Left-Wing Brain Rot

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

I just want you to imagine saying this out loud for a moment:

Now, imagine you are an American woman, living in the United States, saying this. Saying this about a regime that is not known for great treatment of women. Honestly, this is lunatic fringe shit to say no matter who or where you are, but just imagine this person doing it. In fact, doing it in a public setting. This person is insane. She also used to work for Elizabeth Warren, apparently.

Then, well, there’s this gem from the interwebs:

Graham Platner is a horrifying nightmare in human form. Yes, he had a Nazi tattoo for years and years, and finally covered it up when it got exposed to the public during this campaign. He also posted terrible things on the internet for years, before he ran for office. His campaign pays his wife. Yes, really. He might have dated several women at a time in like 2024. Let’s also not forget that he was a Blackwater mercenary, because that’s always good. Now let’s add all of this to the equation:

Platner faced blowback this week for boosting a social media comment about a looming war with Iran by Stew Peters, a neo-Nazi influencer who has frequently espoused antisemitic tropes and engaged in Holocaust denial. Platner’s team said the post was made in error and “immediately” removed it after learning it elevated a “despicable account.”

In late January, however, Platner sat for a lengthy online interview with Nate Cornacchia, a retired Green Beret who has also promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories. Near the end of their hour-long conversation, Platner, a fellow military veteran, called himself “a longtime fan” of Cornacchia’s YouTube channel, “Valhalla VFT,” and said it was “an absolute pleasure being” on the show.

Look, I know what they’re going to say- “he’s for ‘Medicare for All’ and against Israel, so he’s good.” These people are mentally ill. This guy is a Nazi. Just because he’s telling you now as a candidate that he’s not doesn’t mean that he’s not. In fact, who they were before the campaign is who they are. What you get in the campaign is an act.

The left is in full brain rot mode. These folks will side with dictators like Maduro, murderers like Khamenei, terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, failed regimes like Cuba, and even swoon for the fallen Soviet Union and defend today’s Russia. We are way past the “I believe there should be a ceasefire in Gaza so that Palestinian children stop getting killed,” that’s a perfectly sane thing to say, this is outright siding with Neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and third world terrorist organizations and regimes against the United States, basically because they hate Jews and capitalism. It’s insane and bizarre, and frankly hopeless. You are never going to build a majority in modern America for this crackpot shit, most people aren’t this deranged and miserable in this country, even if their situation does suck. People that actually hear this kind of tinfoil hat shit are probably less likely to vote for these dingbats than they were before.

This is Bernie’s legacy. He’s always there to make things worse. Don’t let him bring this insanity to your neighborhood.

A Grown Up Assessment of Iran and Trump’s Foreign Policy

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

Multiple things can be true at once. Ayatollah Khamenei was an awful person and leader who terrorized and killed his own people, and the world and Iran are better off with him dead and gone. The United States entering another war of choice in the Middle East is a terrible idea (assuming we actually do). Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu probably have no plan for what they would do if they achieved regime change in Iraq, and maybe that’s better than if they do. Congress should vote on whether we go to war or not, but Congress is an impotent institution. Actual Iranians seem somewhere between bewildered and happy.

For the second time this year the United States has taken out a ruthless, disgusting, brutal dictator who is awful to his own people. No one should miss Maduro or Khamenei. For that matter, let me lump Mahmoud Ahmadinejad into this too, since he died in the strikes. None of these are good people. Whether we arrest them and remove them from office or kill them in an air strike, honestly, I don’t lose sleep over them. Khamenei has killed tens of thousands of Iranians this year. Read that again if you need. Maduro deteriorated Venezuela to the point of having pirates sailing around off their coast in the Caribbean. Sure, I think Donald Trump is an idiot, but I can’t sit here and honestly say it’s a bad thing that we removed these people. Actual Venezuelans and Persians seem fine with it, the anger almost all seems to be from white leftists. I really don’t care what they think of these events.

Is there any plan here though? When we removed Maduro, we allowed his butcher of a Vice-President to take over as the President there in exchange for access to oil. Will we end up just allowing a new Ayatollah to take power in Iran, or some other puppet strong man, in exchange for oil? My guess is yes, and that definitely defeats whatever good purpose these actions had. Reza Pahlavi seems like the most logical short term answer to who should lead Iran right now, and frankly giving the former Shah’s kid power seems like just our latest blunder in that region. About the only thing worse would be a full scale invasion and having to occupy the country and run it ourselves. It seems that the “Trump Doctrine” at this point is Bush’s “Axis of Evil” on steroids, where we go into every hot spot we’re unhappy with in the world and decapitate their leadership and let them figure it out after.

