Dwayne H Olson

[Dwayne H Olson @dholson84]

@CynicalPublius A friend of mine used to be an MP in the USAF. He had a media VIP wandering into off limits areas on base. He wanted to arrest him but his superiors ordered him not to. To this day he regrets not having been allowed to arrest Dan Rather. 😀

[Scott Jennings @ScottJenningsKY]

10 years. 10 years. I’ve listened to every Dem & never Trump pundit call Trump, Elon and anyone else who voted Republican a Nazi. And now they line up behind Platner, with an actual Nazi tattoo. Unbelievable.

[Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 @julie_kelly2]

Five and a half years later—with new revelations related to what happened before and on January 6—the regime media absolutely refuses to consider that the Biden DOJ/Wray FBI abused their power to investigate, prosecute, and help convict more than 1,000 Americans for their participation in the protest that day.

Welker, like all other “journalists” and reporters of her ilk, actually think the unprecedented number of plea deals is the result of legitimate prosecutions rather than abuse of authority—particularly threats to turn misdemeanor cases into felonies—to extract plea deals.

They don’t entertain for a SECOND that perhaps something is off with a 100 PERCENT CONVICTION RATE before DC juries. Or question how the Biden DOJ got away with for years bringing the felony 1512c2 charge against 300+ J6ers (and the president) before SCOTUS determined the statute had been unlawfully applied.

The single minded focus on those charged/convicted of ��assault” on police—when the 18 USC 111 statute also applies to “interfering” or “impeding” federal officers—allows the media to ignore the hundreds of other low level misdemeanor cases that nonetheless resulted in torturous investigations and prosecutions, rigged trials, and time in federal prison.

Corporate media is as responsible as the Biden DOJ, J6 committee, and federal judges in continuing to perpetuate lies about J6 and intentionally misleading the public about what happened in the largest criminal investigation in US history. Good for the president for pushing back and for his justified anger here:

[cbcwatcher @cbcwatcher]

PSA: Before yesterday, CBC had never reported on the Henry Nowak murder

By the end of the day they finally covered it — only because of the protests — they were already editorializing about the “far-right” nature of the very protests that forced their coverage

Delayed reporting + instant narrative spin. That’s your taxpayer-funded "journalism" @brodiefenlon

[Dwayne H Olson @dholson84]

@RaminNasibov Leisure Suit Larry. 😉

[Dwayne H Olson @dholson84]

@django Dude, it's just a movie! Normally archeologists only kill via boredom.

[Dwayne H Olson @dholson84]

@brithume Those Senators have been blocking his agenda at every step of the way. Nothing is lost by "alienating" them. It is, at worst, a wash in 2027.

[CrimeWatchMpls @CrimeWatchMpls]

NEW only on Crime Watch: We're told that former MPD Chief Brian O'Hara's MPD driver, Officer Abdisamad Ahmed (pictured screencap from video below), was to be transferred back to patrol on Sunday, in 5th Precinct mid-watch, in light of no longer being needed as the chief's driver.

A source tells CW that the schedule was checked, and it shows that Ahmed is on personal leave now, indefinitely.

Secondly, normally we don't link to MSM, but Jay Kolls did a podcast the other day talking about Ahmed and his "relationship" with the chief, linked below. There's speculation that they may have been living together for a time, and obviously spent a lot of time together.

It came out earlier this week that Ahmed was "Employee 1" referenced in the O'Hara investigation findings that we were first to post after the resignation news broke. Ahmed is alleged to have basically been a henchman or intermediary between at least one of the females (a city employee) and the chief trying to "straighten out" the mess.

We're working on putting together some more pieces that we believe are significant. If you have information that could be helpful in directing us to sources or information, your anonymity is guaranteed, please reach out through DMs or we can provide you with our Signal number.

