Democrat’s revenge

Democrat’s revenge. By the Hon. Vickie Paladino.

None of the conversations taking place by Democrats and leftists in anticipation of retaking Congress are about the ways they’re going to make life more affordable for Americans.

The conversations are exclusively about how they’re going to use power to take revenge on their political enemies.

There is no strategy to lower gas prices or grocery prices. No strategy for the budget. No talk about hearings on affordability or inflation or the stock market.

Just revenge. That’s all they’re talking about, two weeks before an election they believe to be sewn up.

“He has a body count like a f*cking war criminal. We start with the US Congress and it ends at The Hague for Elon Musk.” They cannot wait to be back in charge of the “justice” system.

 

Kevin Bass:

If Democrats get power, they will:

  1. Lawfare Trump officials;
  2. Pack SCOTUS;
  3. Go after Elon, SpaceX, and Tesla — then billionaires, then millionaires;
  4. Crush free speech;
  5. Make voter ID illegal;
  6. Flood the country with illegals.

Takers gotta take:

Robert Reich [American professor, author, lawyer, and political commentator, who worked for presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama] calls for the “defunding” of Elon Musk, calls for Democrats to go after Musk’s companies. “Democrats ought to [start] laying the groundwork for nationalizing Starlink & SpaceX… It should be a public corporation.”

 

 

Swan:

5 years ago: Starlink is such a stupid idea. Anyone wasting money investing in this Musk scam deserves to lose everything.

Today: Starlink is essential to the defense of an invaded nation. Access to Starlink is a human right! Nationalize it!

The Democrats don’t talk about their policy positions, because their coalition of voters agree on almost nothing. The trade union people want less competition from immigrants, the feminists and gays are opposed to Sharia law, and so on. Unable to argue policy, the Democrats — like all mainstream leftist parties in the West today — are reduced to demonizing the opposing leader. Hence, the criticism of every non-left political leader in the last two decades rapidly escalates up to full Hitler.

The only policy most of the left can agree on is taking other people’s stuff.

The Brazilian Biden

The Brazilian Biden. By Sarah Anderson at PJ Media.

For many of us here in the United States, it reeked of 2020. An incumbent who trailed in the first round staged a late surge to claim victory after a last-minute judicial intervention extended voting hours, transport disruptions appeared in areas favorable to the eventual winner, and the losing candidate immediately refused to concede while alleging the rules had been changed midstream. … It’s also giving me 2024 Nicolás Maduro vibes….

On October 4, Lula finished second with roughly 45.16% to Bolsonaro’s 47.03%. Three weeks later, the certified totals showed Lula at 51.79%, with about 64.3 million votes, and Bolsonaro at 48.21%.

I’m not going to go through all the math, but it appears that Lula gained 10,376,694 votes and won by 4,430,191.

Lula claims it was all about getting out the vote. Abstention did fall between rounds, and around three million more Brazilians voted in the runoff. There is also the matter that this was a two-man race, and other candidates complicated the numbers during the first round, taking a combined 9.317 million votes.

But there is still something fishy. For example, those extra candidates were generally to the right of Bolsonaro and even endorsed him after they lost. Are we to believe every single one of their voters suddenly thought Lula was a better option?

And then there’s the rule change. Just after the polls closed around 5 p.m., Supreme Federal Court Justice Cristiano Zanin extended voting nationwide by two hours. We already know that Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court is corrupt, but Zanin specifically was appointed to the court in 2023 by Lula. Oh yeah, and he was Lula’s personal defense attorney during el presidente’s corruption trial. He cited “transportation” issues and pointed out that some areas had reduced bus services. But the voting stations that were already closed couldn’t be reopened, so the extended voting was uneven across cities.

For what it’s worth, Bolsonaro had asked for extended voting hours in areas that were impacted by heavy rains, but Lula wanted the nationwide changes.

On election night, Flávio refused to concede, and rightfully so. He accused Lula’s side of changing the rules in the middle of the game and said he would seek an annulment of the vote. …

Confirmation:

On Monday, the younger Bolsonaro was visiting his father, Jair, when, he said, federal police stopped him and asked him to surrender his ordinary and diplomatic passports. He was also told he could not leave the country.