Trump ran his 2024 campaign talking about how he’d bring peace. He lied. He spent the first six months of his Presidency dismantling the federal government by force, simply shutting down whole agencies and departments that were created by laws, on his own word. He is actively trying to reshape the world now using American power. It is not entirely clear what the end result of his plans will be. He has not meaningfully tried to back down Russian aggression in Ukraine, or Chinese designs on Taiwan. It’s not clear that he’s willing to try and push countries who could potentially do major harm to America. In Iran though, it is probably his most aggressive move yet. Regime change there would do great harm to Russia. He has already drawn the Saudis into his coalition with Israel there. Toppling the Iranian regime could go a long way to defunding Hezbollah and Hamas. Toppling Iran isn’t super easy though. It could require an actual war that costs money and lives. There’s the potential that this is the new Afghanistan.

If I’m being honest here, I don’t really have a problem with taking down a terrorist, murderous regime. I just don’t trust the two guys in charge of this. Netanyahu’s decision to drag out his war in Gaza has not been good for anyone, so why would he handle this better? Trump is just maniacal and will do anything he can to try and get his face on Mount Rushmore and out of the Epstein Files at this point. Neither of these guys gives me any confidence. The fact that they have highly competent and funded militaries means they can succeed in a short term attack where they just approve the plans put forward by Generals and Admirals. I don’t really think either has a vision or plan that we should all be excited about.

Patriotism, Hockey, and Democrats

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

I have to admit something that will definitely get me canceled in Democratic circles- I find Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue.” In fact, I find gratuitous acts of patriotism to be fun. I was celebrating outside of the White House the night Osama Bin Laden was killed with thousands of other young Americans. I was cheering for both Alysa Liu and the Men’s Hockey team at the Olympics. In fact, I generally support America on almost everything. This does not mean I don’t know or care about Jim Crow, the Trail of Tears, Japanese Internment camps, slavery, or any of the other atrocities committed by our nation. It does not mean I wasn’t a protestor during the Iraq War. Far from. In fact, I see no problem with blasting “Free Bird” and acknowledging our problems, even in the era of Trump.

In our currently “black and white” era of politics, there are folks who think picking sides is an absolute. You’re either team AOC or team Vance, period. This extends to the point of an Olympic hockey team, because a.) a majority of them are either conservative or politically disengaged, and b.) they’re white men. Yeah, Kash Patel is a weirdo, and yeah, Trump’s joke about the women’s team was piss poor, but if that’s what you took away from the Olympic Hockey Final, or if you were arguing about Alyssa Liu’s (liberal) politics against people that wanted to re-cast her as simply an anti-communist crusader (she’s both liberal and a tremendous symbol against communism), you kind of missed the point. We don’t watch sports to get political commentary. I think many of us are well aware that the athletes playing on the television have political views like the rest of us, they’re people. You can’t possibly watch what’s going on with ICE in America and *not* have an opinion on it of some kind. The point is that yes, it actually doesn’t matter when I’m watching a hockey game. People are not wired to functionally live in a constant war with their fellow citizens like this. It’s weird. Most people think it’s weird. Trying to force it turns off way, way more people than it attracts.

I get that many people on the American left-of-center side are worried that this will be our final President and that our current state is permanent, and so they think the only choice is to fight on every battlefield, all day, everyday. I do not share that sentiment. I believe Trump will lose the House of Representatives in November and his Presidency will practically end. I do believe we will elect a new President in 2028, regardless of who it is. I don’t think a bunch of hockey players visiting the White House after they win a Gold Medal threatens that. I’m sorry, I think this is a fight and argument that generally makes the left look a lot less appealing to unradicalized normies who actually will decide who that new President is. So I think this was stupid.

Btw, I wrote this in the time it took me to listen to “Free Bird,” “American Girl,” and “American Idiot.” Not bad.