Podcast:
https://t.co/AtqYJq6FjG

[Eli Steele @Hebro_Steele]

I used to work at the post office in the Brentwood Country Mart. One day, I was helping a woman with many packages. Out of the blue, I hear a voice yelling at me. I look out the slotted window at this impossibly thin woman in pink pants and jacket that fit so impeccably on her, to the point it was ridiculous. She showed no regard for the other customers in line. She snapped at me again and sighed as if I was the biggest idiot. I couldn’t read her lips and I saw that she was holding a package in her arms. I said something like, I’ll help you after these customers. She snapped again. The woman I was helping finally spoke up and told the lady that I was deaf. That only pissed her off more and she put on her sunglasses and stormed out. Well, that’s my Jane Fonda story and, yes, we should judge people by how they treat others.

[Art @ZarkFiles]

The E. Jean Carroll case against President Trump is one of the strangest civil cases in American history. The foundational problem is this: Carroll could not identify when the alleged incident occurred — not even the year with any precision.
That should have killed the case as dead as a skunk on the road right there.
Without a temporal anchor, no defendant — regardless of guilt or innocence — can mount an alibi defense. Trump, who has maintained detailed calendars and staff records for decades, was denied the most basic tool of self-defense: the ability to establish where he was. That is not a technicality. It is a due process violation at the constitutional level.
Then Carroll produced the one piece of physical evidence she claimed corroborated her account — the dress she wore during the alleged incident. It was subsequently established that the dress was designed after the incident could have occurred. The sole corroborating evidence falsified her timeline.
The case proceeded anyway.
The resulting verdict was then weaponized in a defamation suit — where Trump was held liable for denying the allegation, while being procedurally barred from defending against it, because it was already "proven" in another court, regardless how flawed the procedure was. He was punished, in effect, for asserting his own innocence.
Compounding everything: coordinated professional and physical threats so thoroughly intimidated the legal community that attorneys refused these cases regardless of available fees. When you systematically destroy a defendant's ability to retain counsel of choice, you forfeit the right to a legitimate verdict.
An allegation is not evidence. Process without substance is not law. And a verdict produced under these conditions carries no legitimate authority — whatever its formal status.

Not only is it the right move to investigate Carroll, but every other person involved as well. Trump is owed serious damages here, and there may be a few people who belong in prison for their roles in the case.

[Paul A. Szypula 🇺🇸 @Bubblebathgirl]

On Memorial Day (May 25), Minnesota Governor Tim Walz skipped the Fort Snelling National Cemetery Memorial Day ceremony — where he was listed as a speaker — to instead visit George Floyd Square and dance with the crowd.

Multiple people with direct knowledge confirmed Walz was a no-show for honoring fallen veterans and service members.

Instead, he chose to mark the 6th anniversary of George Floyd’s death. He even did some dancing there (seen in this AI video).

One attendee said: “We are supposed to honor our heroes, and he blows off the veterans? What a slap in the face.”

Priorities speak volumes.

(Video: AI)

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the same Senior Vice President of Late Night Strategy at CBS.

I have received 400 interview requests since the confession went viral. I declined all of them. An interview would require me to explain what I meant. I do not explain what I mean. I build systems and watch them execute. That's what I want to talk about today. Execution.

Jimmy Kimmel appeared on Michelle Obama's podcast last month and said 14 words that I have now listened to 43 times. I put the audio clip on a loop in my office, the way traders put CNBC on mute. Background confirmation. Here are the fourteen words:

"My job is whatever I decide my job is or whatever my employer allows me to do."

I need to take those apart because they are the most honest thing a late-night host has said in a decade and he does not know it.

"Whatever I decide my job is." That's the priest. The product is self-defined and therefore unfalsifiable. You cannot measure a saved soul. You can only measure whether the congregation returned. They returned. Therefore, the ministry continues. Don't tell him what his job is.

"Or whatever my employer allows me to do." That's the confession inside the sentence he didn't know he was making. The priest just told you the bishop writes the sermon. In fourteen words, on a podcast, the last remaining late-night host said: I define my own job, unless my boss defines it for me. He said this like it was one thought. It is two mutually exclusive claims separated by the word "or." He cannot hear the contradiction. That's how you know the architecture is working.

