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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.

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.

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.

@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.

I felt well-informed, and completely morally righteous when ranting about the Orange Man and what a threat he was, while also treating him as a joke.

After all Trump, according to all of the Professional Experts, was dangerously unprecedented. The things he said, the words he used, the mere fact that someone who had never stepped foot in DC dared throw his hat in the ring - It was preposterous, and surely no serious person could take Trump seriously.

I was well and truly inside the bubble. It didn’t matter what arguments were made to the contrary - I listened to the Experts™. By the time Election Day rolled around in 2016, I was phone banking for Hillary. I was ready to stay up all night here in Israel while the vote came in, watch the first female be elected President of the United States, and celebrate. ...

Over the next few days, we absorbed the shock of the political earthquake we had all experienced. My husband patiently listened to me cry that the world was going to fall apart and then he told me to snap out of it. He said the media bubble I was trapped in was full of actual garbage and they lie nonstop. He’d said it before, but I couldn’t hear it. Now that Trump was President-Elect, my mind slowly opened to the possibility that the legacy media wasn’t all I thought it was. After all, everything they had said about Trump’s odds of winning was dead wrong.

It didn’t happen overnight, it was a slow process. I began to cut back on watching the bobbleheads at MSNBC and CNN and replaced them with people like Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin, who was going through his own political awakening at the time. A Trump hater would say I fell down the conspiracy theory, right-wing YouTube rabbit hole. By the time Donald Trump was inaugurated in January 2017, I approached his upcoming term with cautious optimism.

Shortly after his inauguration, Trump gave a 90-minute press conference in a room in the White House in front of gold curtains. For 90 minutes Trump went to battle with the press. They were nasty to him. They twisted his words, assumed his intentions, and phrased questions in an inappropriately biased manner. I watched Trump handle the media with logical answers, good humor, and patience. I watched him speak without CNN injecting a dark filter and evil intent over small clips taken out of context.

I remember sitting glued to the TV, ignoring the kids’ bedtime, unable to turn it off. When it was finally over, I turned to my husband, full of newfound optimism and a different kind of naivete. I said that Trump was so good at that press conference, that surely now CNN will have to admit they had been wrong this entire time. Once again my husband laughed at my naivete and we turned on CNN, where sure enough they had full panels of Experts furiously discussing Trump’s tie.

That was pretty much the last straw, and as anyone here who has gone through the “redpill” process knows - once you break out of the media bubble and you can see who they truly are- you can NEVER unsee it.

Once I was free from MSM tentacles, Trump was president and everything felt bright. I learned the values and tenets of conservatism and libertarianism through books, podcasts, shows and debates. It felt like things finally made sense, once my mind was open enough to consider the arguments.