This was the article by Mr. Klein that convinced me to become a subscriber. It is wise, unexpectedly insightful, brilliant, and eloquent all at once.
An ex-Democrat, I became an unaffiliated independent in 2021. For me, it was the woke politics and particularly woke policies in our schools and universities, as well as Democrats' excessive regulation of commerce and property development in California, where I live.
Although I liked many of Biden's policies, I was deeply offended by his absentee Presidency and grasped no later than 2022 that he had lost the mental capacity to serve as a fit President. Quite apart from that, he had a natural tendency both to dither and to pander.
After leaving the party, I was truly surprised to learn how intolerant Democrats were of those who opposed their preferred policies and platitudes.
For all that, I could never support the national Republican Party because of its incomprehensible views on climate change and energy policy. I am pro-nuclear, pro-renewable, and pro-research into nuclear fusion and ameliorating the changes that fossil fuels have wrought to the atmosphere.
I also strongly believe that the country should welcome immigrants according to what they can contribute to our society by their labor, study, skills, or investments. That has undergirded American prosperity from its founding onward. That perspective, it seems, places me squarely outside today's Republican Party.
I am also alarmed by the current Administration's cavalier disrespect for rule of law, the separation of powers, and democratic procedures. They underpin our society. Meddle with them, and the country will be transformed out of recognition for the worse.
I also find the Administration's attacks on our best universities to be incomprehensibly bad policy.
That said, I like some things that the Administration has done. In particular, Trump understands that it is personally his responsibility to communicate regularly with the public and the press (even if he blatantly favors certain media outlets over others, as all Presidents have done more or less blatantly).
Also, I am hostile to the reverse-racism and tacit or express censorship eagerly and self-righteously practiced by woke progressives, and so Trump's repudiation of that groupthink is welcome to me.
But too often MAGA conservatives seem to champion free speech only for those who parrot their own ideas. That is not free speech.
Rather, free speech can be limited by reasonable place-and-time requirements, but otherwise each speaker can say what he will except to utter or publish any of the following: true threats; speech that incites imminent violence or rioting; disclosures of sensitive state secrets (narrowly defined);, and patent obscenity that shocks the conscience. Also, a speaker can be enjoined from repeating a statement that has been confirmed to be defamatory or from revealing a company's trade secret, and no speaker can lawfully use false advertising to win sales or harm competitors. Pretty much all other speech is fair game.
Of equal importance, history confirms that free trade among peoples and places improves overall prosperity over time. Indeed, the very founding of this country was a rebellion against English mercantilism.
Adam Smith wrote his opus on the Wealth of Nations in 1776. That was not a coincidence. It was an enlightenment, which was embraced by the original American Revolutionaries. The only exception is that each country must know how to make certain kinds of products that its national security requires, but the list should be very short and carefully limited. Trump's trade wars are simply incomprehensible to me and potentially ruinous. I hope that Scott Bessent wins Trump's ear and can thus save us all.
Lastly, Elon Musk is not unambiguously good or bad. He is a brilliant visionary, a swashbuckling commercial pioneer, and someone who in my view likely has a frail, overly impressionable personality. Unquestionably, the Democrats drove him into the arms of the Republicans: the Biden Administration snubbed Tesla and preposterously misused FCC powers to withhold approval of Starlink as a provider of broadband to rural areas under Biden's broadband programs. Also, one of Mr. Musk's sons chose at a young age to become a transgender girl, which is a cause absurdly embraced without nuance by Democrats who lack good sense. On this last issue, I invite everyone to read Andrew Sullivan's wonderful, unanswerable commentary on Substack.
In fact, woke progressives and MAGA Republicans have a lot in common. Both suffer from excessive groupthink. Both have some good points to make but too often favor half-baked ideas that lead to ruinously bad policy. Both are profoundly illiberal. Perversely, each feeds off the other, and each side's outrages seem to inflame and bolster the other side, while us onlookers suffer from both.
They deserve one another. But the rest of the country and the rest of the world need a break from both.
So it's time for a third party that can rally coalitions to enact or prevent the worst excesses of either. The country badly needs a third party. Count me in.
(PS: I made a few minor, non-substantive edits to this comment only to correct obvious typos at 6:56 p.m. PT.)