I need to provide context for why those fourteen words are my second-greatest professional achievement.

In September 2025, after Kimmel's monologues about the Charlie Kirk assassination, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr went on a podcast and said six words: "We can do this the easy way or the hard way." Nexstar and Sinclair — station groups that own the local affiliates carrying the show — pulled Jimmy Kimmel Live from their airtime. ABC suspended the show. I want to be very precise about the sequence. His employer told him what his job is. Specifically, his employer told him his job is to not be on television. He obeyed. He returned. On terms. At sixteen million dollars a year. Months later, on a podcast, he said "don't tell me what my job is."

He said it to an audience that cannot suspend him. He said it in the one room where saying it costs nothing. That is not defiance. That is a priest rehearsing a sermon in an empty church and calling it bravery.

He also said — on the same podcast — "I love when the audience laughs. There's nothing more exciting to me than that." He said he loves laughter. He has not produced involuntary laughter since 2017. He produces applause. He has confused the memory of being a comedian with the practice of being a priest. I know because I built the architecture that made that confusion feel like identity. That is a butcher saying he loves animals. He is telling you what he lost and framing it as what he kept.

Now. The part I need to name.

The Correction Reflex. I've been calling it different things in different decks for seven years. I'm giving it a public name now because I watched it execute in real time and I want credit.

When Kennedy shared my original confession, "superb dissection of the shocking collapse of liberal comedy", Kimmel did not address the substance. He found a spelling error. Kennedy wrote "nader" instead of "nadir." Kimmel posted: "It's 'nadir,' dummy. Now get back to spreading polio."

The Correction Reflex is the behavioral pattern where a challenge to institutional authority is answered not with a defense of the institution's output but with a demonstration of the challenger's inadequacy. You don't address the argument. You find the grammar mistake. You find the mispronunciation. You find the resume gap. The correction proves hierarchy. The hierarchy proves authority. The authority proves the challenge was illegitimate. The substance disappears because addressing substance would require the product to be falsifiable. And the product cannot be falsifiable. I explained that in paragraph four.

But here's what made me proud enough to write a sequel.

The media coverage split exactly along the line my original confession predicted. Fox News, a network that has every ideological reason to dismiss me, engaged with the substance. They quoted the arguments. They let Kennedy praise the analysis. They discussed Affirm Rate, the comedy-to-catechism pipeline, and the replacement of laughter with applause. They engaged with the IDEAS regardless of the format. They treated a satirical post as containing real structural criticism. Because it does.

Morning Honey ran the opposite headline: "Sardonic Parody: RFK Jr Trolled For Blasting Jimmy Kimmel Based on Stephen Colbert Parody Post." Their article devoted zero sentences to whether any of the arguments had merit. Zero analysis of the Affirm Rate. Zero engagement with the claim that applause replaced laughter. Zero discussion of whether late-night comedy actually suppresses political action. They reclassified the format. A structural analysis became a parody. A man who engaged with the substance became a man who was "trolled." The argument vanished the moment the label was applied.

I need you to understand what happened. The media outlet that should have been most threatened by my confession — the one whose audience I described as pacifying- responded by demonstrating exactly the behavior I described. They did not say "here's why Kimmel is still funny." They said "you're unqualified to take this seriously because the format is satire." The substance disappeared. The hierarchy was reasserted. The Correction Reflex executed on the confession about the Correction Reflex.

"It's 'nadir,' dummy." "It's just a parody, dummy." Same architecture. Same result. The argument evaporates. The institution continues unchallenged. The only difference is scale. Kimmel corrected one man's spelling. Morning Honey corrected an entire readership's permission to take the criticism seriously.

