Deja Vu

First, they ignore you. Then they. mock you. Then they attack you. Then you win”
– Gandhi

I remember during the heyday of the Tea Party, in 2009-10, living through Gandhi’s aphorism – and, in the end, seeing how very overrated Gandhi was as a keeper of profound wisdom.

But I digress.

The Democrats, MSM (ptr) and the Mitt Romney wing of the GOP did their best to pretend it didn’t matter.

Then it turned to mockery and its idiot cousin, uninformed defamation.

Then came the attacks.

And then we won – at least, in 2010. Big Left and Big GOP still don’t want to talk about it, but the Tea Party beat both establishments like Keith Moon beating a rack tom.

Of course, in 2012 and onward, the Empire struck back. Big Left and Big GOP teamed up, in effect, to smother the insurgents. It didn’t help that, by dint of being elected to actual office, the Tea Party became “the establishment” that the Ron Paul crowd railed against in the next presidential cycle. The momentum ebbed – as it often does when grassroots movements have to get back to their day jobs.

The cycle has cycled.

“The Strib paid notice in its op-ed page that the “Mama Bears” – who’ve been sitting it out, apparently, since Sarah Palin left the stage – are back (emphasis added):

These conservative mothers and grandmothers, who in recent years have organized for ”parental rights,” including banning discussion of gender identity in schools, have been classified as extremists by the Southern Poverty Law Center. They have also been among the most coveted voters so far in the 2024 Republican presidential primary.

Donald Trump praised their work, saying organizations such as Moms for Liberty had taught the liberal left a lesson: ”Don’t mess with America’s moms.” Ron DeSantis said ”woke” policies had “awakened the most powerful political force in the country: mama bears.” His wife, Casey DeSantis, who launched ”Mamas for DeSantis” in leadoff-voting Iowa, said moms and grandmas were the ”game changer” in DeSantis’ blowout win for a second term as Florida governor. She predicted they will be again as he runs for president.

Who wants to tell columnist Sara Burnett know that nobody outside the mainstream media thinks the SPLC has any more objective down the middle credibility than ISAIAH or Moms Want Action?

Ye shall know them by their opposition:

”Republicans have decided that this is, I think, their golden ticket for the primaries to rile up their base,” said Katie Paris, who runs Red, Wine and Blue, a network of women pushing back on GOP-backed policies such as the anti-LGBTQ and anti-trans efforts of Moms for Liberty.

Leave it to Big Left to try to rally women around box wine. What next – an activist group called “Valium Girls?”

”Call it ‘parents’ rights,’ call it ‘mama bears,’ and try to make it sound like something that would be common sense. … The reality about ‘parents’ rights’ is that it’s just about the rights of a vocal minority that is trying to carry out an extreme political agenda.

I can’t wait for the next Minnesota DFLer to try to comment on that last sentence.

Representative Walter Hudson put it best:

Much more to come

40 thoughts on “Deja Vu

  1. MAGA is not policy. It is a crowd-pleaser, and a hat fashion. The fate of the party is not in the hands of those that think they are the leading lights of the party or those with the money. The real power lies with the mass of individuals that have until now, adored Trump as they have reviled anybody who challenges him, Democrat or Republican. Unless the base crumbles, the party can forget a fresh start. They own the problem, but they are powerless to fix it. What would Republicans be without grievance politics?

    This debate on who can replace Trump is a bit ludicrous. It is not possible to attract the GOP base or win primaries without far right or fundamentalist positions. If donors are worried about this, they need to stop funding the GOP until the party moderates and seeks to replace its extremist base with real conservatives and independents who are interested in economic opportunities and individual liberties. Nobody at present can argue with a straight face that today’s GOP is a party of freedom. It definitely is not and this needs to stop. A real leader with courage needs to emerge to pull the party out of this swamp and DeSantis definitely isn’t that leader.

  2. Emery
    still plagiarizing the party line
    and you’re still a depraved pedophile

  3. Thanks so much for that invaluable advice, Emery Collective. I’ve sent a note to the national GOP demanding they find candidates acceptable to The Left. I recommended they start with Mitt Romney, since he has experience at losing gracefully.