Love this. I was a Republican all my life, but voted Democrat for Biden the first time. I didn't vote for Trump either time. It has been a "hold your nose and vote" situation for years. I despise both parties at this point. The elitist left that wants to divide everybody into various sectors of victimhood and instruct us how to think, what to buy, erase history, create reams of regulations and litigate everything to death. As well as Republicans who take away women's rights, ban books, glorify guns, violence, claim religious divine right, and ignorantly follow their leader.
It's ridiculous. Politics is nothing more than showmanship, jobs for life (senate, congress, Supreme Court) and buying and selling votes. It's all about personal enrichment and power, not the greater good. Both sides claim "we won by a great margin and have a mandate." No, you don't! Most folks are in the middle, and just want an adult for president who tells us the truth, good and bad. You can't please everybody, but nobody is stopping the extremists on both sides who are holding the entire country hostage to their whims! In retrospect, Clinton was a terrific president!
The problem is your examples of Dem moderates, do act or speak moderately. Not a single Dem, except perhaps John Fetterman and a Texas Dem border Congressman, conveniently charged with corruption after he spoke up, ever called for Biden to close the border. 10 million+ people crossed into the US in 4 years. Few borders in human history have been crossed more, without invitation.
Dems then demanded the same number of annual new arrivals be codified into permanent complicated legislation, obviously designed to hide the true scope of the situation. Trump, who Dems refer to as chronically stupid, closed the border in weeks, utilizing only existing laws. Dems could have easily achieved the same results, but purposefully did not. How is that remotely moderate?
Likewise for Climate policy. Handed $7500 checks, most Americans have still avoided EVs like the plague. For many people, EVs are not practical for a multitude of reasons, but Dems remain devoted to shoving them down citizen's throats. Does that sound moderate?
The trillion dollar spending orgy of Green schemes did little to help the Climate or most Americans. The beneficiaries were overwhelmingly Dems donors that founded Green companies, while swimming in a sea of tax payer subsidies. They then pumped and dumped stocks or issued crazy C-suite paychecks and perks. How moderate is that policy?
For example, Rivian makes $100K luxury EV SUVs. Wall Street calculates the company losses nearly $100K on each vehicle sold. Handed billions in taxpayer dollars, in multiple tranches, the company will likely go BK before it can waste the last billions, Biden handed them, walking out of the WH. I do not recall any moderate Dems objecting to taxpayers subsidizing a $100K luxury EV company, destined for the corporate boneyard. How hard would it have been for a moderate Dem to say, there are better uses for tax dollars?
Ditto for the issue of child sex changes. How many Dems mentioned a society that forbids children from tattooing themselves, due to the permanence of the choice, might what to think long and hard, before allowing 12 year olds to remove healthy body parts or ingest "medicine" that deprives them of adult fertility?
The issue of trans athletes could have been easily solved by the compassionate compromise of adding a 3rd category in individual sports and allowing multiple schools to form trans teams that compete against other trans teams. Add separate trans locker rooms, and the issue is solved, but not a single Dem suggested the obvious middle ground.
Ruy has been brilliantly calling for moderation, since before Dems lost the election. He might as well be howling into the wind. It does not appear any "moderate" Dems are listening.
The biggest problem with Mamdani’s victory is that New York is the home of so many left- leaning journalists who are inclined to get overly excited and proclaim all this is reflective of a mighty socialist wave. Which it is not. Mamdani received 460k votes out of a city of 8.8 million (and, okay, about 6 million voters) including many thousands of voters who (incoherently in my view) voted for Trump in 2024.
His victory reflects two important trends: if one’s political party is a broad coalition, which the Democrats have always been, then the groups most mobilized will prevail. In NYC, four years ago, Adam’s shocked the cognoscenti by mobilizing the black middle class. This go round, Momdani energized the young, the left and the Asian community. But he was only able to prevail due to the indifference and non-participation of the great majority of moderate New Yorkers.
The other trend is a bit more troubling. The central theme of Momdani’s campaign was affordability, mostly with regard to housing. Affordability is a real concern but it is also way overblown and also an area where there are no easy answers. The kids in Williamsburg could get a much cheaper apartment - by moving to the Bronx. And with the density of NYC, the only way to crash the market (which is what the young people are effectively demanding) would be to turn New York into Beijing, more or less destroying it. Along comes Momdani who, to use a phrase that is beginning to take hold among certain quarters here, “writes checks with his mouth that his ass can’t cash”. Many of his followers know that he can’t deliver his rediculous promises but they are beyond caring, in their eyes, he is at least “out there” for them. This refusal to confront the hard work needed to really solve problems infects both sides of the political spectrum, Momdani’s victory demonstrated how much of a problem it is for the Left.