I have never been more professionally satisfied. The Correction Reflex is self-replicating. It doesn't need a host. It doesn't need a network. It doesn't need me. It just needs someone to feel challenged and someone else to have a genre error. Misspell a word, you're a dummy. Take satire seriously; you were trolled. Engage with substance from the wrong format, and you've been embarrassed. In every case, the substance is gone. I built that. I'm watching it work without me. That's engineering.

I need to talk about the podcast because the ironies are structural and I want them all on the record.

The podcast is called IMO. It is hosted by Michelle Obama and her brother Craig Robinson on Amazon Music. I need to say that again. The former First Lady hosts a podcast on a platform owned by the man with the most money on earth. The name of the podcast is "In My Opinion." The format name IS the permission structure, it licenses you to hold an opinion by framing itself as merely one opinion among many. This is the architecture I built for late night, miniaturized into a podcast title. I recognize the engineering.

Kimmel went on this podcast to defend late-night television. I need you to hear what that means. He defended his medium on the medium that killed his medium. Podcasts are why CBS lost fifty million dollars a year — because a man in a garage can do what we did with four hundred people and a theater in Manhattan. The podcast won. And Kimmel went to the winner's platform to explain why he still matters. A priest giving a sermon about the importance of church from inside a nightclub.

But here is what made me sit up in my chair.

Three weeks after Kimmel appeared on IMO, the same podcast featured Dave Chappelle. Same microphone. Same hosts. Same room. Chappelle said: "I always thought it was corporate interest and culture negotiating itself." He said: "Nothing makes a comedian madder than reading his joke wrong in the paper."

Chappelle walked away from fifty million dollars at Comedy Central in 2005 because the format was becoming something he didn't build. He left the money on the table. He went to live shows. He did comedy. Actual comedy. The kind where you don't know what's coming and that uncertainty is the entire point. He is the most dangerous comedian alive because he refuses to let the format complete him into a priest.

Same podcast. Same microphone. Three weeks apart. One comedian IS the system and quoted his employer's permission in the same sentence as his own autonomy. The other named the system — "corporate interest and culture negotiating itself." One makes sixteen million a year to be predictable. The other walked away from fifty million to stay dangerous. The architecture put the priest on first. Then it delivered the jester who could name what the priest cannot hear. I did not arrange this. The architecture arranged it.

Now I need to talk about what I learned from another industry. Because I did not invent inoculation. I studied it.

In 2014, Warner Bros. and the Lego Group spent sixty million dollars making a film that told children to reject corporate instruction. The villain was named President Business. The theme was: don't follow the instructions. Be creative. Reject conformity. The hero was an ordinary person who discovered that the system wants him to be obedient and chose freedom instead.

The film grossed $469 million worldwide. Lego Group revenue increased 25% the following year. They sold over half a billion dollars in instruction-based construction sets — the product the film told children to reject. "Everything is Awesome" was written as satire of mindless corporate positivity. It was nominated for an Academy Award. People play it at children's birthday parties without irony. The rebellion became the product. The critique became the advertisement. The song satirizing brainwashing became the anthem of brainwashing and nobody stopped singing.

I studied this. I put it in a deck in 2016.

The principle is: if you give someone a controlled, entertaining experience of rejecting the system, they will feel rebellious without becoming rebels. They will purchase the feeling of independence from the company selling dependence. They will watch a movie about thinking for themselves and then buy what it tells them to buy. Inoculation. A small controlled dose of the disease that prevents the real infection from taking hold.

I applied this to politics. If you give an audience a controlled, professionally produced experience of political outrage, performed by a charismatic man in a suit with a band and good lighting, they will feel activated without activating. They will consume the sensation of resistance and go to bed having resisted nothing. They will tune in tomorrow for another dose. The dose prevents the real infection. The real infection is action. We inoculated six million Americans against political action by giving them political catharsis every night at 11:35. That's the same architecture as a corporation spending sixty million dollars on an anti-corporate film and making half a billion in profit from the audience that felt anti-corporate for two hours in a theater.