    While we’re giving each other helpful advice, perhaps you could reach out to the national DFL demanding they replace Lesko Brandon and Kackling Kamala with candidates acceptable to The Right? Maybe that Hawaiian chick, or that dude from West Virginia? Or perhaps you know of someone even more conservative to nominate?

    Yes, indeed, this stunning and brave display of bipartisanship is certain to reduce rancor and begin the healing process. I look forward to your recommendations.

  4. Emery seems to indicate that the loudest voice is representative of a political group.
    That fits with the way I’ve seen leftist protesters drown out opposing voices.

    Emery’s statements show a near-worship for the notion of career politicians, an occupation that is morally indistinguishable from prostitution. In Emery’s world, mere plebs cannot effectively govern. Thankfully, a bunch of “far-right extremists” did not accept that concept in the late 18th century.

  5. emery
    come on the 3 of you can surely put your heads together and develop a riposte better than that…
    of course none of that alters the fact that you are (singly and collectively) a depraved pedophile.

  6. The GOP used to say they were the party of small government, but now wish to be present in the bedrooms, doctors’ offices and other private spaces where Americans, particularly women, take their most personal decisions about how to order their lives.

  7. “What would Republicans be without grievance politics?”

    That’s rich coming from a mouthpiece of the Party of Perpetual Grievance.

  8. emery
    GOP candidates suggesting that they will hunt down, prosecute, and imprison depraved pedophiles like you must be truly terrifying for you.

  9. Many fought pandemic-related school shutdowns and mask mandates, pushed to remove diversity, equity and inclusion programs from schools and tried to ban books they viewed as inappropriate, such as ones with LGBTQ content.

    WOW!

    Talk about an endorsement.

  10. People who adore a psychopath will never settle for anything less than the real deal. Remember all the marriage proposals sent to Ted Bundy ??

  11. The SPLC was founded by a Jewish fellow and a black, and for years it served to keep blacks fighting against government in the South and infiltrating our institutions.

    They jumped the shark when they started labeling Christian groups and churches “hate groups”.

    Recently, it has been overtaken by black 80IQ poverty pimps who lack the intelligence to back away from pedophiles and groomers.

    No one with an IQ above room temp takes what they say seriously. Citing them in public garners much mockery.

  12. Things must be slow up there in mosquitoville. Either that or the milfoil has completely cut off the open water in rAT’s pathetic little mud hole.

  13. I posted this a few days ago — Miss D felt the need to censor and remove it….

    There’s an important element of the Trump vs DeSantis contest that usually gets overlooked, and that is its class element. It is complicated, so it is not immediately easy to grasp. But it boils down to this: Trump and DeSantis are very much alike in that they both have an obvious, seething contempt for the rest of the human race, but Trump wears his with to-the-manor-born insouciance, while DeSantis is possessed of the unmistakable, grating insecurity of the parvenu.

    In this respect, DeSantis is reminiscent of Nixon, who famously said “I’ve earned everything I’ve got.” Nixon and DeSantis represent a type of personality (with the caveat that Nixon was a greatly more talented politician than DeSantis is). DeSantis, like Nixon, has spent his entire political career serving the interests of the rich, who he simultaneously resents because he had to “work his way” into one of their schools, learning and adapting to their mores. And he simultaneously sees himself as having crawled out of the muck, the common dregs of humanity who he also can’t stand because he looks down on them with a kind of self-loathing recognition.

    The difficulty for DeSantis is that despite all the Horatio Alger mythology about the “self-made man” in conservative US ideology, the typical Republican voter actually hates guys like that. There are a handful of ladder-climbing strivers who see in DeSantis something of themselves. (The TV show Mad Men has a memorable scene, set in 1960, in which the up-and-coming protagonist Don Draper says: “Kennedy, I see a silver spoon; Nixon, I see myself.”) But that is not most people.

    This is the perennial problem for politicians on the right who have to face elections. The right, by definition, exists to defend the interests of the rich and powerful. Its policies are against the interests of the majority of the population. Conservative politicians somehow have to cobble together enough votes to get elected to enact their unpopular policies. To do that, they need to divide the working class through appeals to various hatreds: racism, nativism, sexism, etc. There simply aren’t enough prosperous strivers to support conservative politicians otherwise.

