Why the Stock Market Keeps Changing Its Story

 As the Magnificent Seven are downgraded to the Fab Four, perhaps the list of leading tech stocks should include an old-school name: 

Exxon XOM 1.38%increase; green up pointing triangle

 Mobil.

The oil company’s shares would come in fourth in the septet this year with a rise of 21%, after 

Nvidia

 and 

Meta

 and very close to 

Amazon

. Behind Exxon’s surge to a new high on Friday is an important shift in the market, a new narrative that investors would be wise to pay close attention to—in case it changes again.

Exxon is at the heart of two stories: Strong demand for oil because the global economy is stronger than expected, and supply problems because of wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Both were on show this week, as oil rose on strong jobs figures Friday, a day after it was pushed up by concern of Israel-Iran escalation on Thursday. Oil stocks are winners from both stories, while most of the market prefers one or the other.

Until recently, investors had been focused on falling inflation bringing down bond yields. That was good for growth stocks, already winners thanks to excitement about artificial intelligence.

Markets haven’t forgotten about inflation, but they put it aside in favor of a focus on the stronger-than-expected economy, which boosts demand for oil. The S&P 500 energy sector, the biggest member of which is Exxon, is now ahead of the tech sector for the year and on Friday passed communication services, in which Meta and Alphabet sit, when dividends are included.

The energy sector’s valuation has risen to its highest since the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates in March 2022, using the price-to-forward-earnings ratio.

Investors love to distill the bewildering variables that move prices around into a single narrative. Once enough people agree on “what’s driving markets” then the narrative can be self-fulfilling—until of course, something interrupts the story and the narrative changes. Oil, like gold, is in the unusual position of benefiting from two competing themes, a hot economy and geopolitical threats.

It helps to look at the market’s recent history. There was a huge change in the narrative back in October when 10-year Treasurys hit 5% and previously hawkish Fed officials turned dovish, worrying that high bond yields would hold back the economy. Yields plunged and the stock market took off, supported by Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s “Powell pivot” toward rate cuts. Investors priced in six rate cuts this year by the start of January, and every hint of lower rates pushed up stocks further.

In January, the story began to move to the economy. It became clear that growth was stronger than thought, and the Fed underlined its forecast of only three rate cuts. Rather than worrying that rates would be higher than expected, investors cheered the prospect of fewer cuts as a sign of a solid economy. The switch from good news on the economy being bad news for stocks to being good news for stocks was complete.

The problem with growth is that it has limits, and at the heart of those limits is the oil price. When demand rises broadly in the economy, the oil price rises, and more of consumers’ money is spent at the pump. Too much demand, and the rising price means the rest of the economy loses out.

The same goes for other commodities, to a lesser extent, with manufacturers surveyed for the latest S&P survey of purchasing managers reporting sharply higher input costs in March and raising their own prices at the fastest rate in almost a year.

The danger for investors is that recent rises in inflation-sensitive oil, gasoline, copper and gold—the yellow metal hit a new high on Friday—are a signal that economic growth will lead to a second round of inflation, forcing investors to flip back to worrying about rising prices again.

The stronger economy has also pushed at the financial limits of growth, encapsulated in rates. Yields on 10-year Treasurys rose sharply this week to briefly hit 4.4% Tuesday, spooked in part by the PMI figures, and came close to that on Friday after the strong job numbers—although they are still well below the October peak of 5%.

One warning that the narrative might be changing yet again: Tuesday’s jump in bond yields flipped stock investors back to treating higher yields as bad news again, with stocks falling when borrowing costs went up. That comes after months of markets broadly treating higher yields as a symptom of stronger growth and thus good news.

Shamik Dhar, chief economist of BNY Mellon Investment Management, thinks the big change in narrative will come if markets switch from pricing fewer rate cuts by the Fed to preparing for actual rate rises. “Then you get a major narrative change,” he says. “Markets like relatively simple stories to hang their hat on.”

So does Exxon belong with the tech biggies? It isn’t a tech stock, but then Amazon is a retailer, Apple sells music and consumer goods and Tesla makes cars. Where it’s different is that oil producers don’t only thrive on growth-driven inflation. They also benefit from problems on the supply side—of which there are plenty. Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil facilities, Yemeni attacks in the Red Sea and the threat of an Israel-Iran conflict all support oil prices, as well as the haven of gold. 

Non-energy stocks, especially cheaper value plays, should do OK in a period when growth is pressuring inflation up, but not outrageously so. But an oil supply shock helps only the oil stocks, with the rest suffering from weaker growth, recession or even stagflation.

