Three Good Reads Today

I’m not entirely sure how to react to the first article. The bottom line is that it may help explain the antipathy of some ordinary people on the conservative end of the political spectrum for Donald Trump. The author is forthright in that regard:

What is needed is a return to a united front politics that merges Boomer resources with youthful talent and energy. And for that, the Right needs another leader like Donald Trump, or perhaps even Trump himself to return to the potent politics of national renewal that won in 2016.

To get there, he wants to explain Boomers to the young, and vice versa:

Boomers, Meet the Based

There’s a generation gap on the Right, and it’s hurting us.

…

What the Boomers Need to Know about the Based

Let’s clear up a few of the most common questions or suspicions older conservatives have about the so-called dissident Right:

Do you hate America and want it to fail? 

A lot of younger right-wingers would say yes . . . in a certain sense, they do. And they have reasons for saying that. What young man with any sense wants to die for the Joe Biden regime in the Ukraine? Who wants to pay taxes so Kamala Harris can shower money on illegal immigrants and left-wing shock troops?

That’s a hard message to hear for anyone who lived through the 1960s and the Cold War. For a long time, to be on the Right—to defend liberty and morality and decency—meant to be a patriot and to love America. And it still does. But the enemies of freedom and decency who hate America are no longer godless communists abroad, they are the godless leftists at home who are currently in power.

If America means transgender rights and suffocating biomedical security measures, then those who love freedom will come to hate America—or, to be more specific, the current regime that has taken control of what used to be America.

Young people on the Right don’t hate liberty and morality and decency; they despise woke ideology. The older idea of “America” that the Boomers love is gone, as far as the younger generation is concerned. Most Boomers will never share this antipathy, but they must learn to distinguish between America the nation and America the state. The American state—as the COVID lockdowns, Russiagate hoax, and the political prosecution of the January 6 protestors show—is at war with the American people. (Many older conservatives recognized this distinction and gave Rush Limbaugh a pass when he famously remarked on air that he hoped Barack Obama would fail.)

I didn’t think I’d ever read another article about Michael Avenatti, but …

Mark Judge changed my mind:

Was Hillary Clinton Paying Michael Avenatti?

As the creepy porn lawyer faces fines and jail time, questions about his operation—and who was financing it—linger.

Judge has a good story to tell, and tells it well. However, for our purposes I want to simply quote passages from an article by Mark Penn that Judge quotes. Penn—the former Clinton pollster and adviser—knows the Clinton org as well as anyone living (a necessary proviso). He’s a lawyer and a smart guy generally. And, to his credit, he wrote what he wrote in 2018, at the height of the Get Trump campaign:

Penn asked:

So exactly who is paying Michael Avenatti? And is he a lawyer, an opposition researcher, a journalist, or a campaign operative?

He wants to make the discussion all about where Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal attorney, got his money but, to have clean hands, Avenatti needs to come forward with exactly who is financing his operation, who his sources were for detailed banking information, and whether he really is an attorney solely representing Stormy Daniels or just using her as cover to wage a political operation.

From the beginning, this has been fishy. Daniels’s previous lawyer advised her to stick to her agreements. In contrast, Avenatti okayed her violating with impunity her non-disclosure agreement on ‘60 Minutes’ despite a binding arbitration judgment against her. She acknowledged on Twitter that she is not paying for her lawyer. So who is? And did he indemnify her against all multimillion-dollar penalties?

Finally, Penn ended with this haymaker:

It took a long time and even a court battle to find out that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid for the Fusion GPS dossier, a fact that was disclosed only after the damage was done, as former British spy and the dossier’s compiler, Christopher Steele, had already created a vast echo chamber as though the material he was peddling had been verified in some way, which of course, it never was. Now Avenatti is being allowed to repeat this same process, mixing truths with half truths and evading accountability.

Avenatti has been given a free, unfettered media perch on TV to spread his stuff without the networks forcing him to meet any disclosure requirements, saying that he is Daniels’s attorney when someone else entirely is paying for this operation is not true disclosure that allows the viewer to evaluate the source and potential conflicts. He is now being given deference as though he is a journalist interested in protecting unverified sources while he makes headline-grabbing pronouncements. Lawyers need to disclose the source of their evidence.

Who thinks Penn—an insider’s insider—didn’t know the answers to those questions when he asked them? There relevance remains.

Glenn Reynolds’ current article is entertaining—let’s hope that, beyond the cultural observations that hit home, it actually comes to pass:

Truckers are starting a working-class revolution — and the left hates it

Excerpts:

So we’re finally seeing a genuine, bottom-up, working-class revolution. In Canada, and increasingly in the United States, truckers and others are refusing to follow government orders, telling the powerful that, in a popular lefty formulation, if there’s no justice, there’s no peace.

Naturally, the left hates it.

For more than a century, lefties have talked about such a revolt. But if you really paid attention, the actual role of the working class in their working-class revolution was not to call the shots — it was to do what it was told by the “intellectual vanguard” of the left.

A working-class revolution led by the working class is the left’s worst nightmare because the working class doesn’t want what the left wants. …

…

That’s why, even as they legitimize and valorize outright rioting and violence by leftist groups, lefties vilify every working-class protest movement, going back before the Tea Party. In Canada, the press even tried to pretend that the thousands of truckers driving to the capital city of Ottawa were actually Russian agents. When that failed, it fell back on its old standard, calling them fascists, Nazi sympathizers and white supremacists.

But nobody believes that because it’s as obvious a lie as the claims about Russians. Leftists talk about race because they don’t want people to notice they’ve been waging class war.

…

In the United States, meanwhile, Joe Biden — whom a self-described “cabal” of media, tech and political types organized to put in office just over a year ago — is polling in “worst president ever” territory, according to Rasmussen and Gallup polls.

Gallup’s survey shows that voter satisfaction has hit a “gloomy” new low, and Rasmussen found that 54% of voters see Biden as the “worst” president in recent memory. 

“Collectively, satisfaction at the start of 2022 in a variety of areas is about as bad as it’s been in two decades of Gallup measurement,” the pollster declared. And in the highly respected General Social Survey, Americans’ happiness has reached record lows.

And there’s more at the link.