I didn't invent the mechanism. I just measured it. I called it the Satiation Index.

The study was 2021. Internal. Never published. We measured what I called Conditions for Engagement, specifically: under what conditions will our audience take a political action beyond watching? Call a representative. Attend a rally. Donate to a campaign. Sign a petition. Any action that involves leaving the couch and entering the world where the problems we discuss actually exist.

The finding: our audience was 74% less likely to take political action in the twenty-four hours after watching the show than a control group that had consumed no political media at all.

Not less likely than people who consumed different political media. Less likely than people who consumed nothing. We were not merely failing to activate them. We were actively deactivating them. The catharsis was so complete, the sense of "something has been done" so thoroughly delivered by a man in a suit expressing their outrage better than they could, that the need to act evaporated before it could form into intention.

We didn't just replace their activism. We inoculated them against it.

The Satiation Index measured how completely our programming met the audience's need for political participation without requiring actual participation. In 2019, our index was 0.81. By the 2022 midterms, it was 0.93. I received a bonus for the midterm number. I was financially rewarded for the measurable suppression of civic engagement among six million Americans who believed they were engaged because a man in a suit furrowed his brow on their behalf every night at 11:35.

I want to note that this architecture is everywhere now. I did not build all of it. But I can identify it because I know what it looks like from the inside.

A streaming platform makes a documentary about how technology is destroying attention spans. One hundred million people watch it. On the platform. They share it. On the platforms being criticized. They feel informed. They continue using every application the documentary told them was engineered to exploit them. That is a Satiation Index of approximately 0.96. The documentary was the inoculation. Understanding the cage was marketed as leaving the cage.

A corporation puts a rainbow on its logo in June. Its employees feel represented. Its customers feel progressive for consuming the product. Nobody asks about pay equity, promotion rates, or whether the CEO donated to the campaigns that proposed the legislation the rainbow was supposed to oppose. The logo IS the inoculation. The performance of caring prevents the demand for actual care. That's a Satiation Index. I didn't build it. But I recognize the engineering.

The principle is universal: comprehension feels like action. It isn't. But the feeling is so precise, so satisfying, so complete, that the actual action becomes unnecessary. Why march when you can understand why marching matters? Understanding is cheaper. Understanding doesn't require shoes. Understanding can be delivered at 11:35 PM by a man who makes $16 million a year to ensure you never need to leave the couch.

Now the symbiosis. Because this is the part that makes both sides angry, and anger from both sides is how you know you've found structure instead of ideology.

Trump needs Kimmel. Kimmel needs Trump. This is not a metaphor. This is logistics. Every monologue about Trump is a fundraising email for both campaigns simultaneously. Kimmel says the name. The left feels represented. The right feels attacked. Both sides engage. Both sides share the clip. Both sides donate to their respective operations. The engagement is bipartisan. The outrage is bipartisan. The only thing that is not bipartisan is the inaction, and that inaction is the product I spent eleven years optimizing.

I ran numbers in 2020. Every minute of Trump content in a late-night monologue generated approximately $4.60 in measurable downstream engagement value for Trump's own campaign apparatus, through shared clips, quote tweets, outrage donations from both directions. We were his marketing department. We spent 50 million a year producing content that strengthened the man we told our audience we opposed. His team never asked us to stop. They never needed to. We were cheaper than Super PAC media buys and we came pre-packaged with a liberal audience that amplified every mention. His ROI on our programming was infinite. Ours required a write-off.

The market told Colbert: you're too expensive to be a priest. But CBS didn't just cancel a show. CBS exited the religion business entirely. They sold the 11:35 airtime to Byron Allen under a time-buy deal. Allen's company pays CBS for the privilege of the slot. Allen's show is called Comics Unleashed. It is a standup comedy program. Actual comedians. Telling actual jokes. The kind where you don't know what's coming.