It is too soon to know which way the narrative is headed. My bet continues to be on sticky inflation pushing central banks to hold back on rate cuts, which should eventually slow the economy. For now, oil stocks offer an alternative way to bet on growth—and some protection if geopolitics brings the growth story to an end.

https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/why-the-stock-market-keeps-changing-its-story-318bb9c6

Legal Marijuana Is Making Roads Deadlier

Cannabis-related traffic fatalities are a threat to public safety. Governments need to get serious.

 Marijuana legalization is killing a lot of people. Not slowly — though some studies suggest that it may be doing that, too — but quickly, in car crashes. It’s one more symptom of the disastrous rush by lawmakers to capitalize on cannabis sales without doing the hard work needed to keep the public safe.

In Canada, which legalized recreational marijuana in 2018, one study found a 475% increase in emergency-room visits for cannabis-related crashes in Ontario between 2010 and 2021. Many more cases likely went undetected, owing to a dearth of reliable testing for driving while high.

In the US, the proportion of motor-vehicle fatalities involving cannabis use soared to 21.5% in 2018, up from 9% in 2000. One analysis found a 10% increase in vehicular deaths, on average, following legalization by states. In California, the increase was 14%; in Oregon, it was 22%.

This suggests that more than 1,000 Americans could be dying annually because of marijuana-related accidents — and that’s just in states where legalization has occurred. Given the ease of transporting the drug across state lines, the real number could be far higher.

The cause of these deaths isn’t just the drug itself. It’s ignorance. A recent study found that about half of marijuana users thought they were OK to drive 90 minutes after inhaling or ingesting the drug, yet their driving performance in a simulated vehicle was as bad as it had been after 30 minutes. The best available evidence suggests that people should wait a minimum of four hours before getting behind the wheel; some experts recommend eight to 12 hours.

That people don’t know this is the fault of governments, which have rushed headlong into legalization without doing the required research or adopting necessary safeguards. In effect, they’re conducting live experiments on their own citizens. To address this unfolding crisis, voters should hold officials accountable for taking two steps: boosting public awareness and developing better detection technology.

The fight against drinking and driving offers a useful precedent. After widespread government-sponsored campaigns helped stigmatize such conduct, drunk-driving fatalities were cut in half. Stronger enforcement also played a part. For a long time, roadside tests were limited to walking in a straight line and other basic exercises. The advent of Breathalyzers made drinkers think twice before getting behind the wheel.

So far, marijuana users don’t face the same disincentive, partly because the technology for roadside testing isn’t as reliable or widespread as it should be. Governments can help overcome this hurdle by supporting basic scientific research into such tools. Fear of arrest is a powerful public-policy lever — that’s why police departments often announce drunken-driving spot checks in advance — but right now, many drivers are getting high with impunity, and the public is paying a high price.

A pharmacologist who has studied the effects of marijuana offered a grim assessment of the state of road safety. In Colorado, where he teaches, traffic fatalities rose by 16% after the drug was legalized, according to one study. “When I’m on the road,” he says, “I assume everybody’s stoned.”

Increasingly, that’s a reasonable assumption.

Of the many egregious mistakes governments have made in legalizing marijuana — including ignoring the drug’s impact on youth brain development, which could be damaging an entire generation — failing to take road safety seriously is among the worst. Until it’s addressed, many more people will be killed, and their families left to wonder what their elected leaders were smoking.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-04-04/marijuana-legalization-has-made-us-roads-more-lethal

Sachs: Biden has destroyed Ukraine; more funding would be insane

 Economist and Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs weighs in on the latest on the Russia-Ukraine war during an interview with The Hill's "Rising."

JEFFREY SACHS: You can't make sense of this, it's a zoo. If I am just hearing now, the plan is to illegally seize Russian assets, well kiss goodbye to America's role in the international monetary system. There are limits to what you can do, but I don't think our members of Congress really understand much about this.

...

This is purely money down the drain. If they want to rip up another $61 billion, which is not chump change, they seem intent on doing it but it will mean nothing except more destruction of Ukraine.


If you don't listen to the nonsense in our mainstream media, but listen to your show and others, people would know that this war has destroyed Ukraine. And the longer it continues, the less there will be of Ukraine. It is very simple, if this goes on longer, Russia will capture more territory. If it goes on long enough, Russia will capture Odessa. Kiev, if we continue the way we're doing. This is a Biden project that goes back 10 years now, we'll completely destroy Ukraine. The idea that this is "siding with" Ukraine is absurd. Anyone who really follows events knows that we're not siding with Ukraine, we have paid for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to go to the front lines and die, for more and more territory to be lost.

The most basic point of this war, which is that we overthrew a government in Ukraine in 2014 that wanted neutrality so we could push NATO enlargement was reckless, stupid, and doomed to fail. And it failed. Now Biden is trying to hide the failure to get past November, but the failure is seen on the battleground every day.