Crooksy and Republican Crosswell’s Impending Nuclear War

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

Well, we’re like three months or so from Pennsylvania Primary Day. Republican Ryan Crosswell and Bob “Crooksy” Brooks have the most money in the PA-7 race. Crosswell is fraudulent. Crooksy is the biggest fraud in the field. Now we know that Crosswell was the source of most of the negatives on Crooksy too. Both men are virtual unknowns. Both know that only one of them has a shot to take off in this race. The only question is who bites who first? If you ever wanted to watch a scorpion fight, you’re in luck with this race.

Here’s the thing, a lot of people are going to opine for everyone to stay positive. That’s not an option here. Crooksy can’t afford to not hit Crosswell. Crosswell has more money than he does, and if he gets to tell his made up story of standing up to Trump first and people buy into it, Crooksy will have no oxygen to rise in this race. Crosswell can’t afford to not hit Crooksy either. If Crooksy has the Governor lie to people and tell them that he’s a good Democrat and good person, Crosswell won’t be able to pry those votes back from him, no matter what he says. Both need to hit the other, and both need to do so before minds are made up. Both start out with no base of votes, and need to find people gullible enough to buy into their fictional stories about their lives. If one beats the other to the punch, the ball game may be over. If they both go positive? Well whoever feels like they’re behind will need to absolutely tear the other to the ground to have any chance to win.

Both of these guys have never run for office before. Both are entirely creations of a DC consultant class that is trying to drive the Democratic Party off of a cliff right now. Their high priced spin masters will probably tell them that going negative is too dangerous, and blah blah blah. That will only hold for a little while. There is no way both of these two can build themselves up from nothing. Eventually one of them has to start firing the very obvious opposition research that is out there on both. These are two very objectionable people and it would be malpractice to run a campaign where you don’t inform the public of how fraudulent the other is. If they don’t do it to each other, who will? No one else can come in with that kind of heft and define these guys for who they are.

I Didn’t Need to Watch the State of the Union to Know What It Is.

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

I’m pretty happy I didn’t watch Trump’s State of the Union last night, unlike many of you who read this blog. From what I gather, he gave the longest speech in history, for the second straight year. Yeah, no thanks. Honestly, listening to this guy ramble for hours about how wonderful he is and how great things are is bad for your mental health. You lose brain cells and you might even be tempted to respond to him. There is no point to that. You are persuading no one by arguing about him. You are also not debating a normal politician. If job growth is tepid at best, he’ll tell you he created a billion jobs. Facts and figures don’t matter. For the most part you’re not debating any sort of actual policy. He talks about immigration for instance, and his chaos in the streets policies to deport illegal people here are less effective than Clinton and Obama simply taking people out of prisons who were arrested for crimes and were here illegally. The guy finds a way to even do things that people want in the dumbest way possible, and there’s no point acting like he’s anything but an ignoramus. The people voted for him, and they’ve got him for four years, if they still want to watch, go on ahead. My guess is the ratings were piss poor.

I also don’t watch for all the other theatrics that go on in the room. Honestly, the Cabinet, the Supreme Court, and the Congress are three loathsome institutions at this point, filled with strange people and strange ideas that aren’t doing much good for the public. I don’t need to watch Democratic members who did go yell at the President so they can get their 20 seconds on TV and raise money off of it by text message later. While Trump may be the center piece of decline in that room, let’s not pretend the rest of the room are not complicit in their own ways for reducing our country to a carnival side show. Congress has become successively worse over the last 30 years at doing anything beyond basic appropriations bills to fund stuff they want to do, and even then they often times fail to do it on time and end up shutting down the government. Our current Congress is among the least productive in the history of man kind, a symbol of failure in Western society that deserves scorn from all angles. Even when someone proposes something broadly popular and supported from all sides, you’re lucky if you can get it a vote, let alone pass it through both houses. And the court? They created our current mess. We won’t waste more words on them.

So how is our country doing? Health care, housing, and food all cost too much, and they are all things that are essential to our survival as human beings. We’re actively rolling back protections for our air, water, soil, and food, poisoning the Earth we live on in the name of what? I don’t know, let’s just say profits. Our government is dysfunctional. Our economy is not meeting the public’s needs. Our people are fighting on social media over nonsense. Yeah, we’re doing great. The state of our union is “stronger than ever.” This is just what Americans died in wars for, right?

We’re a shitshow. And if you watched it, that was on display. Me? I had nothing to do last night, but I was too busy for that.