In a now-shorter-and-twice-a-week segment on WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- The Miller embarassment
- The McKee Millerhood
- The rich and Regunberg
- The Valley Breeze beclowns itself
Featured image by Leio McLaren on Unsplash.
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In a now-shorter-and-twice-a-week segment on WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- McKee’s private lunch with his fundraiser and a prospect
- Matos’s latest endorsement
- The soccer pause
- The progressive media “shakeup” nobody would have noticed
Featured image colorized from Shutterstock.
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In a now-shorter-and-twice-a-week segment on WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- The latest developments in the Rhode Islanders Behaving Badly in Philly saga
- McKee’s handling of the situation
- How it ties back to basic differences of political theory
- Plus Black Lives Matter polling
- And surprise controversy over a biological male running the Democrat Women’s Caucus
Featured image by James Lee on Unsplash.
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In a now-shorter-and-twice-a-week segment on WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Economic development corruption revealed
- Nerona v. McKee (still)
- Regunberg’s defense
- Labor unions, media, and Nicole Solas
Featured image by Devin Kaselnak on Unsplash.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- State budget details tell a story
- The many forms of leave for a state worker
- Lynch endorses Amo
- The radicalism of Regunberg
- The reactionaries hold on to the armory
Featured image by Norman Rockwell on WikiArt.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Raimondo hands the future over to Brown students
- Troubles at ABC6
- Crushing the offroaders in Providence
- The soccer stadium’s struggles
- Cicilline’s farewell (for now) to Congress
- Asking for informants against free speech in Barrington
Featured image by Annie Sprat on Unsplash.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Evil glee at making people pay for abortion
- Differential treatment of two misbehaving local officials
- The RIPTA job mill
- Progressives’ privilege in public schools
- No sympathy for the early retirees
Featured image by Edwin Lord Mills on WikiArt.
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Let’s go through all of the basics. Most basic of all: A debt remains real, even when you don’t have the money to pay it.
And what makes a debt real? Basically, a debt is real when the parties who agreed to it and other parties around them agree that something bad will happen, if it is not paid.
Everyone already understands that the United States of America missing a national debt payment leads to something bad. Ergo, no one is questioning the validity of the National Debt of the United States, and there is no action that the President of the United States or any other branch of government needs to take or can take to further establish its validity.
The United States Constitution authorizes several ways for Congress to raise money to pay a valid debt. The primary ones are laying and collecting taxes and borrowing money on the credit of the United States.
The President has no more power to pay a valid debt by borrowing money without Congressional authorization than he does to pay a valid debt by raising taxes without Congressional authorization.
Any attempt by the President to borrow money without Congressional authorization would constitute an unlawful suspension of the United States Constitution, and would be every bit as egregious as the President decreeing that he had suspended the Constitution so that he could impose taxes without Congressional approval.
We live in strange times when the progressive left wants the President of the United States to unilaterally terminate the American government’s Constitutional revenue and appropriations process, in order to guarantee that big financiers never face risk.
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The most essential insight of George Orwell’s 1984 is that it isn’t enough for totalitarians to dominate. They must demand subjugated people acknowledge them as the arbiters of reality itself. This quality is the telltale warning about a movement’s nature, and spotting its bizarre appearance in the United States, I’m beginning to wonder whether our constitutional safeguards against totalitarianism forced it to take a contorted shape.
That shape is clearly visible in the what-reality-are-we-in controversy over the L.A. Dodgers’ disinvitation of “The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” from the baseball team’s “Pride Night” event. What the group is about is entirely obvious, but our society is in such a near-totalitarian state of confusion a veil of mainstream narrative is draped across the radical face of reality. With that veil in place, the Dodgers failed to anticipate that the invitation — and giving the group a “Community Hero Award” — would generate a negative response.
Manipulators like CBS News provide no images of the “sisters” and leave a giant question mark about why anybody would be offended by the group. One must turn to the New York Post for details like this:
The “nuns” — who have names like Sister T’aint A Virgin, Sister Porn Again and Sister Holly Lewya — were being awarded for supposedly “promoting human rights and respect for diversity and spiritual enlightenment.”
The “sisters” (mostly men dressed up in a mocking imitation of women) claims to be a charitable organization, but what is their charity?
We use humor and irreverent wit to expose the forces of bigotry, complacency and guilt that chain the human spirit.
And whom do they attack with their “irreverent wit”? Christians, naturally, more specifically Catholics, and more specifically nuns. Their “charity” is to offend people with whose beliefs they disagree. They choose the most holy days to mock Christians, and their costumes are obviously malicious. Mockery and hatred are their reasons for being — their identity. This is unambiguous, and to accept such activity as charitable is to adopt their bigotry.
The context was different decades ago, when the culture had a Christian consensus. Irreverence became a mainstay of comedy and counterculture as a way to take a breather from reality and gain some distance by which to test assumptions. When the counterculture becomes the driving force of the mainstream, however, the mockery takes on a wholly different character.
