Sunday, July 13, 2025

Roger Kimball Says YOU Are the Epstein Problems!!

Kimball has that Eau d'Elite odor.

 ...I understand that the public’s appetite for scandal is a hardy perennial. The story of who is doing what to whom—especially if the “who”s are celebrities—is calculated to give prurient interest the gratifying cover of “the public’s right to know,” not to mention an opportunity to indulge in a little tongue-clucking moral outrage....

See?  It's you prurient-interest scandal-chasing lowlife Flyover Country inhabitants who are the problem.  (And you probably have tightly-clutched guns and Bibles, too.....)

Further, you rubes, you're off into Conspiracy La-La Land.  Overactive imaginations or thyroids or sumpin'sumpin.    Trust ol' Roger because.........because.

...that brings me to the word “conspiracy.” Is the whole drama of the Jeffrey Epstein story a conspiracy, with shadowy government/business/celebrity figures pulling the strings in the background?

Or is it merely a conspiracy theory, i.e., a tale fabricated by people who want to believe in a nefarious puppet master in the background and are determined to go on believing it, evidence be damned?...

K, Roger:  what contrary "evidence" do you bring to the table?

Hint:  none.  Well, except for Hugh Hewitt, Roger's pal.  Hewitt, you see, is right.  That's evidence. 

... The most difficult revelation to come out of the Epstein investigation, Hewitt notes, is that there are no revelations. The moral? It is “Time to move on! There really—really!—is nothing to see here. Spread the word if you know anyone afflicted with the malady: It is OK to walk away from the conspiracy.”...

Roger also has advice for (guess who?)  Tucker Carlson!!

...Doubtless, there will be other conspiracies coming down the pike soon. Sometimes they are real conspiracies, as in the example of Julius Caesar. Very often, however, it is just a matter of grassy-knollers hoping, praying that the Commie Lee Harvey Oswald was not the man responsible for killing JFK. Memo to that coterie: Oswald killed Kennedy. He acted alone. End of story. ...

Note well that Roger, the Cloud Person, deliberately misses the point, as does Hewitt, just as does Trump:  they hope to move the discussion to "a list" and "a suicide" rather than to the matters which are of real concern:  Who were Epstein's actual employers, and how did those employers utilize the videos to affect national policies here and in Europe?

Those are questions that Trump, Hewitt, Kimball, and hundreds of other D.C. Deep-Staters do NOT want asked, and more important, never want answered.

Screw you, Roger

Trump Gets Ratioed On Trump Social!

The Donald completely mis-read his voters.

Defended Blondi (accompanied by all his typical bluster and bullsh*t) and got bodied.

Hard to read the public if the public is the Oval Office hangers-on, puffers, and camp followers, eh, Donald??

"Dramatic" Layoffs at State Department?

As usual, the "nooz" takes dictation from the Left and/or Deep State, fails to ask questions.

...Layoff notices are going out to more than 1,300 employees of the U.S. State Department Friday.

The firings are part of a dramatic reorganization and a push by the Trump administration to drastically downsize the federal government....

And of course, this will "endanger" the US.

Really?

 Looking at State Department documents, it appears the department went from 57,340 total employees in 2007 to 72,895 in 2015 to 80,214 in 2024. So it grew by nearly 23,000 employees before the 'devastating' cut of 1,300....

Maybe the "reporter" on this story has not yet graduated from high school.

That's about the only excuse for this crap. 

Hey, Blondi!! What About THIS??

Our No-See-Em Ms. Bondi has another project that is waaaayyyyy overdue.

 Investigators and journalists appear to remain at a loss as to what motivated 20-year-old Thomas Crooks to allegedly try to kill Donald Trump as the first anniversary of the assassination attempt on then-former president and candidate Donald Trump approaches on July 13....

CBS and other sources tell us that he was 'focused on grades', was a 99-percentile SAT scorer, and he kept to himself.  It seems that nobody knew why he tried to assassinate Trump.  Following the shooting, his home was 'scrubbed' clean and his parents refused to talk to anyone except, perhaps, investigators.  If you believe Blondi's peeps, they did not provide any info about 'motive.'  

Perhaps there are clues.

 ...he began using an encrypted email service and a virtual private network while focusing more on news, explosives, and ammo.

That summer, Crooks had bought a rifle from his dad for $500 and signed up for a membership at a local shooting range, the network reported, apparently using it to shoot more than three dozen times....

The FBI has had his phone(s) for a year.

Is Apple refusing to unlock them?   

Saturday, July 12, 2025

The Mussolini-Hegelian State of the US

 Thanks to Claremont and the AOSHQ, we have another essay by the great Angelo Codevilla, and it contains a warning against what is now operative in the US, as well as against what could be.  Warningif you like your Congress-critter, do not read this.

 ...Hegel, as well as the positivist and Progressive movements, had argued for the sovereignty of expert administrators. Fascist Italy was the first country in which the elected legislature gave up its essential powers to the executive, thus abandoning the principle, first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, by which people are rightly governed only through laws made by elected representatives. By the outbreak of World War II, most Western countries’ legislatures—the U.S. Congress included—had granted the executive something like “full powers,” each by its own path, thus establishing the modern administrative state....

That would make Wilson an ur-Hegelian here, and Roosevelt his most significant disciple and implementer.

 ...After Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933, Mussolini’s enthusiasm for likening the New Deal to fascism’s political-economic order was tempered only by the need not to give additional ammunition to FDR’s domestic opponents, who were saying precisely that. Yet, ab initio, he made clear that “the spirit of [FDR’s program] resembles fascism’s since, having recognized that the state is responsible for the people’s economic well-being, it no longer allows economic forces to run according to their own nature.” Mussolini also published a glowing review of U.S. Agriculture Secretary (eventually Vice President) Henry Wallace’s 1934 book, New Frontiers. Fascists rejoiced that FDR had forsaken liberal for corporativist principles, and that the world’s most powerful country, the country most admired by Italians, had taken the trail they had blazed....