All that said, disengagement is not the answer, engagement is. Without the likes of folks like you, Joe and, yes, Andrew Sullivan, the coalition runs the risk of veering off in destructive directions, which has already brought us to the brink of permanent tyranny. But the great majority of Dems are not the blue city darlings but the George Latimers and Pat Ryans of the world, trying to do their best in crazy times. The voters, bless their hearts, are going to make some irritating and immature choices; we cannot allow these misfires to lose the war.
The only thing that keeps me sane is that I know things will change, they always do. And the fact that I’m an optimist and believe that when change arrives it will be for the better.
Not to respond to the same hobby-horses you've been riding for decades, but note that Bill Clinton changed his diet to keep his heart from killing him, by and large not a political act.
The Greek historian Thucydides, writing 2400 years ago in democratic Athens, asserted that a politician in a democracy needs four cardinal virtues. 1. He must see what is necessary to be done. 2. He must be able to convince the populace of this—what is necessary. 3. He must not be afraid to propose difficult and unpopular measures when they are necessary. 4. He must be above money.
You are asking where in the Democratic Party is that virtuous politician. Indeed.
Reality bites, but it is better to wake up to the possible, and stop dreaming of what might have been. Given your history, politically, it is hard awakening. Like Teixeria, Sullivan, and others.
As Napoleon once said: “I found the crown of France in the gutter, and I picked it up.”. Sooner or later someone will wake up, see the whole in the Democrat Party and seek to fill it.
We need a two party system, not one high above the other. Power abhors a vacuum, someone will see it and know instinctively how to fill it. Hopefully before 2027.
Joe, I must of missed it in all of the words you just spouted, but is there anything good about today’s democrat party? Anything of interest to hard working proud Americans? I didn’t read a single example.
You and the rest of the democrats can repeat your lies about President Trump and the MAGA movement until the day you die, but you aren’t going to fool us. If there really was anything bad about Trump and the populist nationalist movement then why do you have to lie?
You are clearly not one to be fooled. It is reflected in your incoherent argument about Sanity Clause "lying" about something or other and the suggestion that DJT and the populist nationalist movement "hasn't really done anything bad". No sir, Mr. This, no one is fooling you.
Not “incoherent” but obviously just too complicated for you to understand. But like Joe, you will be easy to disprove; just name one thing that Joe wrote here that “DJT and (or) the populist nationalist movement” has done that is bad that ISN’T a lie?
Pardoning the criminals who assaulted the police on January 6 was very bad. And don't give me Antifa or the FBI. THOSE are lies. I allow you to exist here as an example of free speech. Your foolish fake intellectualism is boring and, frankly, unreadable but you provide an excellent service for Sanity Clause readers. Keep it up!
Joe, you picked an excellent example of the lies that you and the rest of the fake news media continue to propogate. Jan 6 was a government false flag operation, not an attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters and I’m going to help you prove it. So tell me which of the Proud Boys (who you mentioned in your article) assaulted a police officer on Jan 6? Name just one. Provide the name of any officer they assaulted. Tell me, what exactly did any one of the Proud Boys do on Jan 6 that was “bad” or illegal? Provide any evidence that any of the Proud Boys encouraged anyone else to do something that was “bad” or illegal. To my knowledge even the lazy media hasn’t made up a specific lie about them, just broad brush generalizations without any evidence. And after I help you refute the media lies about the Proud Boys I can help you refute the lies against the other Trump supporters who were targeted by Biden’s weaponized DOJ/FBI in their effort to get to Trump.
Kash Patel and Dan Bongino have promised to bring all of the government provacators to justice and while they are in the process of casting a big net to catch all of the Jan 6 perpetrators they have asked for our patience. When this story breaks, it will crush the complicit lying media. This corrupt government’s assault has ruined a lot of innocent lives and the complicity of you and your friends in the media is disgusting.
As I continue to torture you with facts and logic and disprove your lies, I really don’t care if my discussions are too complicated for you to understand. Let’s start simply; just tell me what “bad” things the Proud Boys did on Jan 6.