In an essay for National Review, the father of a teacher and student who survived the Covenant School shooting makes a telling observation. Waiting for two hours to be reunited with his family after the attack, Graham Hillard watched the therapeutic state swoop in:
During that mind-focusing span, I acquired a series of insights that had previously been merely secondhand or theoretical. I learned that the ideology of psychotherapy has become so culturally ingrained that assembled parents were urged to “process” the day’s events even as those events remained ongoing. (In an irony worthy of Voltaire, the city-employed counselors stalking the aisles wore rainbow-flag lanyards.)
The tried-and-true test of the inverted counterfactual is instructive. What if a murderous Christian zealot targeted an institution focused on gay families and the government therapists showed up wearing crosses?
To be sure, the city workers could not have known the shooter’s motives at the time (which motives, Hillard notes, authorities appear to be minimizing even now by withholding her “manifesto”), but we cannot be confident it would have mattered. After all, they knew they were going to a Christian school and apparently didn’t reconsider their ideologically charged lanyards.
A culture in which maliciously mocking Catholic nuns is a form of charity begets a society in which Christians should be grateful for whatever comforts government is still compelled to offer them and a school shooting is a fine time for sartorial evangelism. The totalitarians will grin as they insist it’s a matter of civil rights to force people to pay the bill when others wish to kill their own children, and the inexorable logic of evil will demand ever-more-visible declarations that two plus two equals five.
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A funny thing happens when the warnings and predictions of non-progressives begin to prove true: the progressive activists who call themselves “journalists” and carefully curate the news for the rest of us find other things to talk about. Twitter, now that it is increasingly deprogramming its formerly brainwashed algorithm, is full of stories that would utterly change the way Americans think about what’s going on in the world if they were reported without the left-wing spin.
Starting local, we’ve got Barrington teachers’ winning their lawsuit after having been fired for declining to receive the COVID vaccine. Whether vaccines were desirable at the time is a distinct question, but the law-breaking mania that led progressives in government to think they could do whatever they wanted to battle the virus was clearly a mistake.
That same mania led to changes in election procedures — coincidentally right before a presidential election that progressive Democrats were promoting as a fight to save the universe. (Yeah, no motive for fraud there!) By themselves, those last-minute changes arguably made the results illegitimate, and yet, the datapoints that things weren’t quite right in the execution of the election flowed all the way down to good, old-fashioned fraud. Tucker Carlson reported (while still on Fox News) on double-counting in a county in Georgia, for instance. Obviously, this isn’t a recent story, but it feels like it is because it never received the coverage it should have. Carlson’s question at the end has only become more relevant:
All of the ballots, the whistleblower tells us, had been filled out by a printer. Not by hand. And many of them supported the exact same candidates, democrats, including Joe Biden… Why are we okay with any of this? We’re okay with it because we’ve been told we have to be okay with it. We’re undermining democracy if we ask questions about what happened during the 2020 election, and of course, that’s a perfect inversion of the truth.
Switching from “inversion” to “invasion,” Ted Cruz takes down a reporter who’s parroting Democrat talking points on immigration, with the conclusion that the chaos at our border is happening because the Biden administration and the Democrat Party wanted it to happen. This is a policy decision. It’s messy now and can’t help but flash through the veil a little, but the media will attempt to paper it over, and then when the consequences emerge, they’ll promote other causes to explain them. Those “causes” will almost certainly involve accusations of racism and blaming Americans for being bad people.
Refocusing local, albeit in another state, we see how the spin works with a national story about a school board in Colorado. Here’s the tweet text from NBC News:
Conservatives took over a Colorado school board, and then:
• Adopted a right-wing group’s social studies program
• Did not reapply for grants to pay counselors
• 40% of the high school’s professional staff won’t return next year
A slight step toward objectivity would raise many questions. Why did the local voters elect these people? Was the earlier social studies program “left-wing”? Were the grants for counselors leading to a benefit residents wanted, or was it allowing outside interests to manipulate children? What roles , and how many, are the “professional staff,” and is it good, bad, or indifferent that these particular people are leaving? Obviously, residents wanted change, but when NBC News is expressing it wish it wants to fulfill when it reports “growing opposition.” That’s how activist journalists manipulate people.
And then there’s the one-two punch of the Biden crime family receiving millions from China and not-really-surprising revelations about the Russia-collusion hoax perpetrated by Democrats and the country’s intelligence apparatus.
I’m not claiming that I can see perfectly through the fog, because more than one machine is generating it. But one possible reality is that we currently have a president whose family has received a fortune in payments from a geopolitical adversary, who was put into office through a multifaceted coup, and who has deliberately instigated an invasion to change the population for political benefit, after having leveraged a pandemic to undermine our constitutional order and take control of the government, with the help of high- and low-level fraud, while activists and the mainstream media press relentlessly for a radical social revolution and work to undermine democratic opposition.
That long sentence sounds extreme, but it’s entirely plausible, and here’s the important part: the craziness of reality will only worsen to the point of mass suffering and death if we lack the information and wherewithal to push back and enforce accountability.
Featured image by Tengyart on Unsplash.
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