John Brooks

@Orioles fanatic. Conservative in the wilderness. Anti-populist, anti-socialist. Was @jbroks86 once upon a time. Classic cinema lover. Friend to all 🐈.

[Doctor Nerdly @DoctorNerdly]

@MaldingMaldy Christopher Lee , one of the most iconic horror actors, was a devout Anglo-Catholic and warned people away from the occult and satanism.

[Moldy ✝️| Playing Fire Emblem Fortune's Weave @MaldingMaldy]

Bram Stoker - Reformed Protestant
Edgar Allan Poe - Episcopalian
Mary Shelley - Belief in God, unconventional
William Peter Blatty - Roman Catholic
Charles Williams - Anglican
CS Lewis - Anglican
GK Chesterton - Roman Catholic

All wrote horror

[Ben Harris @btharris93]

It doesn't get more commie-nazi than this.

[Lauren @cabsav456]

Getting rid of the Senate blue slip would be a huge mistake, and conservatives should be the last ones calling for it.

The blue slip is a 100+ year old Senate Judiciary Committee tradition. Home state senators get a say on district court judges and U.S. attorneys nominated in their state. If a senator doesn't return the slip, the nominee doesn't move forward.

President Trump has been pushing Chuck Grassley to scrap it for over a year now. That pressure ramped up after Democrats used blue slips to block some of his picks: Schumer blocked Jay Clayton for U.S. attorney in Manhattan, NJ's senators blocked Alina Habba in New Jersey, and VA's senators withheld slips for Lindsey Halligan in the Eastern District of Virginia. Frankly, none of them had any business being nominated to those roles.

Conservatives are supposed to think past the current fight because we understand that rules cut both ways. Grassley has pointed out that during the Biden years, Republicans used blue slips to keep roughly 30 liberal nominees off the bench, and those seats are now open for Trump to fill. The blue slip is how red state senators stopped Biden from installing progressive judges & prosecutors in their states.

Kill it now, and the next Democrat president gets to put whoever he wants in Texas, Florida, and West Virginia, with Republican senators unable to say a word. NOT WORTH IT.

Same story with nuking the filibuster to pass the SAVE Act.

Every tool you take away from the minority today gets used against you the moment you're back in the minority. I'm sick of having to explain this concept to fellow "conservatives."

[John Brooks @Jbroks1986]

@btharris93 The first 10 years was perfect. Writers captured American culture perfectly. Same with the original run of Futurama.

[Benjamin Ze’ev 📚🎻🏺 @ArchaeoBenjamin]

1. Still not justifiable to MURDER them.
2. Still not justifiable to MURDER them.
3. Still not justifiable to MURDER them.
4. Still not justifiable to MURDER them.

[John Brooks @Jbroks1986]

He’s not conservative like his brother GWB. Bush wouldn’t have voted for Paxton but he wouldn’t have abandoned conservative values to vote for Talarico either.

[Miya Shay @miyashay]

Neil Bush, brother of one President Bush & son of another President Bush, just posted that he voted for @JamesTalarico. Neil still lives in the same neighborhood as father did for decades here in Houston.

[Tymofiy Mylovanov @Mylovanov]

Former US Secretary of State Pompeo: There have been multiple offers to end the war in Ukraine, including energy ceasefires and a Black Sea agriculture deal.

Every time, Putin has rejected them and Zelenskyy has said yes.

[Bella Wallersteiner 🇺🇦 @BellaWallerstei]

Spot on. A shame some right wing grifters in Britain still don’t have the backbone to say this. Trump is no Reagan.

[John Brooks @Jbroks1986]

@RichardElric2 @saber_k086 I think the Korean left does this to try leverage against the US. Though South Koreans don’t like Russians either.

[John Brooks @Jbroks1986]

@LibertasNostra @PhilWMagness I don’t like them. How dare they disagree with me

[Phil Magness @PhilWMagness]

The Hewlett Foundation mentioned here is a major funder of American Compass, American Moment, and American Affairs - three Postliberal/New Right organizations that are at the center of JD Vance's political apparatus.

As always, all they have is projection.

[Jacob Ben-David Linker 🇺🇸🕎🇺🇸✡️🇺🇸🕎🇺🇸 @JacobALinker]

They took power in Egypt and quickly proceeded to bring criminal defamation cases against their critics.

[Zvika Klein צביקה קליין @ZvikaKlein]

Ofer Winter says he will recommend Netanyahu for prime minister. His conditions for joining a government deserve equal attention.

As Herb Keinon explains in The Jerusalem Post, the retired general’s party is demanding broad ultra-Orthodox military conscription before joining a government in which the haredi parties hold the balance of power. Winter has also ruled out sitting with Yair Golan.

If Winter’s party enters parliament, those conditions could complicate the coalition arithmetic considerably.

