Kevin Duffy on the 2026 midterm election "blue tsunami"

It's pretty clear that the midterm election blue tsunami was all about affordability: a rebuke of Trump's tariffs and the Iran War. While I doubt the big government Dems will completely diagnose the problem (much less fix it), at least they got the obvious right. 

I suspect yesterday's stock market rally was a head fake (especially hyperscalers up), but some of the moves - energy down, gold up, AI suppliers down, China up - will stick.

~ Kevin Duffy, X post, November 5, 2026

 

Tom Bernhardt on AOC's comment that Elon Musk is "a billionaire con man"

I’ve seen this meme posted on X and Facebook by many active Dems.  It’s remarkable on several levels.

Long before Musk’s recent sojourn into politics, I considered him to be the most consequential person this century.  He changed payments with Paypal, propelled the electric car business from niche to mainstream in Tesla, radically reduced the cost of space lift with SpaceX, gave us low-latency global internet with Earthlink, advanced AI at OpenAI, Boring Company provides new tunneling tech, evolved Twitter to being a better free-speech platform with X, and Neuralink advanced brain-computer interface giving hope to victims of neurological damage.  He is a business polymath and tech visionary by any definition.

Contrary to AOC’s post, Musk is a brilliant engineer.  Several years ago, I recall listening to Musk on Lex Fridman’s podcast where he talked in depth about topics such as rocket engine design and autopilot AI for over four hours.  I was very impressed.  But it is his extreme ability to spot opportunity, hire top talent and fearlessly execute that sets him apart. 

Entrepreneurs significantly differ (on average) from the general population in several of the Big Five personality factors, notably being far lower in Agreeableness (going along with others) and Neuroticism (negative emotions such as anxiety) and higher in Openness (curiosity and attraction to the novel).  You see this in spades with Musk, Jobs and others (Gates, Ellison, etc.).  They are very difficult to work for, but the results speak for themselves. Geniuses such as Musk are also often quite eccentric. 

Musk was a hero of the left when he was a lifelong Dem.  Now he is the victim of metastasized TDS.  It’s not surprising that an ex-barista would say something this dumb.  What is surprising is that Dems are picking this up as some piece of important insight.  Until they emerge from this psychopathology, the electorate will shake their collective heads in disbelief and vote otherwise.

~ Tom Bernhardt, Facebook post, March 22, 2025

Rasmussen Reports on voter support for the war on the unvaccinated

How far are Democrats willing to go in punishing the unvaccinated?  Twenty-nine percent (29%) of Democratic voters would support temporarily removing parents’ custody of their children if parents refuse to take the COVID-19 vaccine.  That’s much more than twice the level of support in the rest of the electorate – seven percent (7%) of Republicans and 11% of unaffiliated voters – for such a policy.

~  Rasmussen Reports, "COVID-19: Democratic Voters Support Harsh Measures Against Unvaccinated," January 13, 2022

Vasko Kohlmayer on why the left pushes transgenderism

The well-being of so-called transgender people is not... what Joe Biden and his handlers really care about.  After all, Joe Biden had never been known to be particularly friendly toward LGBT.  It is the movement’s proclivity toward reality negation that those who pull the strings of this frail man find so appealing.  They have appropriated the transgender cause because it allows them to gaslight the American people, and gaslighting has become the left’s modus operandi.

~ Vasko Kohlmayer, "The Great Struggle of Our Time: The Battle for Reality," American Thinker, October 17, 2021

June 9, 2014

Jonathan Alter: Biden is first president since LBJ "who can rightly be called FDR’s heir"

For America to “own the future,” as the president promised last month, he needs to do amid the pandemic what Mr. Roosevelt did amid the Depression: restore faith that the long-distrusted federal government can deliver rapid, tangible achievements.

[...]

Just as Mr. Roosevelt understood that the laissez-faire philosophy of the 1920s wasn’t working anymore to build the nation, Mr. Biden sees that Reagan-era market capitalism cannot alone rebuild it. 

[...]

Whatever the future holds, Mr. Biden and Mr. Roosevelt are now fused in history by the size and breadth of their progressive ambitions.  Jimmy Carter took office when liberalism was fatigued; Bill Clinton said “the era of Big Government is over”; Barack Obama was forced to conform to the mantra of deficit hawks. Mr. Biden was lucky enough to have been elected when what the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called “the cycles of American history” are spinning left.  He is the first president since Lyndon Johnson who can rightly be called F.D.R.’s heir.  Soon we’ll know if he squanders that legacy — or builds on it.