He says the order came from none other than Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. …Moraes, of course, is the justice who oversaw the investigation and conviction of Jair Bolsonaro on coup-plotting charges after the 2022 election. He was also sanctioned by Marco Rubio in July 2025 for “serious human rights abuse.” … The Trump administration also accused him of “abusing his authority, creating a censorship complex, [and] blatantly targeting political opponents.”

Glenn Greenwald points out the obvious:

If Bolsonaro had won last night’s election and then a pro-Bolsonaro judge sent the Federal Police to seize Lula’s passport and bar him from leaving the country … every major western media outlet and liberal NGOs would be screaming about the authoritarian attack on Brazil’s elections and the destruction of basic freedoms.

The victor has the guns and courts, and writes history.

After Late-Night Ballot Drop, Joe Biden Wins Brazilian Presidency With 81 Million Votes

After Late-Night Ballot Drop, Joe Biden Wins Brazilian Presidency With 81 Million Votes. By The Babylon Bee.

After a late-night ballot dump and several emergency court rulings, Joe Biden was declared the surprise winner of Brazil’s presidential election, securing 81 million votes. …

At publishing time, Brazilians who had questioned the election result were arrested and placed in solitary confinement.

The world’s tall-poppy syndrome

The world’s tall-poppy syndrome. By Evelyn Rae at Caldron Pool.

It’s the suicidal notion that there is something uniquely evil about being “White.” We are told that our ancestors are guilty of crimes so heinous, so abhorrent that a lifetime of grovelling, and the total forfeiting of our own homelands cannot come close to atoning for the sins that we inherited from them. …

Through never-ending racial quotas and DEI programs, we are relentlessly told that the workplace, the community, the nation, indeed, the world is a better place when White people are diluted, when their power is limited, when their voice is drowned out — and increasingly, when they’re not visibly present at all. Some are already stating it openly: Fewer Whites is the goal today. No Whites is the goal tomorrow. …

 

 

[Our ancestors’] achievements belong to the world, and everyone from everywhere has a right to the civilisation they built — but their supposed crimes, they alone belong to us. So, we are told, the only thing we inherit from our ancestors is the guilt, the shame, and the debt.

And so, as a result, we are told to step aside, to stay silent, and to not question the narrative — even if it’s obviously rigged against us. And it is rigged against us. On a national level, we’re told our identity doesn’t matter because we have to prioritise the voices of ethnic minorities. On a global level, we’re told our identity doesn’t matter because we have to prioritise the voices of so-called “global majorities.”

Wherever we are, we are told that we don’t matter, we need to be silent, we need to be diluted, we need to be watered down and marginalised — and the remarkable thing is that those who openly discriminate in this sense are wholeheartedly convinced they’re morally virtuous in doing so — why? Because they have been convinced that all of the world’s problems can be traced back to White men, and especially White men in positions of power and influence.

In their minds, this is now the great evil that needs to be conquered. And so, every White man striving for power is “literally Hitler”, and any collective of White men who support that are demonised as “literal Nazis. If you want a disturbing glimpse at how widespread this dangerous mindset is, simply take a look at how people reacted to the public murder of Charlie Kirk. …

 

Who is an Australian?

We are being told that the descendants of Australia’s founding stock are unnecessary … If every Anglo-Celtic Australian were to be replaced by foreigners, the nation itself would remain the same, provided the new imports subscribed to “Aussie values.” … Consequently, under this novel definition, being Australian is no longer an ethnic designation but an ideological one….

Now, this is more than just semantics. We’re talking about the intellectual erasure of Anglo-Celtic Australians. The historic people are being gradually removed from the definition. Their identity has become a collection of transferable attributes. And their heritage has become the property of the world. Even those on the so-called “Right” have bought this redefinition. They’re too embarrassed to define us the way we have always been defined — the way every other people group on earth is permitted to define themselves. …

Reality:

At the heart of this discussion, there are two opposing mistakes.