Recommending a candidate to Israel’s president is one stage of forming a government. Signing a coalition agreement comes later, when politicians have to settle questions such as who serves in the army.

[Sir Humphrey 🇺🇦 @bdquinn]

You're not winning any elections in red or even purple states, hell even some blue ones, by being hostile to Christianity.

[Rafi DeMogge רפי דמוג @HeTows]

Some hard truths about Israeli electoral politics, which you won't read in English-language analyses, and which are rarely said in Hebrew-language writings either - some people don't know them, and many try very hard not to know them.

1) Political parties are like guns that jerk leftward, and which you need to aim to the right of the target to actually shoot the target. Which is to say, every single political party's rhetoric is two standard deviations to the left of the policies that it will actually promote when in government.

The reasons for this are many, but the main one is that Israel's international environment and its unelected officials exert leftward pressure on policy. Without active interference by the elected government, in autopilot mode, between any two options the more passive and the more dovish one will be implemented. Constant friction and rightward push is required even to just keep things as they are.

2) Party platforms are irrelevant and not worth reading. Almost every party, with the exception of the Democrats, has a center-right to right-wing written platform. These platforms are meaningless and largely unrelated to the party's actual policies. For this reason it's also extremely midwit to complain that a party has no published platform. These are unnecessary for understanding the party's actual policies.

3) The most important thing about a party is not what it wants, but what it's willing to sacrifice a lot for. On paper, 80% of political actors want the same thing: no Palestinian state; free market economy; most Haredim should enlist in the army; no "coercion"; improve diplomatic relations with Europe, the US, and really everyone; expand the Abraham Accords; go tough on Iran. In reality, nobody will do all of these things, and you're lucky if your elected MKs will promite half of them.

If you want to know what a party will promote, ask not what it wants, but what it wants to avoid at virtually any cost - even avoiding it will hurt a lot diplomatically/economically/socially, etc. A party's true platform is not what it wants, but the place where it refuses to get dragged even if the skies fall.

4) The party's slate of candidates, except for its leader, is also an unreliable guide to its expectable policies. Tokenism is rampant in Israel. Most politicians think that if they cram their slate with people with a certain background, then people with that background will vote for them. They are wrong, but they keep assuming that. Eisenkot's Yashar is full of knitted kippahs, but the party's support among the national-religious is miniscule. Ben Gvir's Otzma Yehudit has both religious and secular candidates, but few seculars vote for the party. And so on.

5) The correct way to determine a party's probable policy is opinion polls among its voters, and the base's socioeconomic and ethnoreligious composition. As I said, on paper almost everyone is right-wing about security, capitalist about the economy, and wants peace and good relations with our neighbors and trade partners. But as I also said, it doesn't matter what people want; the real question is where they refuse to be dragged - by coalition partners, by inertia, by international pressure, and so on.

So as a rule of thumb, look at who the voters are, and you can figure out policy. A nominally right-wing party won't dig in its heels about building E1 even in the face of sanctions, if its core base consists of upper-middle class hilonim in Gush Dan who cannot bear the thought of losing visa-free travel to Europe. A nominally capitalist party is unlikely to lower taxes or increase competition by letting in Uber if 70% of taxi drivers vote for it and if the average socioeconomic score of its strongholds is 5.7/10. And so on and so forth.

6) Finally, just my sense personally. I strongly believe that most Israelis know these things. They go through the moves, they argue, they insist "but the party I'm voting for also wants X!!", but deep down they know all the things I wrote above. These arguments are an exercise in trying to make cognitive dissonance go away. It's hard to be a well-informed, intelligent voter in Israel because if you're honest with yourself, you know that however you vote, you'll give up things very dear to you. That's difficult to accept, so most most voters bargain before they resign themselves to the foul-tasting compromises they inevitably have to make. It looks like they are argueing with you, but really they are bargaining with themselves.

[Yaki Lopez @YakiLopez]

Wait, what?!? Arabs can vote in Israel?!?!

Man, those Israelis are terrible at apartheid...

[JoeMcCarthyStan 🇮🇱🏳️‍⚧️ @JoeMcCarthy2tan]

It's funny that Democrats have a guy that can win by Assad margins in a must-win swing state but he's not even talked about for 2028 because he's Jewish.

[Oz Katerji @OzKaterji]

If you've reached the point in British politics where you're standing with RT regular & Assad defender Broseph Stalin over a deeply racist motion & declaring Shami Chakrabarti & Caroline Lucas to be Zionist traitors, you are mentally unwell & have been radicalised to insanity.

[Matthew Chapman @fawfulfan]

I'm sorry, but I can't get past the guy who moved to *Poland*, of all places, to get away from right-wing populism. That's like moving to Wisconsin to get away from beer and cheese.

Did this guy do any research at all before moving halfway around the world?