~ Jonathan Alter, "How F.D.R.'s Heir is Changing the Country," The New York Times, April 12, 2021

Marc Faber on governments finding scapegoats for its failures

Every failed state has always accused somebody else for its own shortcomings.  The Bolsheviks blamed foreign interference and foreign spies; Stalin blamed Hitler; Hitler blamed the Communists and Jews; Trump blamed the Chinese; and the Democrats blamed Trump for everything that went wrong, etc.

~ Marc Faber, The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, February 1, 2021

Kevin Duffy on brand destruction

I don't recall a time of so much self-inflicted brand destruction: NBA, ESPN, mainstream media, Democratic Party, Federal Reserve, U.S. Dollar.

~ Kevin Duffy, tweet, September 10, 2020

Paul Craig Roberts on Democrats, law and order, and National Public Radio

The reason Democrats don’t enforce law and order is that law and order are protections for white people. Anything that protects white people is bad, because it lets white people continue their oppression of black people. This is the level of intelligence at NPR, a font of anti-white ideology.

~ Paul Craig Roberts, "'In Defense of Looting'," LewRockwell.com, August 31, 2020

Doug Casey on Donald Trump's chances in the 2020 election

But on the bright side, he’s a cultural conservative. And that’s why people support him. He wants to see the US return to the golden days of yesteryear, the world of Leave it to Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, and Father Knows Best. We’d all like to see domestic tranquility and rising prosperity. But that’s not the world we’re going to be living in, not just for 2020, but the whole decade.

Given a choice between Trump and the Democrats, if you like what’s left of the US, you have to be a Trump supporter. But since we’ll be in the midst of a gigantic political, economic, and social crisis in November, people will want a radical change. That’s what the Democrats are promising, so they’re likely to win. But there are other factors.

The last election was close enough, but now, four years later, there are four more cohorts of kids that have gone through high school and college and been indoctrinated by their uniformly left-wing teachers. They’re going to vote Democrat overwhelmingly.

~ Doug Casey, "Doug Casey on the Cultural Revolution in the US and What It Means For the Election," International Man, July 30, 2020

Samuel Mitcham on when "all about slavery" became the official narrative of the Civil War

From the 1870s to the late 1950s, there was an unofficial truce between the North and South.  Each side recognized and saluted the courage of the other; it was conceded that the North fought to preserve the Union and because Old Glory had been fired on, and the Southerner fought for liberty and to defend his home; the two great heroes of the war were Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee; and the South admitted that slavery was wrong but never conceded that it was cruel.

Around 1960, the Democratic Party—led by Lyndon B. Johnson—advanced the modern incarnation of identity politics.  It worked very well for them.  In the election of 1956, 75% of African-Americans voted Republican.  By 1964, more than 90% of them voted Democrat, and they have been doing so until 2020.  As part of their effort to control and manipulate the black vote, the Leftists and their myrmidons advanced the myth that the Civil War was all about slavery.  It wasn’t.  It was, in my opinion, about money, more than anything else.

~ Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., "Why the Civil War Wasn't About Slavery," LewRockwell.com, July 15, 2020

Bill Sardi on the coronavirus and politicization of modern medicine

Scrap any idea modern medicine exists outside politics.  Most of the COVID-19-related deaths emanate from States of the same political party.  With an upcoming Presidential election, the excessive number of reported deaths in Democrat-controlled States is disconcerting.  There are 24 Democrat governors and 26 Republican.  Two-thirds of the cases are on the BLUE Democrat side.  Six BLUE states have half the cases but only a third of the population.

U.S. politicians are bragging about the volume of tests performed but saying nothing about the failure to use these tests to target treatment and prevention towards high-risk groups and thus unlock the rest of the population and the economy from very destructive confinement.

~ Bill Sardi, "The Big Coronavirus Testing Con Job," LewRockwell.com, July 14, 2020

Tom DiLorenzo on Leftists and their hatred for Trump

The Leftists who have displayed an uncontrollable, violent hatred of President Trump over the past three-and-a-half years have done so because their real hatred is of the people who voted for Trump and put him in office...