  1. On one side are those who argue that Australia is simply a collection of propositions. Accept the approved values, and you become whatever we are.
  2. On the other side are those who argue that ethnic identity is all that matters, and that ideology or religion are inconsequential to the heritage we’ve been entrusted.

But this is not an either/or situation. The greatness of the Western world, the greatness of the British people, is not people disconnected from their faith, or values disconnected from a people. The greatness of the Western world and British people is an exceptional people embracing an exceptional faith. It is that combination that has proved to be so potent … which is why the Straight, White, Christian, Male has been marked as enemy number one.

Elon Musk is the tallest poppy of all.

We Are At The Molotov-Ribbentrop Stage

We Are At The Molotov-Ribbentrop Stage. By David Archibald.

The foreign ministers of Russia and Germany, Molotov and Ribbentrop respectively, signed their non-aggression pact on 23rd August, 1939. Germany attacked Poland a week later, with the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opening fire on the Polish port of Westerplatte at 4.45 am on 1st September, 1939. The German excuse was that German minorities in Poland were being oppressed.

The current day equivalent of Westerplatte is the Estonian town of Narva, in the northeast corner of the country, on the border with Russia. Russia claims that the Russians in Estonia are being oppressed. There is a US tripwire force based at Camp Reedo in southern Estonia. The bulk of this force has been rotated out, with only some 100 troops remaining. The next US armoured formation is due to arrive in November 2026. If they don’t arrive, or the base is abandoned, that will be a sign of an imminent Russian invasion.

 

 

Now, how could that come about you might well ask. It seems that Putin has been reading the weird ideas of the US Undersecretary of War for Policy, Elbridge Colby, who proposes that the world should be divided into three spheres of influence: the Americas under the control of the United States, the Eurasian landmass controlled by Russia, and Asia is to be controlled by China. Mr Colby is doing his best to bring that about by white-anting NATO. He held a meeting of NATO countries, excluding the nuclear powers of Britain and France and the Baltic states, in Bergen, Norway in June 2026. This ‘Bergen group’ is due to meet again in November in Poland. No doubt they will be told to stand down when Russia invades the Baltic states. That sounds strange but there is no other explanation for such weird behaviour.

Having read Colby’s febrile geopolitics, Putin has proposed a meeting of the three Colby superpowers in Shenzhen, China, on 18th November, 2026, on the sidelines of the APEC conference. Putin expects this meeting to impose a peace settlement on Ukraine, which gives him what he wants. Russia may or may not want to invade the Baltic countries at the moment, but an invasion is necessary for the US to abandon NATO. The US has its own big, kinetic war going on with Iran. At some stage President Trump will call for NATO members to come and help out with his Iran War. When they don’t, and they won’t, that will be his excuse to abandon Europe to the Russians.

In return for this perfidy in the name of hard power realism, what do regime associates in the US hope to get in return? Zerohedge is the main channel for socially acceptable Russian propaganda, so what do its articles say? This one, entitled Five Reasons Why Trump Is More Serious Than Ever About Cutting Deals With Russia, lists things including data centres powered by cheap hydropower. The US, under Trump, is expected to trade its reputation for data centres. …

Ukraine war update:

Zelensky [replaced] the butcher General Syrsky with General Mykhailo Drapatyi in July 2026. General Drapatyi started reforms, including get rid of micromanagement.

This is where it gets interesting. Ukraine had been inflicting 30,000 to 40,000 Russian casualties per month. Ukraine adopted an aspirational target of 50,000 casualties per month. That’s the point at which Russian recruitment would fall short of casualties and Russia would have to end the war.

Ukraine, in three short months, has blown past that aspirational level. Recently there was a day of 2,500 Russian casualties which equates to 75,000 casualties per month. It seems to have settled down to about 2,000 casualties per day which is 20,000 per month higher than it was prior to General Drapatyi’s appointment.