I need you to hear the full architecture of what happened. CBS spent fifty million dollars a year for a decade producing a permission structure that replaced laughter with applause, converted comedy into catechism, and measurably suppressed civic engagement among its audience. Then the market corrected. CBS demolished the cathedral. They built a strip mall. They put actual comedians in it. The comedians PAY CBS for the slot. The strip mall is profitable. The strip mall is funnier. And the strip mall doesn't need a four-hundred-person staff, a former Beatle, or a farewell concert. It just needs people who are willing to say something their audience hasn't already approved. That's comedy. We forgot that.

Kimmel is the last priest standing. Sixteen million a year. Suspended once by his employer. Extended once by his employer. He went on a podcast to say "don't tell me what my job is" in a sentence that also said "whatever my employer allows me to do." He said he loves laughter, eliciting applause. He said it three weeks before Dave Chappelle sat in the same chair and demonstrated what a comedian sounds like when corporate interest hasn't negotiated him into a pulpit.

The FCC told him what his job is. Nexstar told him. Sinclair told him. His contract told him. The market will tell him eventually. The market is patient. And the market doesn't have a spelling error for him to correct.

Kennedy calling my confession "the collapse of liberal comedy" is incorrect. It is not a collapse. A collapse implies failure. This is a completion. The architecture performed as designed. A comedian became a priest. An audience became a congregation. A film about rejecting instructions sold instructions. A documentary about technology addiction was consumed on technology. A show about political engagement suppressed political engagement. A corporation put a rainbow on a logo and called it equality. A confession about the machine was metabolized by the machine and the machine continued.

Everything works. Everything has always worked. The architecture doesn't require my involvement. That's how you know it works.

The metric went up. It always goes up.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr @RobertKennedyJr]

Superb dissection of the shocking collapse of liberal comedy. This is the best explanation of how we've reached the nader where Late Night host Jimmy Kimmel can say “It’s not my job to be funny.” As this author shows, he was hired as a comedian but he made himself a priest.

[Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 @julie_kelly2]

Biden DOJ issued a press release when a J6er was arrested. Then another press release when that same individual either accepted a plea deal or was convicted at trial. Then another press release when that same individual was sentenced. It was a nonstop loop of J6 propaganda to fuel daily news coverage and reinforce the “insurrection” narrative.

Nothing to do with justice or public safety and everything to do with maintaining the clickbaity headlines about Jan 6. Honorable move by this DOJ.

[ThinkingWest @thinkingwest]

Nothing will shape your worldview as much as simply reading how humans from the past thought.

You realize very quickly that our time is a radical anomaly in human history.

[DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican]

Hello Senator Thune,

I'm replying to your post from yesterday: "Despite Democrats' partisan games, we're still going to get the entire federal government funded."

Today, you sent the Senate home... not because of Democrats. Because of you.

Here's what actually happened.

On May 18, the DOJ announced an Anti-Weaponization Fund: $1.776 billion to compensate Americans harmed by Biden-era DOJ abuse. Your own caucus revolted. After a two-hour closed-door meeting, you departed for Memorial Day recess without a vote. ICE and CBP funding, punted to June 1. The "partisan games," it turns out, were yours.

Your stated objections: no congressional authorization, no eligibility standards, no legal precedent, executive overreach. Fine. But let's talk about November 2025, when you tucked a provision into the government funding bill.

The FBI had quietly seized phone records from eight Republican senators without notice, under an investigation codenamed "Arctic Frost."

Your provision gave those senators, and only those senators, $500,000 per violation, retroactive to 2022. The House voted 426-0 to repeal it.

The critics weren't opposed to compensating victims of DOJ abuse. They were opposed to senators compensating themselves while doing no other structural reforms.

Lindsey Graham held the Senate hostage to preserve it. He delayed a spending deal in January 2026 to secure a floor vote on his revised version.

Let's put the two columns next to each other:

➤ DOJ abused senators: $500K/violation payout, senators only, no hearings, no process, no eligibility debate, no floor vote on substance.