Still an excellent piece, and, sadly, still relevant and accurate. The Democrats were pathetic then and they remain so today -- nothing has changed. I think of Bill Clinton every day. He was an excellent President, one of the best in my lifetime. (I was born in 1956.) None of his successors has been as good as Clinton. Why? We had 8 years of peace and prosperity, a smaller, more efficient federal government, less crime, AND a balanced budget! What was there not to like? Rahm Emmanuel may be an excellent candidate, but I doubt that he will be able to drag the Democratic Party to the center and sanity.
Joe, I enjoy reading your posts and appreciate your efforts to be provocative. But I paused over your criticism about the “feminization” of the Democratic Party. Really? I love a good steak, I was the captain of my high school football team, I still play golf, but I don’t really think that the party’s problem is that women get to play a role. That just seems like another misdirection, especially when you are praising the Dem nominees for governor in VA and NJ.
I support a woman with a national security background for President in 2028 because she will be stronger than the wuss-brigade that currently plays at leadership in the party. They are wusses because of thirty years of deferring to--and patrionizing--women activists. This gave the Dems the false "equity" of DEI, the barbaric support for teenage sex-change, the support for illegal immigration, the support for "understanding" criminals rather than locking them up and the inability to articulate when, if ever, abortion is wrong. These acts of intellectual cowardice gave us President Donald J. Trump
Scratching my head, but you are the expert. But “wuss” is still in your vocabulary? I think I agree with you on most of the substance, but I do think how we talk about this stuff matters. But maybe I am just being a wuss.
Correct, except for Wallace '68 and especially '72 before he was shot. That ground game became the Tea Party and later MAGA. Any counter movement would have to grow that same way.
This was the article by Mr. Klein that convinced me to become a subscriber. It is wise, unexpectedly insightful, brilliant, and eloquent all at once.
An ex-Democrat, I became an unaffiliated independent in 2021. For me, it was the woke politics and particularly woke policies in our schools and universities, as well as Democrats' excessive regulation of commerce and property development in California, where I live.
Although I liked many of Biden's policies, I was deeply offended by his absentee Presidency and grasped no later than 2022 that he had lost the mental capacity to serve as a fit President. Quite apart from that, he had a natural tendency both to dither and to pander.
After leaving the party, I was truly surprised to learn how intolerant Democrats were of those who opposed their preferred policies and platitudes.
For all that, I could never support the national Republican Party because of its incomprehensible views on climate change and energy policy. I am pro-nuclear, pro-renewable, and pro-research into nuclear fusion and ameliorating the changes that fossil fuels have wrought to the atmosphere.
I also strongly believe that the country should welcome immigrants according to what they can contribute to our society by their labor, study, skills, or investments. That has undergirded American prosperity from its founding onward. That perspective, it seems, places me squarely outside today's Republican Party.
I am also alarmed by the current Administration's cavalier disrespect for rule of law, the separation of powers, and democratic procedures. They underpin our society. Meddle with them, and the country will be transformed out of recognition for the worse.
I also find the Administration's attacks on our best universities to be incomprehensibly bad policy.
That said, I like some things that the Administration has done. In particular, Trump understands that it is personally his responsibility to communicate regularly with the public and the press (even if he blatantly favors certain media outlets over others, as all Presidents have done more or less blatantly).
Also, I am hostile to the reverse-racism and tacit or express censorship eagerly and self-righteously practiced by woke progressives, and so Trump's repudiation of that groupthink is welcome to me.
But too often MAGA conservatives seem to champion free speech only for those who parrot their own ideas. That is not free speech.
Rather, free speech can be limited by reasonable place-and-time requirements, but otherwise each speaker can say what he will except to utter or publish any of the following: true threats; speech that incites imminent violence or rioting; disclosures of sensitive state secrets (narrowly defined);, and patent obscenity that shocks the conscience. Also, a speaker can be enjoined from repeating a statement that has been confirmed to be defamatory or from revealing a company's trade secret, and no speaker can lawfully use false advertising to win sales or harm competitors. Pretty much all other speech is fair game.
Of equal importance, history confirms that free trade among peoples and places improves overall prosperity over time. Indeed, the very founding of this country was a rebellion against English mercantilism.
