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We know you like it when the hosts get into it and we know you like it when one of them gets triggered by a certain Chief Executive. So –no spoilers!– we think you’ll enjoy the opening segment of today’s Big Show. But stick around, because we want to introduce you to two members of the media we think you ought to be aware of. First up: Alex Berenson, once a card carrying member of the elite media (the New York Times) and now a novelist who does some independent journalism on the side. His work on COVID over the past six months (available on Twitter and on his website is not to be missed. Then, meet Andrew Beaton, who covers sports for the Wall Street Journal. His no nonsense reporting on COVID and sports and the impact of the social justice movement is not to be missed. But that’s not all: we’ve got a new Lileks Post of The Week, courtesy of @DoctorRobert (it’s about oboes). Finally, we lost a great one this week. Well, those of us who were aware of him did. Guess which one of our podcasters is not really aware of the contributions to the culture Edward Van Halen left us?
Music from this week’s show: Dance The Night Away by Van Halen
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Right. I wasn’t really thinking about that. I was more thinking about Rob freaking out. The ones that have big leverage and are using it against Trump really need to be remembered.
#GaryWantsSinglePayer
Rebuild it into what? And for whom? And to what end? Obama wasn’t the only one leading from behind those 8 years.
Gary, who’s fault is it that Trump won the nomination and then won the election? Who did that? Why didn’t you stop them? Should we act so Democrats can shove whatever they want down our throats for the next 2 to 4 years, too?
#GaryWantsSinglePayer
The rich PEOPLE can still go on the other side of the wall, they just have to leave their money behind.
This topic really gets under my skin. Exit taxes are a sign you did something wrong decades ago.
Exit taxes.
They do this now.
Exit taxes are the virtual Berlin Wall.
I think they have this with homes in Chicago. Something like that. There is all kinds of this crap everywhere.
I am tempted to scan and post my Voter Registration card, but I won’t, given that I have already been doxxed on Ricochet.
I still believe that Ronald Reagan was the Greatest President of the Twentieth Century.
Ronald Reagan is the example, not Trump, of what we should aspire to be.
“There you go again.”
I’m also reminded of a story attributed to Lincoln:
Lincoln: “If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?”
Person: “Five.”
Lincoln: “No, four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one.”
I expect Lincoln would say that someone who “calls themself” a Republican – a “registered Republican” – who votes for Democrats especially at the top of the ticket, is not really a Republican at all.
Beyond that?
Those are pretty good accomplishments. I was in my early twenties when he got elected. I really thought we were losing the Cold War. I came into adulthood with the country experiencing double digit inflation, and I had no idea how we were going to get off that treadmill. We also had gasoline shortages.
By the time I was in my thirties, jobs were plentiful and it became much easier to look for work.
But he did get those two big things right. His third goal, to reduce the size of the federal government, he failed at with federal spending continuing to increase.
I know that he had his faults. There’s substantial evidence that he didn’t have it in him to confront terrorists with hostages (he may not have been directly involved in Iran-Contra, but maybe his staff sensed where he was at on the issue), and Reagan, who was a self-proclaimed federalist, allowed his Secretary of Transportation to force the states to raise the drinking age from 18 to 21 by the usual stick of threatening the withdrawal of federal highway funds (which should be wholly funded by the states anyway).
But on the big things, he got two out of three.
I am completely on board with that and I mostly blame 43. People like Gary need to be able to hold a complicated thought. That’s my point.
43 went backwards. His hands were tied to some extent, I suppose.
Reagan also seemed to be rather fortunate that the Soviet leaders “kept dying on him.” That doesn’t seem to have happened much since then.
Need I remind you again that he’s only a family law attorney?
Until yesterday, the last time I had voted for a Democrat was 48 years ago, in 1972.
If you want to claim that you were a republican from 1972 until yesterday, that still doesn’t defeat the point.
Thanks for this!
Where were you? No one showed up for Joe. That’s why he’s up 126 points in the polls. All that enthusiasm.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the coastal big cities etc go 500% or so for Biden/Harris – depending on how many extra ballots they can “find” – while the rest of the country is solidly Trump. This time, it won’t just be someone like Pauline Kael who says “How did Trump win? I don’t know anyone who voted for him” it will be MILLIONS of people.