If we assume that we could have had the higher rate of Russian casualties for the last two years, that is half a million Russian casualties and the war might have been over a year ago due to Russian exhaustion. In effect, Zelensky’s political ambition has been the second biggest killer of Ukrainian troops and civilians after Putin himself. …

What the moving finger has written above is an interpretation of events. But there is independent witness to Zelensky’s corrupt weasel character. He did try to  weaken Ukraine’s anti-corruption safeguards at one point, most notably in July 2025. His government pushed through a law that significantly reduced the independence of two key anti-corruption bodies. After substantial public protest and international pressure, Zelensky reversed course and signed legislation restoring their independence. Being corrupt in peacetime is one thing, but doing it during a war with the result of more Ukrainian deaths is vile. Vile weasel indeed. …

Elon Musk:

The Russians, and Musk himself, have called for Zelensky’s replacement. …

Elon Musk is a smart man so how can he regurgitate Russian propaganda like this?

This is the sort of idiotic Russian propaganda that Trump himself spouts, such as saying that the Russians would have won but an idiot general took the tanks off into the mud instead of straight down the highway to Kiev.

 

 

Musk was initially hyper-enthusiastic about the Trump victory, for example calling the Canadian Prime Minister ‘governor’. Then there was a brief falling out over the 2025 budget in which Trump wasn’t going to run the country as a going concern but blow it all on bread and  circuses. Now he is back in the fold and spouts amoral nonsense. But why?

It is because the Democrats have said that they will take his operations from him and jail him for life. He actually does fear for his life, at least subconsciously. As such he should be forgiven for his statements on Ukraine. Of necessity, he has nailed his colours to the mast and the mast is rotten. If the Democrats win, he would be wise to go into exile immediately. Australia should pass legislation to be able to offer him extradition-free asylum.

Are you kidding? Albanese would gleefully throw him in jail for his beliefs and accomplishments, just needs to make up an excuse.

The Australian media elites are lying big-time about the French riots

The Australian media elites are lying big-time about the French riots. By Chris Mitchell in The Australian.

Lying by omission, that is. I watched the ABC News last night on the riots, but not a word about the far left or immigrants. Just students complaining about classrooms, was given as the reason for the riots. Sure. Our lefty friends who stay in their media bubble would simply have no idea of what is going on.

Australia’s media elites seem unable to report what is really happening in riots in France.

Journalists reporting from Europe can’t even describe what is going on before their own eyes. The Australian Financial Review, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald have barely mentioned the presence of Islamist demonstrators at the so-called school riots that have raged across France for more than a month.

AFR European correspondent Andrew Tillett on October 19 could only mention “accusations from conservatives that the unrest is being stirred up by Islamists”. Since the worst of the rioting on October 17, European correspondent for the SMH and The Age, David Crowe, has only discussed immigration through the prism of comments by US President Donald Trump criticising France’s approach to the issue. Crowe finally mentioned Gaza in a single sentence on October 20.

It’s worse at the ABC – for a month the presence of Islamist rioters among other groups has been obvious from the footage aired but goes unmentioned in reports on the national broadcaster’s radio, television and online platforms.

 

Major gaslighting by most of the Australian media.

 

Matthew Hennessey in The Wall Street Journal’s “Free Expression” column on October 20 made the same observation: “Watching the footage of the riots in France, I couldn’t but help notice the thing you are not supposed to see: The rioters themselves don’t look very French.” He pointed out US National Public Radio had not even mentioned “France’s restive immigrant communities”.

It’s not hard to pick, even for a left-wing reporter. Many of the rioters are carrying Palestinian, Algerian and Moroccan flags and many are chanting about Israel and Gaza. Sure, there are plenty of regular school kids, trade unionists and various socialist campaigners too.

Even the queen of the global “rent-a-protester” movement, Greta Thunberg, is there wearing a keffiyeh. …

Protecting the French youth from the truth about welfare:

Driss Ghali, writing for Spiked Online last week, nailed the problem for France’s youth: “Since childhood they have been told … their ancestors were racists and rapists in the colonies; and that France is — and remains — a rich country. They are ignorant of France’s decline.” …

European nations being hit by the latest wave of protests — Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Italy and Albania — do not have enough young people to pay for the welfare systems these nations expect. …

Europe’s welfare system was designed for families with 2.5 children and an average life expectancy of 62, “not 1.25 and 79”. …

Which brings us to why most of the Australian media won’t discuss the Euro riots truthfully:

We will need politicians brave enough to argue for an immigration program voters will accept. This might have to bite off the sticky issue of source country compatibility, which the Coalition has begun discussing. …

Australians don’t want Islamist violence, reject Jew hatred and are sick of pro-Palestinian marches that have disrupted urban life here since October 7, 2023.