Adam Smith wrote his opus on the Wealth of Nations in 1776. That was not a coincidence. It was an enlightenment, which was embraced by the original American Revolutionaries. The only exception is that each country must know how to make certain kinds of products that its national security requires, but the list should be very short and carefully limited. Trump's trade wars are simply incomprehensible to me and potentially ruinous. I hope that Scott Bessent wins Trump's ear and can thus save us all.
Lastly, Elon Musk is not unambiguously good or bad. He is a brilliant visionary, a swashbuckling commercial pioneer, and someone who in my view likely has a frail, overly impressionable personality. Unquestionably, the Democrats drove him into the arms of the Republicans: the Biden Administration snubbed Tesla and preposterously misused FCC powers to withhold approval of Starlink as a provider of broadband to rural areas under Biden's broadband programs. Also, one of Mr. Musk's sons chose at a young age to become a transgender girl, which is a cause absurdly embraced without nuance by Democrats who lack good sense. On this last issue, I invite everyone to read Andrew Sullivan's wonderful, unanswerable commentary on Substack.
In fact, woke progressives and MAGA Republicans have a lot in common. Both suffer from excessive groupthink. Both have some good points to make but too often favor half-baked ideas that lead to ruinously bad policy. Both are profoundly illiberal. Perversely, each feeds off the other, and each side's outrages seem to inflame and bolster the other side, while us onlookers suffer from both.
They deserve one another. But the rest of the country and the rest of the world need a break from both.
So it's time for a third party that can rally coalitions to enact or prevent the worst excesses of either. The country badly needs a third party. Count me in.
(PS: I made a few minor, non-substantive edits to this comment only to correct obvious typos at 6:56 p.m. PT.)
Love this. I was a Republican all my life, but voted Democrat for Biden the first time. I didn't vote for Trump either time. It has been a "hold your nose and vote" situation for years. I despise both parties at this point. The elitist left that wants to divide everybody into various sectors of victimhood and instruct us how to think, what to buy, erase history, create reams of regulations and litigate everything to death. As well as Republicans who take away women's rights, ban books, glorify guns, violence, claim religious divine right, and ignorantly follow their leader.
It's ridiculous. Politics is nothing more than showmanship, jobs for life (senate, congress, Supreme Court) and buying and selling votes. It's all about personal enrichment and power, not the greater good. Both sides claim "we won by a great margin and have a mandate." No, you don't! Most folks are in the middle, and just want an adult for president who tells us the truth, good and bad. You can't please everybody, but nobody is stopping the extremists on both sides who are holding the entire country hostage to their whims! In retrospect, Clinton was a terrific president!
The problem is your examples of Dem moderates, do act or speak moderately. Not a single Dem, except perhaps John Fetterman and a Texas Dem border Congressman, conveniently charged with corruption after he spoke up, ever called for Biden to close the border. 10 million+ people crossed into the US in 4 years. Few borders in human history have been crossed more, without invitation.
Dems then demanded the same number of annual new arrivals be codified into permanent complicated legislation, obviously designed to hide the true scope of the situation. Trump, who Dems refer to as chronically stupid, closed the border in weeks, utilizing only existing laws. Dems could have easily achieved the same results, but purposefully did not. How is that remotely moderate?
Likewise for Climate policy. Handed $7500 checks, most Americans have still avoided EVs like the plague. For many people, EVs are not practical for a multitude of reasons, but Dems remain devoted to shoving them down citizen's throats. Does that sound moderate?
The trillion dollar spending orgy of Green schemes did little to help the Climate or most Americans. The beneficiaries were overwhelmingly Dems donors that founded Green companies, while swimming in a sea of tax payer subsidies. They then pumped and dumped stocks or issued crazy C-suite paychecks and perks. How moderate is that policy?
For example, Rivian makes $100K luxury EV SUVs. Wall Street calculates the company losses nearly $100K on each vehicle sold. Handed billions in taxpayer dollars, in multiple tranches, the company will likely go BK before it can waste the last billions, Biden handed them, walking out of the WH. I do not recall any moderate Dems objecting to taxpayers subsidizing a $100K luxury EV company, destined for the corporate boneyard. How hard would it have been for a moderate Dem to say, there are better uses for tax dollars?
