One of the great services media provides for Democrats is giving even their dumbest political narratives instant credibility - like accepting "voting rights legislation" as the correct term for their nakedly obvious ballot-box-stuffing plans.
No one can come up with a single example of anyone whose "voting rights" have been "stolen" with reasonable ballot security measures. Some of the Dems shrieking the loudest, including Joe Biden, hail from states with tougher rules than the "New Jim Crow" policies they denounce.
Even the fanciful theory that fair, logical, and objectively unbiased ballot integrity measures could have some "systemically racist" effect by suppressing minority votes has been blown out of the water by what actually happens when states introduce voter ID rules.
Participation tends to INCREASE when the rules are tightened, across demographics. People who aren't partisan left-wing operatives have no trouble complying with the rules and find them consistent with other everyday demands for ID and information security.
It's not surprising more people are inclined to take the duty of voting seriously when it's treated like a serious duty. Treat ballots like junk mail and people will see them as junk. Make elections a solemn occasion and people are more likely to take them seriously.
But Dems manufacture a fake "voting rights" crisis out of thin air, with not a shred of actual evidence to support their rhetoric, and the media just tosses their reporter hats aside and jumps in to spread the narrative with no questions asked. DNC emails become their stylebooks.
As far as most of the media is concerned, the American people are presumed guilty of whatever the Dems decide to charge them with. Anything the Dem leadership wants instantly becomes a "crisis" and a crime - even if nobody can find any actual victims. /end
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Watched "The Last Duel" last night, a sadly overlooked but excellent film that shows Ridley Scott is still more energetic and visionary than directors a third of his age when he's excited about the material, and still brings out the best in his cast. But I have a quibble...
I thought the movie suffered a bit by declaring absolute certitude about events that are still somewhat disputed by historians. It might have been better - more intriguing and haunting, less heavy-handed - if it didn't confidently announce what "The Truth" really was.
Striving to avoid spoilers, but I wonder if a younger Ridley Scott - whose landmark films often contained a dash of ambiguity, of unsolved mystery, inviting the audience to supply its own prologues and epilogues - might have trimmed or omitted Act Three of this movie.
Severing the bonds of friendship and family is an important goal of totalitarianism. Nothing is more important than politics. Your ideological comrades are your REAL family. Totalitarian regimes make a point of forcing you to denounce friends and family to prove your allegiance.
This is one reason the Left goes after kids so hard with garbage like trans fascism, critical race theory, etc. They want the kids to denounce their families and accept ideological purity as more important than personal loyalty. Russian and Chinese Communists do the same thing
That's also one reason traditional families were attacked with such ferocity in popular culture over the past few decades. Family bad, State good. Do the "right thing" and denounce your regressive, hypocritical, corrupt family to embrace the progressive crusade.
Capitalism and self-government are inextricably linked. If the people don't control their property and labor, they have no autonomy that cannot be taken away from them by politicians.
To keep this link healthy, it is essential to build the highest wall between MONEY and POWER.
Of course money and power cannot be fully separated - it's terribly naïve to think so. But we should be aware that wealthy people are interested in buying political influence, and if they accumulate too much, they can damage that vital link between free markets and freedom.
There is a natural tendency in successful free markets for capital to centralize - and political power follows it to become dangerously centralized too. Prosperous endeavors grow, successful investors invest more, and consumers reap benefits from growing corporations.
You don't need elaborate psychological theories to explain coronavirus mania. You don't need much more than social media plus political tribalization to explain 80% of it. But if you want to go deeper, consider the dissonance between regular people and crisis addicts.
Most people want normal life to return, the crisis to be over. They're looking for an exit ramp. They do not like feeling helpless, so they will eagerly seize upon any proposal that appears to give them a tiny bit of power. They really want to trust lavishly-funded "experts."
Those impulses are largely rational, including the *desire* to trust expert opinions on complex and frightening issues. More people should understand how comprehensively inept our Leviathan State has become, but it's reasonable to *want* trillion-dollar agencies to function well.
A few months ago the mighty Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan was holding victory parades with all the military equipment that blithering idiot Joe Biden gave them. Now they're beggars that can't feed their own people. Beggar regimes should not be given a shred of legitimacy.
The civilized world needs to have a long, painful discussion about how massive humanitarian aid can sustain and empower evil regimes. Every dollar spent caring for the abused and ignored population by outsiders is a dollar the rulers can spend on weapons, terrorism, and luxuries.
If the 1/6 riots were an act of "terrorism" - using force to achieve political ends - then so were the BLM riots.
The difference is that the latter were successful - and their success was a bloody disaster for Americans, especially black Americans.
The grotesque spectacle Democrats and their media are putting on today is not a condemnation of "terrorism," or "insurrection," or "attacking elections." They aren't planning to say a single damn word about the very recent times THEY did all of those things.
This is all about crass political opportunism, and reinforcing the claim that left-wingers have a monopoly on "righteous" political violence. When lefties use violence on YOU, it's "mostly peaceful" and you should stop whining and walk it off - even when they kill people.