If the Republicans play into this, it is unbelievable, shame on them. They are basically on the right side although Biden bludgeons them every day -- you'll be the one to lose Ukraine. The truth of the matter is Biden has been a disaster for Ukraine for a decade. The disaster is there in the graves of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and lost territory. sa

This is a war that never should have happened, it was about NATO enlargement. The Russians said no NATO on our borders. And Americans who were following this, like our CIA director Bill Burns who was then the US Ambassador to Russia in 2008, said no way, this is crazy. The entire Russian political class is against this. But Biden and Obama and Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland and Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken just barged ahead, wrecked everything, and now they want another $61 billion to get them past November. It is a disgrace.

...

The war began ten years ago when Victoria Nuland not only passed out cookies on the Maidan, but engaged in insurrection to overthrow a government in Ukraine -- pretty stupid. Pretty stupid to have a regime change operation on a country with a 2000 km border with Russia. That's our American foreign policy. That's when this war started. This war didn't start in February 2022, it started in February 2014 with Nuland, Blinken, Sullivan, and Biden -- who was a key person in that whole thing.

The fighting went on for ten years and then in December 2021, Putin said, "Look, stop the NATO enlargement and we can avoid an escalation." I talked to the White House at that point. "No, we don't stop anything." They just thought they had all the cards. We're gonna cut them out of the SWIFT banking system, we're gonna bring their economy to its knees. It was a bunch of nonsense by ignorant people.

And so Putin escalated. He didn't start the war, he escalated the war. Anmoneyd within basically a week, Zelensky said, "OK, OK, OK, we can be neutral." And the Turks mediated negotiations. And then the U.S. government wants to hide all of these facts which are sitting out there for those who know where to find them, the U.S. intervened and told the Ukrainians to keep fighting. We have our senators who say this is the best that money can buy because it is Ukrainians dying not Americans, they're weakening Russia.

Well, they're not weakening Russia but they are killing Ukrainians. This is not responding to Putin's invasion, the war started ten years ago. We keep refusing every offramp to this day.

You hear Putin saying every day, if you listen, he's open to negotiations. And then, these fools in the U.S. government say there's no one to negotiate with.

...

This is just narrative, it has destroyed Ukraine, and they just rip up money like there's not tomorrow. So another $61 billion.

Now the latest plan is to take the illegally confiscated assets from Russia and use that.

That will be really great for the international monetary system I'll tell you. These are people who don't think ahead one day. They just improvise day by day. And then they'll find out things don't work so well fo the U.S. dollar as reserve currency or for the U.S. peace in the world. Because these people are acting like clowns, frankly. Day by day not thinking ahead, doubling down on lost gambles. And everything to tell a story so they can get to he election in a way they see fit.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/04/04/sachs_if_we_start_seizing_russian_assets_kiss_goodbye_to_americas_role_in_the_international_monetary_system.html

 

Taibbi: People Need To Know About The Mass Censorship Regime Growing In The U.S.

Matt Taibbi discusses what he found in "The Twitter Files" at RCP''s first Samizdat Prize award ceremony last month and what the public needs to know about censorship and free speech:

MATT TAIBBI: It was a lot like the journalistic version of the golden ticket in "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory," to look through the secret files of one of the world's biggest corporations.

The first thing we were looking for actually had to do with Miranda's story, and I thought because of a couple of interviews involving Mark Zuckerberg we would maybe find a few emails from the FBI about that one story. We knew that had been suppressed, and ironically we didn't find a whole lot about Miranda's story, but we did find within days a whole galaxy of things that said, "Flagged by FBI," "Flagged by DHS," "Flagged by HHS," "Flagged By Treasury." We realized there was this huge operation that spanned the entire federal government to pressure not just Twitter, but two dozen at least internet companies to suppress different kinds of information.

There's a journalist here who writes for RealClear, Aaron Maté, where the FBI basically passed a request from the Ukrainian Secret Service to take this guy off Twitter. It was a whole long list of spreadsheets full of requests about all these different journalists, and the scale of it was mind-boggling. That is what unites all three of us, we were all caught up in this story of mass censorship that until very recently was hidden. This has to be out in the open more, people need to know more about it.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/04/05/matt_taibbi_people_need_to_know_about_the_mass_censorship_regime_growing_in_the_us.html

Accomplice media want you to believe banning Zuckerberg’s money in elections is attack on democracy

 You know how kids like to play Opposite Day. In the game, the idea is to say and do the exact opposite of what one might normally do.

So, Joe Biden would be alert, competent, and cognizant, for instance — at least on Opposite Day. Biden’s mouthpiece, Karine Jean-Pierre, would be honest, Miley Cyrus would be talented, and Jimmy Kimmel would be funny. Well, okay. Opposite Day doesn’t have that kind of power. 