Ditto for the issue of child sex changes. How many Dems mentioned a society that forbids children from tattooing themselves, due to the permanence of the choice, might what to think long and hard, before allowing 12 year olds to remove healthy body parts or ingest "medicine" that deprives them of adult fertility?
The issue of trans athletes could have been easily solved by the compassionate compromise of adding a 3rd category in individual sports and allowing multiple schools to form trans teams that compete against other trans teams. Add separate trans locker rooms, and the issue is solved, but not a single Dem suggested the obvious middle ground.
Ruy has been brilliantly calling for moderation, since before Dems lost the election. He might as well be howling into the wind. It does not appear any "moderate" Dems are listening.
The biggest problem with Mamdani’s victory is that New York is the home of so many left- leaning journalists who are inclined to get overly excited and proclaim all this is reflective of a mighty socialist wave. Which it is not. Mamdani received 460k votes out of a city of 8.8 million (and, okay, about 6 million voters) including many thousands of voters who (incoherently in my view) voted for Trump in 2024.
His victory reflects two important trends: if one’s political party is a broad coalition, which the Democrats have always been, then the groups most mobilized will prevail. In NYC, four years ago, Adam’s shocked the cognoscenti by mobilizing the black middle class. This go round, Momdani energized the young, the left and the Asian community. But he was only able to prevail due to the indifference and non-participation of the great majority of moderate New Yorkers.
The other trend is a bit more troubling. The central theme of Momdani’s campaign was affordability, mostly with regard to housing. Affordability is a real concern but it is also way overblown and also an area where there are no easy answers. The kids in Williamsburg could get a much cheaper apartment - by moving to the Bronx. And with the density of NYC, the only way to crash the market (which is what the young people are effectively demanding) would be to turn New York into Beijing, more or less destroying it. Along comes Momdani who, to use a phrase that is beginning to take hold among certain quarters here, “writes checks with his mouth that his ass can’t cash”. Many of his followers know that he can’t deliver his rediculous promises but they are beyond caring, in their eyes, he is at least “out there” for them. This refusal to confront the hard work needed to really solve problems infects both sides of the political spectrum, Momdani’s victory demonstrated how much of a problem it is for the Left.
All that said, disengagement is not the answer, engagement is. Without the likes of folks like you, Joe and, yes, Andrew Sullivan, the coalition runs the risk of veering off in destructive directions, which has already brought us to the brink of permanent tyranny. But the great majority of Dems are not the blue city darlings but the George Latimers and Pat Ryans of the world, trying to do their best in crazy times. The voters, bless their hearts, are going to make some irritating and immature choices; we cannot allow these misfires to lose the war.
Terribly sad and 100% true.
The only thing that keeps me sane is that I know things will change, they always do. And the fact that I’m an optimist and believe that when change arrives it will be for the better.
Not to respond to the same hobby-horses you've been riding for decades, but note that Bill Clinton changed his diet to keep his heart from killing him, by and large not a political act.
Dear Joe,
The Greek historian Thucydides, writing 2400 years ago in democratic Athens, asserted that a politician in a democracy needs four cardinal virtues. 1. He must see what is necessary to be done. 2. He must be able to convince the populace of this—what is necessary. 3. He must not be afraid to propose difficult and unpopular measures when they are necessary. 4. He must be above money.
You are asking where in the Democratic Party is that virtuous politician. Indeed.
Number 4 should be Number 1. Otherwise a good list to live by. Thanks ...
P.S. Mamdani just won the endorsement of the United Federation of Teachers! 😆😆
of course he did.
Great stuff, Joe! And I just finished The Natural. Great read. Very much appreciate your centrist perspective!!!
As usual a wonderful a column, Mr. Klein. Always love the way you just put everything out there so fairly for everyone's consideration. Thanks ...
Reality bites, but it is better to wake up to the possible, and stop dreaming of what might have been. Given your history, politically, it is hard awakening. Like Teixeria, Sullivan, and others.
As Napoleon once said: “I found the crown of France in the gutter, and I picked it up.”. Sooner or later someone will wake up, see the whole in the Democrat Party and seek to fill it.
We need a two party system, not one high above the other. Power abhors a vacuum, someone will see it and know instinctively how to fill it. Hopefully before 2027.
Joe, I must of missed it in all of the words you just spouted, but is there anything good about today’s democrat party? Anything of interest to hard working proud Americans? I didn’t read a single example.