Australians don’t want what France has endured — the Charlie Hebdo killings of 12 people in January 2015, the Bataclan nightclub murders of 90, and 42 others across Paris in November 2015, the burning of synagogues and the beheading of priests.

Australians should expect migrants given access to this country to love Australia and support its values. And we should expect them to bring the skills our country needs. Nothing less.

To notice the immigrants or far-left running the French riots would be to undermine the great ideological and demographic endeavor of the left/uniparty in Australia. This in turn could threaten jobs in the media, and those of their friends in the bureaucracy and NGOs. Worst case: if One Nation got into power, the ABC might be cut back, re-organized, or even abolished. Quelle horreur!

France is the canary in the coal mine.

The new genocide

The new genocide. By Liza Rozen.

A French school student accuses the French police of committing genocide against children protesting in the streets against the oppressive and violent education system.

According to him, every attempt by the police and security forces to suppress the “peaceful” protest and stop the students before they burn, loot, or vandalize the streets stems from institutional racism created by Israel through training France’s security forces and police.

 

Stopping Muslim rioters from looting French stores is the new genocide — Daniel Greenfield.

Politics over love

Politics over love. By Louise Perry in The Australian.

It is common to hear young women, in particular, complain that their male counterparts are too conservative to make suitable boyfriends.

Last year, Triple J’s dating show asked young listeners whether they would “not date someone due to their political views”; 86 per cent of female respondents said “yes”, as did 67 per cent of male respondents.

One young woman, Georgia, called in to express a disappointment that was typical of the female contributors to the show, saying: “The last few guys I’ve been on dates with, it all ­follows the same pattern. At first everything is great … [but] a few dates in the cracks start to show and they’ll ­casually mention that they’re pro-life, or say something like, ‘You’re not a feminist, are you?’

“I’ve never really thought of myself as super progressive, I just figured I had pretty rational beliefs about equality and how people should be treated. That was until I started dating, and I got a better understanding of just how far to the right men are leaning these days … You realise you can’t build a life with the person in front of you because your core beliefs don’t align.” …

As pollster Scarlett Maguire wrote this year of British young women: … “Six in 10 say they would find it difficult to date someone who disagreed with them on the Palestine/Israel conflict, or who did not share their views on Trump … Young women are also more likely than young men to say they would not have a relationship with someone who disagreed with them over immigration.”

 

 

It is from this cultural context that terms like “boy sober” and “heteropessimism” have emerged to describe young women’s disillusionment with the idea of dating men. Unlike their great-grandmothers, these women do not need to find a man to survive financially, which gives them unprecedented freedom. Plus, young women are doing very well in education and the workplace, and since fully a quarter of Australian women aged 18 to 45 say they do not want to have children, the urge to find a husband is diminished still further.

I’ve had many conversations with single women over the past few years who all say roughly the same thing: I’m happy with being single, and men are so ­disappointing nowadays, so why bother?

Meanwhile, the caricature of young men as right-wing extremists could become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, as some inevitably react against a progressive mainstream that they see as hostile to men. …

We are more likely to see a bitter withdrawing of men to the comforts of the online world, rather than acts of aggression. That’s true for women, too. Don’t expect this battle of the sexes to manifest in blood and gore …. This is a social conflict characterised more by the kind of angry muttering and furtive unpleasantness ­appropriate to the digital age.

Women are nutured for their first two decades by an education system that tells them they are wonderful if they behave obediently and regurgitate the lessons at exam time. Why don’t the men just go along? Can’t imagine.