Note carefully Codevilla's clause "....the US Congress included..."

Congress deliberately gave away its legislative powers during (and following) the Roosevelt imperial rule.  The reason?  Re-election.  The members of Congress, then and now, were popinjays, showboats, drunks, womanizers........in brief, Not Serious People. (Yes, there are exceptions.) To them, responsibility was a burden they would not bear--so they licensed the Fascist-Hegelian State to rule in their stead.  Then they could proceed on their merry way with silly proposals designed to embarrass the other party, plenty of in-secret and not-for-the-record votes in committees, and "laws" full of language which begged for "interpretation" by malign parties.

Not.  Serious.  People. 

Congressmen knew:  no one elects bureaucrats, therefore no one can UN-elect them.  Given the hiring practices of Government, our Bureaucrat rulers are legacy twits with Big Name College education, homogenous social backgrounds, and--of course--a deep and abiding belief that Government Experts Know Best.  That's because they ARE the Government Experts, you see?

As a backstop, they have the Ultimate Power:  they can say "Nope" to anything

Mussolini's organization of society is also echoed here.

 ...Socioeconomic organization was fascism’s defining feature. Only employers’ and employees’ organizations approved by the government were allowed. They represented and collected dues from any and all in their category and territory, whether these had signed up with them or not. In 1925 these had agreed “voluntarily” to recognize each other as “exclusive representatives,” to subordinate interactions at the local level to central organizations, and to draw up procedures for their cooperation under government supervision. The Law of Corporations of April 3, 1926, codified this political-economic order. No longer would corporations be responsible to owners. Thenceforth, they would answer to higher duties as defined in the law. As Mussolini put it, “In a world of social and economic interdependence…the watchword must be cooperation or misery.” “Labor and capital have the same rights and duties. Both must cooperate, and their disputes are regulated by law and decided by courts, which punish any violation.” This resulted in the orderly servicing of interest groups, fascism’s daily preoccupation....

Wonder no longer how DEI and CRT became the regnant corporate/labor union philosophy, friends.  The Statists made it clear:  you can cooperate and implement Our Plan or you can die on the vine.  Thus we have FLSA, EPA, EEOC, ERISA, OSHA, and swarms of  Fed, State, and local agencies created to "help workers" but more importantly, to beat into submission private organizations using their Unions to assist; and if the Union got uppity?  Ask Jimmy Hoffa.

 ...The view that the New Deal was “fascism without the billy clubs” was well-nigh universal among FDR’s opponents on the Left (e.g. Norman Thomas), as well as on the Right (Herbert Hoover). It could hardly have been otherwise since the essence of the National Industrial Recovery Act—the involuntary inclusion of all participants in categories of economic activity and their subjection to government-dictated prices, wages, and working conditions—was at least as detailed as those in fascism’s corporate law. The U.S. government had brushed aside the Supreme Court’s objections to the National Recovery Administration in A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935). By 1942, in Wickard v. Filburn (still “good law” today), the Court approved regulation of all manner of enterprise with reasoning stricter than any Mussolini had used in 1926. Today, by the same token, Senator and 2020 presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s proposed “Accountable Capitalism Act” would also force corporations to enroll into a legal scheme in which the government would force them to service various stakeholders as government regulators would decide from time to time. Such tools are far more powerful than billy clubs....

Warren's proposal is only a matter of degree, not of substance, of course.  The substance was baked into the cake decades ago.

(The Managerial-Fascist State bred its own Security State apparatus, too.  And when the job is too dirty for the FBI, the CIA steps in.  Don't cross them--no matter your position--or else.  Ask JFK.  Or Reagan.  Or Trump.  The latter two were near-misses, but warnings to them and to all the rest of us, like the J6 prisoners.)

Little-known factoid:  By whose language are today's Conservatives decried as "Fascist"?  

 ...Stalin elaborated the doctrine of “social fascism” which, verbiage aside, meant that Communists should consider all to the right of them—essentially all who were not under Communist discipline—as “fascists.”...

Teodor Adorno (a Communist) adapted Stalin's thought with his ooogledy-booogeldy "scientific analysis" in The Authoritarian Personality.   

If you were vaguely suspicious of the multitudes of "People's This" and "Community Thats" throwing the Fascist-bomb around, you now know their source.  If you are surprised, you are stupid. 

Sad to say, Trump's crusade to reverse Communist- or Communist-inspired programs and crusades along with their millions of bureaucrat enforcers (America First!!) also uses the very same bureaucracies.  Congress, the Not Serious People agglomeration,  is perfectly fine with that, as Doing Nothing generally assures re-election.  

The common thread here is the mal-feasance and/or non-feasance of Congress.

Get it? 

Smoke, Fire? Not to Ace of Spades!

Repeating what we said earlier, Ace usually has very good insights and sharp commentary.

But he has this.........defensiveness...........about ..........well, look here.  In his post regarding the Bondi/Bongino brouhaha Ace ends it this way:

 ...I don't know what's going on here. I trust Bongino and Kash Patel, and I trust Trump. So I don't have strong suspicions that they're covering anything up.

It could just be that this story simply does not end the way many people expected it to end. I know people have suspicions, but suspicions are not facts, and it's wrong to take one's suspicions as being true....

"Suspicions"?  About what, Ace?  The CIA?  FBI?  MOSSAD?

When there is enough smoke to choke 300+ million Americans, there damn sure as Hell is a fire. 

Pinning the Tail......

 The Donald should have known better.