You and the rest of the democrats can repeat your lies about President Trump and the MAGA movement until the day you die, but you aren’t going to fool us. If there really was anything bad about Trump and the populist nationalist movement then why do you have to lie?
Mr. This,
You are clearly not one to be fooled. It is reflected in your incoherent argument about Sanity Clause "lying" about something or other and the suggestion that DJT and the populist nationalist movement "hasn't really done anything bad". No sir, Mr. This, no one is fooling you.
Not “incoherent” but obviously just too complicated for you to understand. But like Joe, you will be easy to disprove; just name one thing that Joe wrote here that “DJT and (or) the populist nationalist movement” has done that is bad that ISN’T a lie?
Pardoning the criminals who assaulted the police on January 6 was very bad. And don't give me Antifa or the FBI. THOSE are lies. I allow you to exist here as an example of free speech. Your foolish fake intellectualism is boring and, frankly, unreadable but you provide an excellent service for Sanity Clause readers. Keep it up!
Joe, you picked an excellent example of the lies that you and the rest of the fake news media continue to propogate. Jan 6 was a government false flag operation, not an attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters and I’m going to help you prove it. So tell me which of the Proud Boys (who you mentioned in your article) assaulted a police officer on Jan 6? Name just one. Provide the name of any officer they assaulted. Tell me, what exactly did any one of the Proud Boys do on Jan 6 that was “bad” or illegal? Provide any evidence that any of the Proud Boys encouraged anyone else to do something that was “bad” or illegal. To my knowledge even the lazy media hasn’t made up a specific lie about them, just broad brush generalizations without any evidence. And after I help you refute the media lies about the Proud Boys I can help you refute the lies against the other Trump supporters who were targeted by Biden’s weaponized DOJ/FBI in their effort to get to Trump.
Kash Patel and Dan Bongino have promised to bring all of the government provacators to justice and while they are in the process of casting a big net to catch all of the Jan 6 perpetrators they have asked for our patience. When this story breaks, it will crush the complicit lying media. This corrupt government’s assault has ruined a lot of innocent lives and the complicity of you and your friends in the media is disgusting.
As I continue to torture you with facts and logic and disprove your lies, I really don’t care if my discussions are too complicated for you to understand. Let’s start simply; just tell me what “bad” things the Proud Boys did on Jan 6.
Still an excellent piece, and, sadly, still relevant and accurate. The Democrats were pathetic then and they remain so today -- nothing has changed. I think of Bill Clinton every day. He was an excellent President, one of the best in my lifetime. (I was born in 1956.) None of his successors has been as good as Clinton. Why? We had 8 years of peace and prosperity, a smaller, more efficient federal government, less crime, AND a balanced budget! What was there not to like? Rahm Emmanuel may be an excellent candidate, but I doubt that he will be able to drag the Democratic Party to the center and sanity.
Joe, I enjoy reading your posts and appreciate your efforts to be provocative. But I paused over your criticism about the “feminization” of the Democratic Party. Really? I love a good steak, I was the captain of my high school football team, I still play golf, but I don’t really think that the party’s problem is that women get to play a role. That just seems like another misdirection, especially when you are praising the Dem nominees for governor in VA and NJ.
I support a woman with a national security background for President in 2028 because she will be stronger than the wuss-brigade that currently plays at leadership in the party. They are wusses because of thirty years of deferring to--and patrionizing--women activists. This gave the Dems the false "equity" of DEI, the barbaric support for teenage sex-change, the support for illegal immigration, the support for "understanding" criminals rather than locking them up and the inability to articulate when, if ever, abortion is wrong. These acts of intellectual cowardice gave us President Donald J. Trump
Scratching my head, but you are the expert. But “wuss” is still in your vocabulary? I think I agree with you on most of the substance, but I do think how we talk about this stuff matters. But maybe I am just being a wuss.
I try to ignore any redactions of my vocabulary imposed by the left. A wuss is a coward. Nothing else implied. It is a rather useful word these days.
A Third Party has no ground game. See: Wallace '48, Thurman '48, Wallace '68, Perot '92, Bloomberg '20 (which cost $935 million).
Correct, except for Wallace '68 and especially '72 before he was shot. That ground game became the Tea Party and later MAGA. Any counter movement would have to grow that same way.
By “ground game” I meant precinct-level organization which only the two big parties have.