    So the psychology of the working-class voter who supports the right is not, in fact, a so-called “populist” who “distrusts authority.” On the contrary: they love to submit to authority, to personalities they see as greater than theirs. Trump has successfully cultivated that image for himself. These people want other workers, especially poor people, to be crushed under the boot, and they don’t want a middle manager to do it. They like seeing the boss himself do it, and they even like seeing the boss having a little fun at the middle manager’s expense, too. When Trump tells jokes at DeSantis’s expense, they will laugh loudly. They like Trump because he acts the way they imagine they’d like to act if they were rich, banging porn stars with a crass joie de vivre; DeSantis, by contrast, is humorless.

  14. emery, the depraved pedophile, rambles on, insisting that this is his blog

  15. Hey Pig —you kill more babies jerkin’ your gherkin every week than abortions do in a year.

  16. TL;dr

    About those conservative Democrats you’re going to propose, the ones who will reach across the aisle, the ones who will help heal the bitter divide in this country, could you be more specific about the names of those candidates?

  17. I posted this a few days ago — Miss D felt the need to censor and remove it….

    Surprised the troll doesn’t know misgendering is a mortal sin these days.

  18. Mr. D, it’s only a mortal sin if a member of the incorrect group commits it. See: N word.

    The eternal motto: If it weren’t for double standards, the left would have none at all.

  19. Say rAT? How many abortions (and siblings) you think your ER nurse (daughter) has averted by swallowing the evidence?

    What’s the mosquito count up there today?
    – Partly cloudy ⬜
    – Cloudy ⬜
    – Fucking RUN! ⬜

  20. Say Tom — just between you and me — is your wife giving you a piece of the action from her Plus size OnlyFans page?

    To a very large percent of Trump base, it is the very fact that Trump commits these crimes and gets away that makes him so appealing. They don’t want someone to promise and solve problems. They want someone to break stuff, break norms, break all decency.

  21. Yes, yes, Trump’s unacceptable, we already know that. We’re ready to drop him for a more acceptable candidate to duke it out with YOUR more acceptable candidate, some Democrat who is more conservative than the current offering, somebody who’s not a batshit crazy leftist.

    Name, Emery Collective; we need the name. Who is that Democrat candidate?

  22. Emery if you want to posture as an invincible troll you have to offer ripostes that are commensurate with your ambitions. Instead when I identify you as the depraved pedophile you are, all you can come back with is some middle-school taunt. I realize that middle-school marked the acme of your intellectual prowess but you could none the less try harder.

  23. ⬇️ On topic comment ⬇️
    For decades, the SPLC was a fundraising scam. They would solicit money from people of a certain ethnicity on the coasts by claiming that SPLC was the only thing standing between them and the hordes of redneck racists, neonazis and KKK’rs out in the hinterlands.
    Now they’ve gotten into the lucrative business of advising the feds and Big Tech on which groups they are to hate and silence.
    The SPLC staff are so ignorant they once posted a position paper on homosexuality that clearly showed that the writer did not know the difference between traits that are “hereditary” and traits that are “congenital.”

  24. When you name your candidate, Emery Collective, make sure they understand the importance of apologizing to me.

    For the last three years, I’ve been drawing a distinction between people who died OF Covid versus people who died WITH Covid. The New York Times finally conceded I’ve been right all along.

    https://thepostmillennial.com/new-york-times-quietly-admits-covid-deaths-were-overcounted-by-almost-one-third

    Your candidate needs to acknowledge it, too. Else healing cannot begin and we cannot ‘move on.’

  25. ^ oh gosh, an admission that they over counted by a third. Big fucking deal.

    Admit to two thirds and we can start talking. Remember how the flu literally disappeared for two years?

    You guys can be shocked, shocked I tell you, about the Democommies’ hypocrisy (aka hierarchy) and corruption and general malevolence, I’m gonna sit here and wait for El Caudillo.

  26. I’m not a purveyor of porn, rAT. But if some gal is collecting your disability checks, you thinking it’s my wife, good for her.