And then if they say “Oh yeah?! Well I bet YOU don’t know anyone who voted for Biden!” and we can all yell “GARY ROBBINS!!!”
I am a Republican, not a Trumpican. The sooner we expel Trump and Trumpism, the sooner the Republican can be restored to winning.
I live in Flagstaff 140 miles away. Our temperature yesterday in Flagstaff was 73 degrees; in Phoenix it was in the 90’s!
So? It was 116 when I left in early August.
Well from the report, Biden didn’t tell his supporters that they were coming. Wouldn’t have given you enough time to get there.
It’s always a great danger for Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians to calculate into their election assessments both polls and stories based on anonymous sources. So much overwhelming evidence exists on the corrupt nature of polls and anonymous “behind-the-scenes” reports that it boggles my mind that people allow those to play into their interpretations of character, truth, and understanding.
And it’s unfortunate that so few of them tune in regularly to evidence-based detectives who dig out the Truth and are readily willing to admit when they are mistaken. I’m thinking in particular of Dan Bongino’s daily podcast, which is amazing in its ability to provide a solid fact-based understanding of Spygate, for example, which one cannot get anywhere else.
Yeah, I know, he’s a passionate Trumper. He ridicules his political opponents. But he brings a level of investigative digging, and particularly an extraordinary ability to synthesize discrete and far-apart slivers of data, that truly reveal the underlying corruptions.
Again, to dismiss Bongino is to miss out, daily, on the latest understanding of why this election is not another mere Republican v Democrat election. It’s so much bigger than that.
So to dismiss Trump based on his rhetoric, his foolhardy lack of political finesse, and seek to “reset to a balanced GOP” is to reveal an extraordinary misunderstanding of the underlying dynamics of Marxist energy and big money being systematically and intentionally applied to the undermining of this great American experiment. It’s shortsighted. It’s missing the forest for the trees. And in the end, its failing to understanding that there is a real enemy here.
That enemy is real enough that mild-mannered Thomas Sowell stated on the Mark Levin show dated 7/12/20, “What I see is, if the election goes to Biden, then there’s a good chance that the Democrats will control the two branches of Congress and the White House, and considering the kinds of things they are proposing, that could well be the point of no return for this country.”
Get real, folks.
Reagan was a terrific president for his time. And the Ds were a completely different party back then. I should know – I was one of them.
We all remember the story of Tip O’Neill sitting by Reagan’s bedside while they both said the Our Father. Compare that to how the Ds behaved when President Trump tested positive for COVID.
There’s no way Reagan (or his reincarnation) could successfully battle against the current Democrat Party. Which is not to say the Ds are the only body needing to be battled against; there’s a fair amount of globalist-type Rs that have been working against America and her interests.
I do believe the parties will be/have been permanently re-aligned. It was long overdue, and it took Candidate and then President Trump to make obvious how many people on both sides of the aisle were pursing their own interests and not those of Americans.
A long way of saying there will never, ever be a Reagan Republican-type party again. Not unless everyone on the left all woke up and experienced mass sanity, at which point the Republicans could afford such a luxury as Reagan.
I don’t consider Rob a Never Trumper. He is just a lovable sceptic.
Loved Reagan. He is dead. I am not willing to let Democrats run things until the next Reagan shows up.
Trump is just the avatar for all of us you are disagreeing with. You aren’t going to expel us.
Newt Gingrich is on Rudy Giuliani’s podcast last week. The part about Hunter Biden and Russia/China, the deep state, Hillary Clinton, Obama, and the complicit media starts at 9:00. Why in the hell do you want to reinforce that? All of these people are so corrupt it’s unbelievable. People are acting like it’s not happening.
Agreed. How are we going to come together is Trump is beaten in a landslide?
I would likely be willing to vote for any Republican in 2024 whose last name is not “Trump.” Would you be willing to vote for a Trump-Skeptic Republican?
What reforms would you agree to in the Republican Party? How about:
What legislation would you agree to? How about: