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Whitey has allowed himself to be conned because of misplaced guilt and what of BLM and all the corporate shakedowns? Then there is CRT and all the other flash pan ideas that were predicated on emotion and BS intimidation etc.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dispatches from the middle of somewhere
By Salena Zito
In my estimation, there is no patch of geography in this country that is the "middle of nowhere."
This is America; everywhere is the middle of somewhere.
WILKES-BARRE, Pa. — After 22 years working as an IT professional for Verizon Wireless, Marcy O’Donnell left to start a new career in the medical field — specifically her husband’s optometry practice here in Luzerne County — two years ahead of the pandemic.
Ms. O’Donnell, a natural communicator, says she really enjoys interacting with the patients and the staff, but the past two years — from pandemic shutdowns to navigating skyrocketing inflation and stubborn supply issues — have been hard for the family practice.
When the practice reopened after a ten-week COVID lockdown, the time and money that went into keeping up with protocols became a separate full-time job. They were also limited to seeing one patient at a time every hour. Since then, Ms. O’Donnell said, they’ve done everything they could think of just to keep the business and practice open: “We weren’t going to just sit there and go into apathy over it; we really pushed hard to make sure that we could still service patients and do everything right.”
Ms. O’Donnell said things still have not returned to normal. The setbacks of the pandemic have morphed into setbacks created by inflation and the recession. “Definitely everything is much more expensive — from frames to contact lenses — but there’s also the never-ending backorders to get these products.”
Ms. O’Donnell says not voting is not an option in her family. She and her husband Brian are planning to cast a ballot this November. “I guess we call it the super-voters, because my husband and his family, they were in politics for the longest time,” she said.
Her father-in-law, Tom O’Donnell, served on many local boards and authorities, was active in the Democratic Party and once ran for Congress.
Ms. O’Donnell says she is casting her vote based on who will get to the root of inflation and address rising crime rates, and who won’t turn a blind eye to how Fentanyl is pouring into America’s cities and suburbs.
“I have never voted straight party ever in my lifetime,” she said. “I’ve voted Democratic. I’ve voted Republican. I voted at one point for a Libertarian. I just vote based on what I think or what I feel at that point in time — who I think is the best for the country.”
People like Marcy O’Donnell will tell us more than any poll about what may be in store on midterm election day.
For those prognosticating about Pennsylvania, the concerns and sentiments of voters here in Luzerne County — as well as in Erie County and in the suburbs of Allegheny County — are the most important in determining which way the state goes in the race for control of the U.S. Senate.
Luzerne County famously flipped Republican in 2016 after decades of supporting Democrats for president — and hasn’t looked back since. It also gave Tom Wolf a win in his 2018 reelection and Attorney General Josh Shapiro a win in his 2020 reelection.
What happens here matters.
Portraits of voters offer a peek into the mood of electorally significant places. They don’t tell the whole story, but they do offer a glimpse into voter sentiment — and the sense of place, community and opportunity that will drive their decision, as opposed to what happens on social media.
Every city should be so lucky as to have a Kyle Bohrer — especially post-industrial cities like Erie, whose economy has had a bit of a bad run in the past few decades. This fourth-generation Erie resident’s motto references the city’s maritime history: “Don’t give up the ship.”
Mr. Bohrer has owned franchises of a logistics company called Unishippers since 2007. “That’s actually the job that pays the bills, he said. “Then I bought a meat market three years ago: Gordon’s Butcher and Market.”
Gordon’s wasn’t just any butcher shop: It was an icon, a mainstay, the heart of the community. For Mr. Bohrer, the purchase was sentimental and has become a labor of love.
When he bought it in October 2019, it was a 2,000-square-foot 50-year-old dilapidated but beloved butcher shop. “It was a neighborhood favorite, and I didn’t want see it go anywhere,” he said.
The father of three sold a chunk of his Unishippers group that year and went all in: Today it’s a 7,500 square foot, top-of-the-line meat market — with a restaurant called “Firestone,” a bar, a six pack and craft beer shop and a wine store called Paris’s Cap and Cork, all located in one building.
Mr. Bohrer — like most Pennsylvanians — has never lived anywhere else. He is rooted to his community and, despite Erie’s challenges, he wants to be part of making it better for the next generation. That sentiment is what will drive his vote come November, along with the impact inflation has had on his business, and his inability to find workers.
He considers his worldview moderate and pragmatic. His vote, he says, will reflect that, as well as the impact all of these things have had on his family and his community’s life.
“Prices for everything are still very high. Even though they’ve stopped climbing for the moment, they haven’t come down. The labor problem and people problem are still there. And the other thing people don’t talk about are our 401k’s — my father got beat up so bad this year in the market that he’s having to stay working for another year or so. He is going to keep going to hopefully see it turn around a little bit more, but yeah, it’s been a little bit, uneasy feeling, for sure,” he said.
Erie, like Luzerne, was a swing county in 2016. Voters here narrowly gave Donald Trump their support, then four years later, narrowly supported Joe Biden. Last year, for the first time in decades, they elected a Republican for county executive.
Mr. Bohrer, 41, says when reporters descend upon his county to cover elections, they always focus on the used-to-be’s of their days as an industrial powerhouse. “They miss how beautiful Erie is — the lakefront, the tourism, the affordable living and the growth of our economy based on higher education and state of the art hospitals,” he explained.
In Allegheny County, though, Democrats have ruled the roost. It’s hard to find anyone who remembers when it ever elected a Republican, outside of the 2000 county executive race. In 2020 it was crucial — along with Montgomery County in the East — in putting Mr. Biden over the top.
It was Mr. Biden’s success in the suburbs that solidified his win, which makes talking to suburban Allegheny County voters so important. Chris Scott of Plum was one of those voters.
Mr. Scott, a Plum Borough native who owns a landscaping and excavation company, said his career choice was formed when he was six years old, after his father passed and a family friend became a mentor who saw a talent in him at a young age.
“I was the last of seven, so I had to grow up working. At a young age, I was fortunate to meet . . . sorry, I’m tearing up a little bit here,” he said, wiping back tears, “but I was fortunate to meet a gentleman that took me under his wing, and that’s what he did — he encouraged me to do what I was doing because I did it well.”
It is clear Mr. Scott works with his hands — and back. It is also clear that family is the very center of his life. “Everything I do is for them,” he said. “It is to make sure I leave the world a better place for them and that I show them the value of hard work.”
An operating engineer and a member their Local 66, Mr. Scott is one to cut to the chase no matter who he is talking to: “Here is how I vote — my family first, my community second and my country third.”
Rather that asking someone what party they are in or who they are voting for, we should ask them what the most important things are for them this election season. It may not be scientific, but it offers a glimpse into the context and complexities that go into their decision. And it tells us more about how people are actually feeling than the raw numbers do.
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- INTO THE FRAY: Israel's pernicious paradox: Tactical brilliance vs strategic imbecility -
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- Joe Biden Has Earned Your Disgust
By Derek Hunter
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Judge Intends to Grant Trump's 'Special Master' Motion on Docs Taken in FBI Ransacking of Mar-a-LagoBy Matt Vespa
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Bill Maher is saying what liberals are thinking
For The Spectator, FAIR Advisor James Kirchick writes about Bill Maher’s “resuscitating the dying art of conversation,” which “has been Maher’s mission for almost three decades, ever since his show Politically Incorrect premiered on Comedy Central in the summer of 1993.”
Maher’s critique of our societal craving for moral absolutism speaks to his larger capacity for adding the nuance so often missing from contemporary political debates. If Maher paved a trail in late-night comedy by being forthright about his political opinions, he has distinguished himself further by expressing opinions that vary from Democratic Party talking points. And it’s this independence that Maher believes to be the secret of his success. “People are looking for something that’s not catering to the excesses of the right, which of course we never did, but also of the left,” he tells me of his show. Other late-night hosts “pretty much cleave to whatever the dictums of the woke are. The worst thing that seems in their minds to happen to a human being would be to say something and have the studio audience not approve of it. Which is, as we know, certainly not the way I’ve run my business, and I have many clips to prove it.”
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The Unmaking of American History by the Woke Mob
Progressive scholars increasingly abandon the past to focus on present-day politics.
By Dominic Green
Academic historians are losing their sense of the past. In his August column for the American Historical Association’s journal, Perspectives on History, James H. Sweet warned that academic history has become so “presentist” that it is losing touch with its subject, the world before yesterday. Mr. Sweet, who is the association’s president and teaches at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, observed that the “allure of political relevance” is drawing students away from pre-1800 history and toward “contemporary social justice issues” such as “race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism.” When historians become activists, he wrote, the past becomes “an evidentiary grab bag to articulate their political positions.”
History’s armies of nonacademic readers will find this obvious and undeniable. Mr. Sweet’s academic peers, however, tore him to pieces on Twitter, accusing him of sexism, racism, gratuitous maleness and excessive whiteness.
“Gaslight. Gatekeep. Goatee,” said Laura Miller of Brandeis University, detecting patriarchal privilege written on Mr. Sweet’s chin. Benjamin Siegel of Boston University, who thinks his politically correct profession is “leveraged towards racist ideologies,” called the essay “malpractice.” Dan Royles of Florida International University accused Mr. Sweet of “logical incoherence,” which is academic-speak for “idiot.” Kathryn Wilson of Georgia State detected an even more heinous error, “misrepresentation of how contemporary social justice concerns inform theory and methodology.”