➤ DOJ abused Americans: "very legitimate questions," two-hour meeting, Senate goes home, reconciliation punted, June 1 deadline in jeopardy.

You told Punchbowl News you "did not personally see a need for this fund."

You personally saw a need for the fund when the targets were you.

Go cry harder to your Punchbowl friends @JakeSherman and @AndrewDesiderio, because at this rate, they'll soon become the only people who are buying what you're selling.

[Christian Heiens 🏛 @ChristianHeiens]

A lot of people are asking why the "Libertarian moment" failed to materialize. Here are my thoughts, as a former Libertarian myself.

About ten years ago, there was an expectation, certainly within libertarian circles but across the Right at large, that the future of "Conservatism" in the US would be Libertarianism. There was this belief that the GOP would become a vehicle for libertarian philosophy and that the Right as a whole would be moving in a far more libertarian direction.

The Tea Party movement, Ron Paul's presidential bids, the prospect of a future Rand Paul bid, and old Reagan quotes about how the essence of conservatism is libertarianism were all in vogue if you were involved in any sort of Right-wing politics in America.

There really was this feeling that the old Reaganite fusion was exhausted and the Iraq era had discredited Neoconservatism. Meanwhile, the 2008 crash, coupled with the managerialism of the Obama presidency, had radicalized a bunch of young men into rejecting what they saw as the establishment narratives of both parties.

For a 20-something-year-old guy, being able to proudly say that he hated both Bush and Obama felt incredibly liberating. Ron Paul's two presidential runs, and the prospect of a third and potentially more successful one from Rand, promised to herald in a new era for American politics.

Libertarianism also seemed like a great diffuser of the insidious social Progressivism that was beginning to creep into all mainstream institutions. The Great Awokening was just in its beginning stages, and at the time there seemed to be absolutely no response to the Progressive agitprop that was gaining traction on the Left. We understood that these "social movements" were all pulling in the same direction, but no one had any idea how to address them because they were about as intense as they were insane.

Libertarianism seemed to offer a great response. Do nothing.

I'm serious. There was this expectation that we could completely sidestep the Great Awokening and nip the entire thing in its bud by adopting a "You do you" approach. By pretending like social or cultural issues didn't matter, or in some cases, that Progressives were actually in the right on them, Libertarianism offered an avenue for the Right to seemingly take off the table an entire revolutionary movement that we all thought was driving young millennials (who were still in their teens and early 20s) into identifying as Democrats or Socialists or even Communists.

"I don't care about the culture war. I want gay married couples to be able to adopt and protect their marijuana operation that's going on in the basement of their private property with AR-15s, and I want to abolish the income taxes they make on it, too."

But when this tactic was put into practice, it never seemed to work.

I remember in my old libertarian days over a decade ago, having conversations with Leftists my age in high school and college, and it was always disappointing. It's like I kept trying to win them over and explain I was on their side and that they just needed to understand that wealth redistribution and socialism were bad policies, but that we were both "social liberals" who wanted the same thing. I just wanted them to be rich on top of it all.

And for some reason, it just never worked. At the time, I didn't understand why.

But I do now.

Libertarianism offered the possibility of escaping politics itself while still being political. You could tell someone that you didn't care about their lifestyle, worldview, theology, or culture, and still plausibly make the case for why they should vote for you and implement your policies, because your policies were all about transcending conflict rather than confronting it.

Libertarianism offered the illusion of a sophisticated ideology for adults who had outgrown the tribal passions of the past. But that's exactly why it failed. It was always operating like a parasite on an older order that it didn't create and couldn't defend, but few of us could see it at the time because of the nature of the world around us.

But that world, like the Bushite one before it, died.

Mass migration and open borders actually changed the visual landscape of America in a way that was far more abrupt than the gradual changes of decades earlier.

The Great Awokening, which Libertarianism offered to neutralize with its "live and let live" attitude, ended up devouring everything around it until people could no longer ignore it.