Elon Musk is the first billionaire who doesn’t play on the globalist team

Elon Musk is the first billionaire who doesn’t play on the globalist team. By Brivael Le Pogam.

Why are Democrats going after Elon Musk with everything they have? It’s not because he’s a billionaire in politics. They’ve been perfectly comfortable with billionaires in politics for decades. They’re going after him because he’s the first one playing against them.

Look at the numbers. Soros’s Democracy PAC had put over $100 million into this midterm cycle before the summer was even over. Only a tiny fraction of it shows up under his own name. Then add the advocacy arm of his foundations, which doesn’t have to disclose all of its political spending. And that’s just the visible part. Over 40 years, tens of billions have gone into NGOs, universities, legal networks and media projects that shape what counts as an “acceptable” opinion.

That’s the real game. Billionaires have been buying politicians for decades, on every side. But the smartest ones figured something out: you don’t buy a candidate, you buy the ecosystem. Universities, foundations, newsrooms, NGOs, regulators, courts. Once you control who writes the reports, who trains the lawyers and who decides what counts as “misinformation”, elections become a detail.

For 30 years that ecosystem leaned one way. Nobody called it oligarchy. They called it “civil society.”

Enter Musk:

Then Musk showed up. He bought the main public square, took the filters off, and started spending in the open, under his own name. Yes, he’s the biggest donor of these midterms. Everyone can see exactly how much he gave and to whom. That’s the difference. One plays in daylight, the other plays through a maze of structures.

And suddenly, billionaire money in politics became a threat to democracy.

Makers versus takers:

This isn’t really about left versus right. It’s about an ideology that captured these institutions and leads straight into a wall. More regulation, less building. More process, less progress. Countries shutting down working nuclear plants. A decade to approve a power line. A system whose default answer to any ambition is “no.”

Musk is the opposite. Reusable rockets. Mass-market EVs. Satellite internet for the whole planet. Brain-computer interfaces. A serious plan to make humanity multiplanetary. You can hate his tweets. You can’t deny that no one in the last 20 years has pushed the frontier of what humanity can build further than he has.

That’s why they need to break him. Not because of his money. Because he proves the system can be bypassed.

A globalist future:

If we leave the system as it is, we don’t get a catastrophe. We get something worse: slow, comfortable stagnation. A civilization that manages its own decline instead of building its future.

The Labor Party here in Australia is taking us down the European path, of stagnation and rule by bureaucrat.

(Did you know that the European Commission is functionally equivalent to the old Soviet Politburo? In both cases there is/was an elected Parliament that in practice does not initiate legislation, so it is just a rubber stamp. Who’s heard of anyone in the European or Soviet Parliaments? No one, because they are powerless bodies. The real power lies in the European Commission or Politburo. And they are appointed bodies, the European Commission through a process involving elected national governments, and the Soviet Politburo by the Communist Party hierarchy. In both cases, democracy is effectively muted and the status quo entrenched.)

 

How the billionaires have been guiding us into globalism

How the billionaires have been guiding us into globalism. By Brivael Le Pogam.

Almost nobody looks at the plumbing: who funds the people who write the norms, litigate before the courts and set the boundaries of the debate.

Take the best-documented case: the Open Society Foundations, created by George Soros. Over a billion dollars a year. Roughly $32 billion given away since 1984. Not a single voter ever approved one of those dollars.

 

 

The model is simple and ruthless. You don’t need to win an election. You fund NGOs, think tanks, legal clinics, university programs. They produce reports, train lawyers, run strategic litigation. And some of those people end up inside the institutions.

Example: the European Court of Human Rights

A 2020 report found that at least 22 of the 100 permanent judges between 2009 and 2019 came from seven NGOs that are highly active before that same Court. Open Society is the main one, and it funds the other six.

The worst part: in 88 cases, 18 judges sat on the bench while the NGO they came from was the applicant, the representative or an intervening party. In any listed company, that’s called a conflict of interest.

None of this is illegal. That’s exactly the hack. These institutions were designed to protect themselves from governments and parties. Nobody planned for a private actor funding the entire chain: the plaintiff, the expert, the lawyer, and sometimes yesterday’s colleague who is now the judge. …

Soros made his money by speculation using insider information. His famous bet against the British pound was informed by insiders in the central banks, so he got the timing right.