Other users accused Mr. Sweet of using a rhetorical device called the “white we,” pitching for a guest slot on Tucker Carlson’s show, and writing “MAGA history.” Many called any questioning of the “1619 Project” racist. David Austin Walsh of the University of Virginia advised historians to support the project regardless of whether they thought it good history, because criticism would be “weaponized by the right.”
Mr. Sweet responded with the bravery that defines the modern academic. He apologized on the AHA’s website for the “harm to colleagues, the discipline, and the Association” that his “ham-fisted attempt at provocation” had caused, especially to his “Black colleagues and friends,” and begged that he be allowed to “redeem” himself.
The AHA, which had done nothing to stem the tide of insults from its members, prevented nonfollowers from commenting on its Twitter feed, because, it said, “trolls” and “bad-faith actors” had joined the debate. One of the bad-faith actors was a racist agitator, Richard Spencer. His contribution, alarmingly, was hardly trolling. Mr. Spencer pointed out that Mr. Sweet was merely repeating the advice of the eminent 19th-century historian Otto von Ranke, who told historians to go into the archives and tell history “as it really happened.” We know a profession is in trouble when it takes the worst kind of amateur to state the obvious.
“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child,” Cicero once wrote. “For what is the worth of a human life if it is not woven into the life of our ancestors by the record of history?” Even Ms. Hannah-Jones would agree with that. The AHA’s activist wing, however, disagrees. Like Cicero, who was both a politician and a historian, they see history as a rhetorical resource. Unlike Cicero, they see nothing good in their people’s history and only wickedness in their ancestors.
When the purpose of history changes from knowledge of the past to political power in the present and future, historians become mere propagandists. Academics who succumb to the sugar rush of activism lose their sense of balance. Meanwhile, the AHA’s annual reports show that undergraduates and graduates are voting with their enrollments, with a related decline in job opportunities for holders of new doctorates. In 2016-17 alone, undergraduate enrollment fell by 7.7%. The number of new doctorates fell by about 15% between 2014 and 2019, and the number of job openings has halved since 2008. The latest AHA Jobs Report is a threnody of “program closures, enrollment declines, and faculty layoffs.” Signs of stabilization, it reckons, are a “false floor.” Why study history if all it equips you for is a nasty and crowded climb up the greasy pole of academic preferment? Much easier to pursue activism through the modish triad of sex, race and gender studies.
All of which tends to confirm Mr. Sweet’s observations about the perils of presentism and activism. Yes, history is always written backward, from present to past. And history’s present uses might include politics. But the task of a historian is to understand the strange past and show how it shapes the familiar present. If we succumb to what the English historian E.P. Thompson called “the enormous condescension of posterity,” then we lose the ability to imagine how people lived in any era before our own. We lose difference and complexity. We lose the perspective that history is supposed to impart and with it any sense of progress. Dictators are presentists, too.
Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
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Biden Vote Bribe: Squeezing Chumbolone Nation Workers to Subsidize Elite College Grads
By John Kass
When Democrat President Joe Biden was starting out in politics, how did Democrat Bosses buy votes just before the election?
They’d have trucks pull up outside their political offices. And their political workers would toss out the turkeys and hams and booze to the crowds. Who paid? Shopkeepers who “donated” all those turkeys and hams. They didn’t dare complain. They just shut up and took it.
And now that Biden is the boss–or at least the doddering front man for the Obama Biden 2.0 regime– the “Big Guy” is still buying votes, with mid-term elections just weeks away.
Yet Biden’s fingers don’t smell like poultry or ham from throwing turkeys and hams out from the back of a truck to buy voters before Election Day. He’s got a phone and a pen to unfairly take your money to buy Democrat votes before the November mid-term elections. What is this?
It’s a bribe.
Biden has bypassed Congress to use dubious executive powers to order a massive (and unprecedented) $300 billion to $900 billion transfer of wealth, taken from the working and middle classes and giving to the college educated to subsidize those college tuition loans.
But Biden’s shakedown is unconstitutional and politically dangerous. It is inherently unfair, because those who didn’t attend college, those who didn’t sign those college loan agreements, are still the ones who’ll pay for it. That’s how Ivy League lawyers and budding power players in Washington get their tuition breaks, thanks to Joe Biden and the Democrats.
And who pays? The plumbers and electricians pay. The truck drivers, motel maids, and others who never went to college. And those who went to college yet paid their own way, and spent years after college, eating Ramen noodles and working two jobs to scrape by and pay their debts and the bills.
I think of the young people who struggled and economized and paid their debts and college loans. It wasn’t easy, but they had an obligation. They signed their names. They paid.
