re: The Anti Populist Crowd

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They are far to into constant war. They are blind to the influence of the military industrial complex.

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Talk to your retard in chief.

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Since becoming president, Donald Trump has overseen historic increases in defense budgets, fawned over military equipment, installed a number of defense industry insiders in top Pentagon positions and made a major push to sell weapons overseas.

But on Monday, Trump said leaders at the Pentagon “want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.”

Trump’s backers compared his comments to those made by former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who closed out his time in office by warning of a permanent national security apparatus that guaranteed money would keep flowing toward arms manufacturers.

Yet Trump’s record tells a different story. All three of his hand-picked defense secretaries had ties to the defense industry: Jim Mattis was a member of the General Dynamics board of directors, Pat Shanahan was an executive with Boeing, and Mark Esper was Raytheon’s top lobbyist. Mattis also returned to his board position shortly after leaving the Pentagon, showing the revolving door between industry and the Defense Department.

Nearly half of senior Defense Department officials are connected to military contractors, according to an analysis by the Project on Government Oversight.

But beyond personnel choices, Trump has made the purchase, public display and foreign sales of military hardware a major priority of his administration.

He has championed two defense budgets that blew past $700 billion, and is preparing to sign a third. The bill that Trump signed in 2018 locked in the largest budget the Pentagon had ever seen, only to top it the following year.

He also approved more than $55.6 billion in foreign weapons sales in fiscal 2018, his first complete fiscal year in office, compared to $33.6 billion in foreign military sales in fiscal 2016, the last year of the Obama administration.

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I don't hate traditional conservatives. Here are my concerns.

They are far to into constant war. They are blind to the influence of the military industrial complex.

They have no concern over government/ corporate collusion and how it is used to undermine our freedoms.

They don't understand the difference between free enterprise and monopoly.

They have no conception of fair trade.

They care not about the loss of our industrial base.

They don't care if American Corporations are no longer American in any sense of the word.

They profit from illegal immigration and use it to suppress wages.

They profit from inflation.

They talk about deficits but then back establishment politicians that enable it.

They won't acknowledge that most corporations are Woke and have joined the other side.

That's just off the top of my head. They basically don't recognize the deep state, corporatocracy that we have become.

All the politicians doing anything to fight the attack on our country are either maga or libertarians.

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I don't have time this morning to address each point individually, but I will hit a few high points.

I think a lot of Wackaists (since the term "populist" has been deemed too mysterious to utter) hold many of the opinions that you articulated above because of the binary thinking that either attracts certain people to the philosophy in the first place or somehow facilitates once they embrace it.

What I see Wackaists doing is concluding, "Someone made money on that military intervention. Therefore, it was unnecessary and a con job."

That's not what that means. Every time someone makes money it does NOT mean that whatever we're talking about was a put up job that ONLY served the purpose of making money.

Just like if you need an operation. The hospital is GOING to make a bunch of money on it. They are GOING to charge $100 for an aspirin, etc. That obviously doesn't mean you didn't need the operation.

Now, could it have been fraud? Could it have been unnecessary? Sure, but that's not proven just by the fact that someone grifted on it.

Same with military interventions. Huckster Carlson has y'all believing anytime someone profits on military intervention, that means it's not necessary.

It's pretty common sense that international Bad Actors will press forward to the limit of what they think they can get away with. If the limit is our state borders, eventually, that's where we will find them. It's as dumb as waiting until a cancer becomes Stage 4 before doing something about it. It's a whole lot easier to remove a breast lump when it is just a Stage 0 mass than once it has metastasized into the lymph nodes, and no idiot alive would wait until then just to keep a doctor or hospital from profiting off of treatment at an earlier stage. Refusing to acknowledge the danger of international Bad Actors unless someone is actually attacking Texas is doing just that.

As for most of the rest of your list, as I have said before, my rebuttal is that Wackaists do not deal in principle. You guys fail to perceive or extract the underlying principle behind what it is you want to do. You just don't like that Facebook censors certain speech, so you call it a monopoly to try to justify government intervention/control of a private company without thinking through what precedent you set by doing something like that.

Conservatives don't think about things in terms of whether American corporations are still "American." We think about those questions in terms of things like Private Property Rights, Freedom of Association, and Free Trade. We think in terms of the underlying principles. You guys do not.

For example, so what if most corporations have become woke? If they are private companies, that's their prerogative. Conservatives absolutely support government not enforcing that sort of thing, but here's the difference...we would also support it if most corporations had become conservative, or MAGA, or something else. You guys wouldn't. If the government wanted to intervene by enforcing a set of values that you agreed with, you'd be just fine with it. We wouldn't be.

More to say, but no more time to say it just now.