[Soros’] foundation doesn’t make money, it spends it. The return isn’t financial, it’s normative. Shaping the rules is worth more than any dividend.

So stop shouting “Soros” like an incantation. It gets engagement and changes nothing. The problem is structural: any billionaire, left or right, could do exactly the same thing tomorrow. Many already do.

What we should demand is rules. Full transparency on the funding of NGOs that litigate before European courts and institutions. Public declarations of interest for judges. Automatic recusal. Traceability of foreign money in lobbying.

Stop staring at the puppets. Look at the plumbing. Whoever funds the infrastructure of the debate always ends up writing its conclusions.

Those billionaires have made their money. They sit atop the status and power pyramids. Now they want to freeze society, so they and their kids stay on top. Like the medieval period all over again — stagnant and autocratic, anti-freedom and anti-progress.

The Coming Insurrection

The Coming Insurrection. By Glenn Reynolds.

Via DataRepublican, we have learned that a group of Democratic governors, retired military and intelligence officers, and former USAID “color revolution” specialists, have for some time been plotting to pull off a color revolution in the United States.

Or, to put it more precisely, they have been conspiring to overthrow the constitutionally elected government of the United States, and to replace the Constitution with something completely different. …

There’s a lot of data, including videos, recordings, transcripts of Signal chats, etc., but the gist is this: If the Democrats take the House and Senate (and maybe if they don’t), various leftist groups will stage violent protests, intended to press Trump into invoking the Insurrection Act and sending in troops. Once he does, Democratic governors in blue states will denounce his acts as illegal (whether they are or not) and mount resistance on various levels. The goal is to destabilize things enough that they can seize power and replace the Constitution.

This isn’t some fever dream, it’s right there in the extensive files that DataRepublican has provided. …

A color revolution is not a coup, but it’s not really a civil war either — or at least it’s not meant to be. (I have some concerns that an attempted color revolution might lead to a civil war.)

But successful color revolutions turn out big crowds on one side only. In the United States, that’s not likely to happen. Aside from the military, President Trump has many loyalists. They might turn out on their own, or they might be invited. He could probably have as many as a million (possibly armed) supporters out in the streets overnight if he asked in the face of hostile mobs. …

The results of that would probably be bloody, and more like a civil war than anything. Would Trump do that? Lincoln was willing to fight a civil war to keep the Union together and put down a Democratic insurrection. I doubt Trump would do less.

I hope that all of this is just pre-election vaporware and none of it will come to pass. But it’s worth noting that we’re talking about this because a group of 1500 senior government, military, and NGO officials have been talking about overthrowing the government among themselves. That alone is a cataclysmic change in our political environment.

Many of them are likely prosecutable for seditious conspiracy — which unlike most other conspiracy crimes does not require an overt act in support of the conspiracy to constitute a crime — and even if, as is most likely, this whole thing is a fizzle, the Department of Justice should prosecute everyone subject to the law. Letting people get away with this kind of plotting just ensures it will happen again.

Cynical Publius:

Did you happen to catch the part of the plot where Democrat governors will declare the Constitutionally-elected Presidency invalid and seize control of American governance?

That’s literally in the videos, idiot, and I am not exaggerating.

Go watch the videos and report back and let us know if you still support the Democrat coup plot.

A cataclysmic change in our political environment indeed. Leftism does not command popular support, so the beneficiaries of leftism (nice government jobs, easy money, power, etc.) are resorting to increasingly desperate measures. Mere media control, censoring and cancelling opponents, and cheating with the vote count isn’t enough any more. The difference between China and the US keeps narrowing.

hat-tip David Archibald

Why is almost every celebrity on the same side? And against Elon?

Why is almost every celebrity on the same side? And against Elon? By Brivael Le Pogam.