And think of the parents who scrimped and saved so their children wouldn’t be saddled with debt. Of that dad who didn’t fix the holes in his shoes until the spring rains came, and the mom who didn’t buy new clothes for herself. The couple who drove that clunky old car, and didn’t take vacations. Some ate beans rather than fine steak. Why? Because they loved beans? No. It was because those college bills were coming.
You know the people I’m talking about. People like you and me. What do you call such people? You could call us suckers, but now that Biden is playing old timey boss and godfather, he’s christened us anew.
We are the Chumbolones.
Because if you sacrificed to pay your college debts, you’re a chumbolone, which is Chicago Chinatown wise guy slang meaning “stupid, idiot, or fool.” It is pronounced this way: Chum-buh-LOAN.
Thanks to Joe Biden, we are a Chumbolone Nation now.
Yet if you dare publicly mention that the beneficiaries are the elites (think of Biden White House staffers) and those who are stuck playing are the working classes (think of motel housekeepers) here’s what happens: You’ll feel the wrath of the leftist Twitter fever swamp.
And corporate media that has been protecting Biden since before they suppressed news of that Hunter Biden Laptop from ell will also strike back:
“The GOP Throws A Hysterical Shit Fit Over Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness Plan Targeted at The Middle Class,” shrieked a headline in “Vanity Fair.”
“Shit Fit?” is that the name of Biden’ White House adviser Susan Rice’s garage band that sang those songs of unity on Biden’s Inauguration Day?
You get the message? In case you missed it, here it is: Shut up and Take It, Chumbolones.
Philip Wegmann nails the elite beneficiary angle in Real Clear Politics .
“There is more outstanding student debt in Washington than in any other city in the country,” Wegmann writes.
“The average debtor in D.C., according to a 2021 breakdown by the small business analyst, AdvisorSmith, owes $52,982 in unpaid student loans. This includes many political staffers at the Department of Education, senior advisors as well as junior aides who moved to that agency from the Biden campaign.”
And the White House.
But only about a third of Americans get a college degree. And those who pressed on seeking dubious degrees, signing their names on loans for a degree in Ancient Greek Mythology, Gender Studies, White Fragility or the Origin of Indo-European Languages and the like found that jobs are few. But they get a break.
You know who doesn’t get a break?
The young person you may know who went into debt to purchase a pickup truck to start a landscaping or other business. The plumber, the electrician, the house painter who didn’t didn’t go to college, didn’t put themselves into debt. Under Biden’s vote buying scheme, they’re still forced to pay off college tuitions of White House staff? What’s fair about that?
Nothing. The socialists are for it. They want to call themselves “progressives,” but that’s a lie. They’re socialists.
If you read their whiny Jacobin nonsense or hear their wailing on cable news you know this. They constantly portray themselves as morally superior to those deplorables with calluses on their hands. And now that Biden reaches into those deplorable jeans to take the bribe money, the young socialists lunge are ecstatic and protect their treats.
They’re exactly like the those old time Democratic voters in Chicago or Baltimore, or Tammany New York lunging and jabbering excitedly over all those “free” pre-election turkeys and hams.
This may be one government giveaway that will bounce back and bite. Why? Because it is clearly unfair and American mythology depicts us–despite our differences–as a people who prize fair play above greasy political clout.
And what’s fair about the college tuition of an entitled White House staffer or a pouting CNN anchor being subsidized by a motel housekeeper, or a truck driver or anyone else?
Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, has been singing that socialist song of “free” college for years. During the last presidential campaign, out in Iowa, she was approached by a voter, a hard-working dad who sacrificed and paid his daughter’s college tuition so she wouldn’t have debt.
“I just want to ask one question,” said the man to Sen. Warren. “My daughter is getting out of school. I’ve saved all my money. She doesn’t have any student loans. Am I going to get my money back?
Warren was shocked.
“Of course not,” said Warren.
The father was outraged.
“So, you’re going to pay for people who didn’t save any money, and those of us who did the right thing get screwed?’ he said, his voice rising. He adds, “You’re laughing at me.”
They’re still laughing.
If you played by the rules, if you followed the law, if you paid your bills, they’re laughing at you. Those with political clout who use your money for their benefit are always laughing at you.
We’re the fools of Chumbolone Nation. And they slap us in the mouth, telling us to shut up and take it.
But Nov. 8, is Election Day, which is 72 days from this Sunday.
And all the powers of the regime, and their allies in corrupt corporate media and Big Tech are focused on one thing: distracting and confusing Chumbolone Nation before the mid-term elections.
Will the people continue to doff their caps to the lords of the regime, and kneel, and shut up and take it?
Or will they remember who they are, that they’re Americans, and refuse to play the Chumbolone?
It’s not up to me. It’s up to you.
It’s your country.
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