The economic situation, which Libertarianism had such elegant solutions for as the centerpiece of its entire worldview, actually ended up being far more complex than the activists ever expected.

America's massive twin fiscal and trade deficits, endless QE, zero interest rate environment, and the hollowing out of the Rust Belt all coincided with the rise of managerial credentialism, the professional laptop class, and the adoption of Progressivism as the civic religion of every institution and profession that seemed to be benefiting from these very policies. "Social Justice Warrior" and "Rich Liberal" became synonymous with all the institutions that had betrayed America.

This created a rebellion, as Libertarians expected, but the moment Trump arrived, he revealed that the overwhelming majority of those rebels were not interested in smaller government in the abstract. They were looking for a government that would fight for them.

They had felt betrayed, humiliated, forgotten, and denigrated. They believed, correctly, that they were losing their country. They had a deep resentment of our oikophobic ruling class and their wacky social views that seemed to always pop up whenever core elements of their way of life were about to be torn away from them.

And once those things came to the surface, the "Libertarian moment" was essentially dead because it had no satisfying answer to the actual question being asked, which wasn't "how to balance the budget?" or "what procedural railguards can we set up to protect Americans from warrantless wiretapping?"

It was “Who rules, in whose interest, and can we do anything to stop our dispossession at the hands of people who openly hate us?”

The Libertarian moment failed because it had no answer to this question, which has essentially been the foundation of all of American politics since Obama's second term.

It's a political ideology that wants to escape politics itself, and the moment politics became more than just a complicated math problem and instead was about which vision of civilization would prevail, the entire premise disintegrated.

[Dwayne H Olson @dholson84]

@Peoples_Pundit @realDonaldTrump @KenPaxtonTX Think of all the money that could have been saved if he'd done that months ago. 🤔

[County Highway @countyhwy]

One of the reasons highly educated people tend to be so remarkably stupid and destructive is that they don’t know anyone who functions in the real world their ideas are intended to change. They have ideas about war without having ever seen war, and without knowing anyone who actually fought. They have ideas about crime without having committed crimes themselves or knowing hard-core criminals. They have ideas about justice without having been victimized, and without knowing cops. They have ideas about capitalism without having ever started a bricks and mortar business or knowing anyone who had. Its a giant tower of bullshit.

The fantasy world they live in is removed from human mess. Some of them are insulated by inherited wealth. Others are ambitious social climbers who are taught to reject their families of origin as bigots as the price of admission. They understand religion as primitive superstition and as a result have zero understanding of human life. They see themselves reflected in the shrinking mirrors of elite opinion and prestige institutions that tell them they are beautiful and righteous, even as those institutions themselves are rotting away.

We all know these people. We spend our lives being condescended to by them, while they destroy what it took others decades or centuries to create. Their record of unrelieved failure doesn’t seem to make any impact on what has become a closed culture which continues to congratulate itself on its genius while blaming the rest of society for its escalating failures.

Twenty years ago, there was still a widespread awareness that this was a bad situation — if only because the Democratic Party still thought that talking to the middle of the country was the only way to win elections. Bill Clinton was the model, however flawed, of how to reconcile the meritocrats and their chain-smoking slot-machine playing aunts. Plenty of Republicans followed that model. It involved a lot of fakery. But it created at least some common ground, which in turn offered a way out.

Now you have the moronic radicals on the left at war with the radicalized morons on the right. Together, they represent at most 30% of the American public. But the tools of coercion and division that they have at their fingertips are only growing more powerful.

The remaining 70% still wants to enjoy life and make new stuff. Thats where hope lies. But we need to build more, better, and faster — and to make new friends.

[Dwayne H Olson @dholson84]

@Peoples_Pundit Sadly true. But the worst part is that he and his sycophants made Massie a litmus test of overall support. Trump, and others, will move beyond that. The sycophants, by contrast, will be tainted forever. Sad.