I decided to sleep on JD Vance’s post from yesterday before commenting on it substantively. I have done so, and given it substantial thought.
My verdict? Here is what I believe that post actually was saying:
“Yeah we lost the election big time. But it’s not my fault, it’s the fault of the guy who made me who I am, and to whom I owe my entire political career. If only everybody had listened to me everything would have been OK. Oh yeah, I’m specifically throwing my boss under the bus, but I am also impliedly throwing Rubio and Hegseth under the bus too because I want to be President. No, I’m not going to talk about the way my lunatic belief that the Iranian mullahs could be reasoned with is really what brought us to this point. I’m also not going to talk about how my hatred of Israel and alliance with fellow Israel-haters and groyper-adjacent loons like Tucker chases away far more voters than it attracts. In other words, I’m not taking responsibility for anything and blaming everybody else. And I’m dropping this literally hours after the election is over so I can set the narrative now before anybody else has a chance to talk that says I’m the good guy, that MAGA is dead, and that I’m the leader of what comes next. No, I did not coordinate this with Trump, I just told him I’m going to do it. And he will say it’s OK because if he does not he’ll get savaged with reports that he has lost control of the Presidency, which was kind of what I wanted. It’s DC. Loyalty does not matter. Vote for me for President.”
Does loyalty matter? I believe it does, because if someone is disloyal to the man who made them, they will also be disloyal to the voters who put them into office.
My 2c.
(And yes, if Vance is the nominee I’ll still vote for him over communist jihadists, but now is the time to debate these kinds of issues inside our own movement.)
This song is so damn catchy I could totally see this on a 100 top hits pop chart list. Who would play this at their wedding? I would; it beats the chicken dance. I think it’s running neck and neck with ‘You’re Too Sweet For Me.’ 😂
If lawmakers really want fewer murders, the hard work is somewhere else. It’s in the neighborhoods where so many of our homicides happen. It’s in broken families, missing fathers, and mental illness. If you tackle the underlying causes of homicide and drug deaths, you would also influence the mass shooting issue. Extremely rarely do lawmakers tackle these hard issues. A rifle ban is faster. You get a signing ceremony and a press release. Fixing the real problems takes a generation, and nobody gets a ribbon cutting for that.
The principle the founding era left us still works. Punish misuse, and leave the arm alone. A man who murders with a rifle should go to prison. A man who keeps one in his safe and takes it to the range on Saturday has done nothing wrong. A ban punishes the second man for what the first man did, and it multiplies that by 26 million.
On December 2 and 3, the Supreme Court will hear these cases. The Second Amendment isn’t what’s on trial. These bans are. The question is whether they can pass the test the Court has already written. And it’s whether the Court meant what it said in Heller, in Caetano, in Bruen, and in Wolford. I think it did.
Cook County and Connecticut picked this hill. They picked one of the most popular rifles in America, from a category the FBI ties to only a small share of the murders it counts. They picked a test the Court already wrote, and they asked it to look the other way. In December, we find out whether that hill holds.
Fortunately, with this court, it’s quite unlikely to.
Our thought for the day, riffing a bit off of one of Pournelle’s thoughts on peace:
"Communism" is the name of the alleged ideal we attribute to an oligarchy under which, by the cover of pleasant sounding political and social (and genetic) nonsense, that cannot bear objective close scrutiny, all power is gathered into the hands of a new, tiny, highly nepotistic, amorally familistic, corrupt and completely unprincipled ruling class, itself backed up by control over the means of information, a massive propaganda administration, unbounded by even a stunted sense of integrity, a lapdog judiciary, and a secret police with unreviewable powers of incarceration, enslavement, torture, life, and death, in order to advance themselves and their heirs under the lie of advancing mankind. Contrary to the common mantra, not only has it not "never been done right," it has _always_ been done _exactly_ right for its true purpose, cited above.
I hope that there’s a lot more of this than I’m currently seeing. It’s a good explanation of why I’ve never been a Republican, but I’ll never, ever again vote for a Democrat.