These are the people whose dreams of destroying capitalism and replacing it with their own version of Soviet central planning under the guise of a “Green New Deal” have been soundly rejected if not ignored by the deplorables, a key reason for their intense, and often violent hatred. They feel entitled to rule over the rest of America – if not the world – and many of them appear to be seething with a murderous hatred over not being granted such power. They have given up on debate and argumentation and are now resorting to pervasive censorship, riots, vandalism, arson, and assaults. Mass killing cannot be too far off if they are not stopped and soon.

~ Tom DiLorenzo, "A Disease in the Public Mind, Part II?," LewRockwell.com, June 29, 2020

Vasko Kohlmayer on the role of Democrats and Republicans in the 2020 riots

Perhaps more than anything, the riots revealed the dysfunctional state of our political system. One of our two major political parties openly encouraged and actively abetted the mayhem. Difficult as it may be to believe, the Democrats on all levels defended and excused the perpetrators from the very outset.

[...]

While the Democrats were busy plying their agitprop and sanctioning the vandalization of our country, the Republicans responded by doing exactly nothing. Rather than standing up for law and order in the face of violence and brazen lies, they meekly went along and silently conceded to most of the looters’ and democrats’ demands. Spineless and morally hollowed out, the Republicans completely ceded the moral ground to the criminal mobs and their abettors in the Democratic Party. Unwilling to defend the truth, justice, law enforcement and law-obeying citizens, they let the Left rule the day.

~ Vasko Kohlmayer, "America in Crisis: The Predicament," LewRockwell.com, June 25, 2020

Doug Casey on the difference between Democrats and Republicans

Doug: As you know, I've always distinguished them this way: the Democrats definitely don't believe in economic freedom, but they say they believe in social freedom, while the Republicans definitely don't believe in social freedom, but they say they believe in economic freedom. Neither believes in both – that would make them libertarians.

Q: [Chuckles] So, it's what they lie about that really distinguishes them. Or, more to the point, it's not what they believe, or say they believe, that drives them, but what they don't believe. Not what they value, but what they fear. It's not love but hate that is the guiding principle of American politics.

Doug: Exactly. Like most of what we see in politics, it's completely perverse. The only good thing about the Democratic party is that they're at least consistent: they are collectivists and statists through and through. They are collectivists in what they say, and they are collectivists in what they do. That gives them the appearance of being more honest than the Republicans.

Q: They may be crypto-communists draped in red, white, and blue, but at least they're consistent?

Doug: Yes, but not the Republicans. They say they value freedom and the individual, but their actions lie to those claims, and they give freedom a bad name. It makes you reluctant to use words like "free market," when you have the likes of the hostile and mildly demented McCain, and the bent and clinically stupid Bush claiming those principles for what they do.

Q: Makes me mad. It adds insult to injury that Ronald Reagan got elected on essentially libertarian rhetoric – smaller government, lower taxes, getting the state off the little guy's back, etc., and then signed appropriations bills that saw government grow by huge, then-unprecedented amounts. Many people today think the Reagan years prove that less government is a bad idea!

Doug: Remember what the Reagan team used to say, "If not us, who? And if not now, when?" As it turned out, it wasn't them and it wasn't then. The worst enemies of individual liberty are knaves that claim they're for it but utterly betray it. And incompetents and ineffectual fools who say they're trying to save freedom by increasing the size of the state.

~ Doug Casey, Doug Casey on the Tea Party Movement, Interviewed by Louis James, Editor, International Speculator, LewRockwell.com, October 1, 2010

David Boaz on the Democrat takeover of Congress

Not surprisingly, after 6 or 12 years of [the Bush administration], the voters turned out the Republicans and put the Democrats in charge.

As Dr. Phil would say, "How's that working for ya?"

Within two months of the Democratic takeover, the Washington Post reported that Democrats were charging lobbyists big bucks to meet Nancy Pelosi and the chairmen of, you know, the congressional committees that write tax laws, regulations, and spending bills - including, they noted, some of Jack Abramoff's favorite clients.

After six months, we've had hearings and press conferences and all-night slumber parties.

But the war goes on. The spending goes on. We're up to 32,000 earmarks in the latest spending bills. American citizens are still being held in jail without access to a lawyer.

The Democrats should get The Who to sing at their next convention - "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

~ David Boaz, executive VP, Cato Institute, "The Coming Century of Liberty," Fall 2007