Actors, singers, late-night hosts, award-show presenters. Thousands of people with different backgrounds, different lives, different temperaments. And somehow, on every major issue, they land on the exact same opinion, at the exact same moment, with the exact same hashtags. Free minds don’t behave like that. An ecosystem does. …

Because Hollywood is not a free market of talent. It’s a royal court.

A young actor doesn’t make it because he’s good. Hundreds are good. He makes it because someone lets him in: an agent, a casting director, a producer, a studio, an awards committee.

Every step is a gate, and every gate has a keeper. When your whole career depends on a few rooms, you learn very quickly what can be said in those rooms and what can’t.

This is how it works. First you stay silent. Then you nod. Then you repeat. Then you believe. Compromise never arrives all at once. It arrives one dinner, one role, one red carpet at a time. And once you’ve given up enough, you need the system to stay in place, because the system is the only thing that makes the sacrifice worth it.

They joked about Harvey Weinstein before the world found out:

Want to see the whole mechanism in a single story? For decades, one of the most powerful producers in Hollywood was the subject of accusations from dozens of women, and much of the industry treated it as an open secret. A host even joked about it at an Oscar nominations announcement, and the room laughed. Speaking up seriously meant losing everything. When the truth finally broke, the same industry dressed in black and applauded its own courage. Silence while it pays. Virtue once it’s safe. That’s the system.

And that’s the real lie. Not that these people are monsters. Most aren’t. The lie is calling it courage. Real courage costs you something. Saying what every room in town already applauds costs nothing. Saying the opposite is what costs. …

Elon:

Elon Musk is landing rockets on their own tails. He’s bringing internet to villages that never had a phone line. He’s building cars that drive themselves and implants that let paralyzed people move a cursor with their thoughts.

Artists are supposed to be the ones who dream about the future. Here is a man actually building it. How many of them stand next to him? A handful. Why? …

Not because they’ve studied his ideas and rejected them, but because standing there is a career risk they can’t afford.

Look at what happened to him when he left the consensus. Advertisers fled. Friends disappeared. Invitations stopped. He could afford it. Almost nobody else can. That tells you exactly how free that world really is.

Actors speak other people’s word and fake emotions:

So wake up. Stop taking your political cues from people whose paycheck depends on agreeing. A celebrity endorsement is not an argument. It’s a loyalty signal. Your vote, your convictions, your children’s future: don’t outsource them to people who are paid to recite lines someone else wrote.

The people who build the future rarely get applause from the people who perform it.

The Hollywood types who don’t talk about politics are the conservative ones.

Maybe Elon will have the last laugh: in ten years time Grok AI might have replaced all the Hollywood actors.

Software is about to eat the world much faster

Software is about to eat the world much faster. By Marc Andreessen.

Fifteen years ago, I wrote that software is eating the world
– at the time, a controversial claim. The main prediction of the essay has come true.

As a simple measure, technology’s share of the market capitalization among the ten largest businesses in the world has gone from 31.5% to 94.4% over that period. Amazingly, this happened even though only 1 in 300 people on earth wrote software, and every line of it had to be written by hand.

Software has been eating the world at the speed of human hands. It is about to eat the world at the speed of compute. … Today, if you talk to any software engineer at a leading company, they’ll tell you that agents write almost all of their code. …

When agents write 90% of the code, engineers can literally do ten times as much. The 10x engineer becomes the 100x engineer, as they shift from writing artisanal code to operating as the CTO [Chief Technical Officer] of a fleet of agents. The 1000x engineer isn’t too far behind. As Scott [Wu] puts it: “Within our lifetime, engineers will go from bricklayers to architects, focusing on the creativity of designing systems rather than the manual labor of putting them together.” …

Every time programmers get more leverage, doomers predict the end of software engineering. Compilers were supposed to shrink the profession. So was open source. So was the cloud. Instead, each leap made software cheaper to build, and demand for software, and engineers, exploded.

It keeps happening because, as Milton Friedman observed, human wants and needs are infinite, so economic demand is infinite, and job growth can continue forever (see The Techno-Optimist Manifesto). Technology is how we unlock that demand. Technology gives us leverage, lowers the cost to produce, and makes previously uneconomical use cases economical.