    How’s the bullhead fishin’ on LaKe HaCK? Any size? Who was the headliner in the Wompum room at the c@sino this weekend?

  27. For decades, the SPLC was and still is an extortion racket.

    There, fixed it for you, MP, you are welcome.

    In the meantime, XBB.1.16 is the new boogieman. Just in time to infect and incapacitate the most loved and popular (he got 81M votes, dontchaknow?!) president EVAH™?

  28. Emery-what “far-right” (is there any other kind to libs?) and “fundamentalist” positions are you talking about?

  29. The BBC, like the SLPC, is trying to get in on the “we are the masters of truth” business. The attack on free speech — the idea that free speech is necessary for the health of a democratic society — has been under a concentrated assault since the early 2000’s, at least, and the assault gotten much worse since the 2016 Brexit vote and the election of DJT.
    But you can’t really justify restrictions on free speech by means other than that they protect the current regime. That is how obvious the truth is that free speech fortifies democracy. The free exchange of ideas between citizens is the only way to promote good governance, otherwise you have the state, which represents particular individuals and social classes, controlling speech. There is no universe where this produces anything other than a tyranny based on social class.

  30. Assume Democrats succeed in obtaining a conviction from a kangaroo court somewhere. Assume the judge sentences Donald Trump to 100 years in jail.

    Does that disqualify him for President? Not under the Constitution. That requires 35 years of age plus an American-born citizen (or Kenyan, we’re not fussy). He could be elected and if the polls are any indication, would be.

    Imagine the photos of Trump sticking his hand through the bars of his jail cell to rest his palm on the Bible as the Chief Justice adminsters the oath of office.

    “No, sorry Mr. Putin, the President won’t be attending the summit conference. And he can’t talk to you right now, he only gets 15 minutes of phone time a day. Can we pencil you in for a week from Tuesday?”

  31. Scott Jensen says Republican Party should change course on abortion, endorsements
    https://www.axios.com/local/twin-cities/2023/07/24/scott-jensen-minnesota-gop-endorsement-abortion-guns

    In our system of checks and balances, few things come without a cost. While it is true, the the party endorsement on the Republican side is more valuable in terms of winning primary elections and getting on fall election ballots, it has been of little use at all in getting elected to office. The price of getting support within the party for Republicans has been a high one.

  32. “Scott Jensen says Republican Party should change course on abortion, endorsements”

    Suddenly Scott Jensen is the voice of reason? That’s “Berg’s 8th Law” at work, isn’t it?

    It doesn’t matter what course the GOP takes on any issue, because the DFL will find something about anything any Republican says to twist into a phony scandal, that the subservient media will indulge.

    That Jensen – every DFLers favorite Republican in 2018, evil incarnate in 2022, and now back in the good graces – doesn’t see that isn’t a huge shock.

  33. ⬆️ If Republicans are disappointed with the results of the 2024 elections — for the fourth straight cycle, mind you — a key factor will be the replacement of competent, boring, regular state-party officials with quite exciting, blustering nutjobs who have little or no interest in the basics of successfully managing a state party orhelping GOP candidates win elections.

  34. “Greetings fellow Republican. We are writing to let you know about an exciting change in the party. We are certain you’re going to love The New GOP!

    “In the past, our party platform was rooted in deeply held fundamental principles: respect for life, limited government, low taxes, putting the interests of American citizens above those of foreign nations. No more! Having principles cost us elections and that allowed Democrats to ruin the nation.

    “The New GOP is all about whatever is popular at the moment. No more fiscal responsibility! No more focus on families! Open the borders, bomb Ukraine, have sex with children – it’s all good because it’s popular on Twitter and that’s the key to winning elections!

    “Won’t you consider supporting the new party with a donation of $10,000.00, $5,000.00 or even pocket-change $1,000.00 today?

  35. The New GOP is all about whatever is popular at the moment.

    But, oddly enough, they’ll still continue to be far right-wing fascists (aka Nazis).

  36. Pingback: In The Mailbox: 07.25.23 (Afternoon Edition) : The Other McCain

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