption is deep and wide.

There is only one way to break up this wicked cartel,: with executive, legislative, and judicial action. The Trump forces have a bead on this, in part because his last term was utterly foiled by this machinery.

We’ve never had an incoming administration so finely focused on the real problems and floating real solutions to actually save freedom in this generation from utter destruction.

Of course it might not go well: usually politics betrays us. But this much I know: we cannot endure four more years of whether things are headed now. Everything we love is being lost.

Most Americans have a simple demand: we want our lives back. It’s that simple. We don’t even need to take recourse to far-flung ideological precepts to understand it. We need only draw on moral intuition and what we remember (if we can) of what normal life should be like.