The usual suspects in the corporate media have long operated in an opposite world, believing that speaking their truth is, in fact, the truth. Take Sudiksha Kochi, the “congress, campaigns and democracy reporter” for the shortcut to thinking that is USA Today. Following this week’s rejection of “Zuckerbucks” by Wisconsin voters, Kochi wrote a CYA piece for the left demanding that “Trump and the GOP weaponized Mark Zuckerberg’s donations.” 

In the reporter’s pretend world, the unprecedented $400 million-plus that Facebook founder and conservative voice silencer Mark Zuckerberg injected into the 2020 elections was simply the noble act of a Big Tech billionaire trying to save democracy from the clutches of covid-19. The piece is rich with leftist sources insisting that conservative criticism of Zuckerbucks is driven by “misinformation” and “false claims.”

What’s Missing Here?

Kochi’s sins of omission are as breathtaking as her reliance on leftists to massage her narrative was expected. And the facts she left out are why Wisconsin just joined 27 states in banning private funding in the administration of elections. 

There’s no mention of long-time former Democrat operatives like Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein, who offered to cure (or amend) ballot envelopes in Wisconsin’s largest, Democrat-controlled cities and was given the keys to the storage room that held Green Bay’s absentee ballots on Election Day 2020. 

There’s no mention of the far-left voting activist “partners” who were required by suspect contracts to be involved in functions that are by law reserved for elections officials. They worked as a swell team, laughing late election night when Democrat stronghold Milwaukee, as it so often does, finally counted all the votes that gave Democrat Joe Biden victory over the left’s No. 1 nemesis, President Donald Trump. 

“D-mn, Claire, you have a flair for drama, delivering just the margin needed at 3:00 a.m.,” wrote Ryan Chew of the left-leaning Elections Group in an email to the city elections chief Claire Woodall. “I bet you had those votes counted at midnight, and just wanted to keep the world waiting!”

The USA Today story mentions none of these details or suspect players. It does quote Tianna Epps-Johnson, founder of the Chicago-based Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), the “nonpartisan” nonprofit that received $328 million from Zuckerberg and his wife, Pricilla Chan, in 2020. 

What About The Wisconsin 5?

Epps-Johnson told Kochi that CTCL’s grant-making processes weren’t tainted with partisan consideration, and that was good enough for the intrepid reporter. She did note a study by Michael Toner, a Republican and former chairman of the FEC “that found that more grants were given to jurisdictions who voted for Trump rather than Biden in 2020, according to an FEC report.” 

Zuckerberg, by the way, tapped Toner to complete the report. Missing from the story is the fact that grants in Trump country paled in comparison to the huge sums delivered to the biggest Democrat-controlled cities in swing states like Wisconsin that ultimately decided the election. 

In the Badger State, the largest five cities — Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, Kenosha, and Racine — received nearly 86 percent of the $10 million-plus in Zuckerbucks “safe election” grants handed out by CTCL, according to a study by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s largest city — and one of its bluest — received more than $3.4 million, better than one-third of the CTCL windfall. That amounts to $13.82 per voter. Conservative-leaning Waukesha, Wisconsin’s 7th most populated city, received $42,100, about $1.18 per voter. Democrat-heavy Green Bay, the third-largest city, grabbed $1.6 million in grant money, or $36 per voter. Racine, another leftist bastion, pocketed nearly $1.7 million, for a whopping $53.41 per voter. 

Dubbed the “Wisconsin 5” by CTCL community organizers, the deep blue cities are all led by far-left Democrat mayors. They all also signed a contract that allowed leftist “voting rights” activists to infiltrate their election offices.

The Wisconsin 5 cities, like other Democrat-laden communities elsewhere, used significant portions of their CTCL funds for get-out-the-vote initiatives targeting Democrat voters. Racine, for instance, purchased a “polling booth on wheels” that traveled to neighborhoods dominated by left-leaning voters.

According to documents obtained by Wisconsin Spotlight, the city sought, among other things, $250,000 in Zuckerbucks to purchase a mobile voting precinct (RV) “so the city can travel around the city to community centers and strategically chosen partner locations and enable people to vote in this accessible (ADA compliant) secure, and completely portable polling booth on wheels.” 

The story was the same in other critical swing states. Georgia received more than $45 million in Zuckerbucks, and 75 percent of those funds went to left-leaning counties, according to a study by the Foundation for Government Accountability. Pennsylvania raked in more than $25 million, with 90 percent of the money going to counties that Biden won. In Michigan, $7 million of the total $15 million in Zuckerbucks went to Democrat stronghold Detroit, according to FGA.  

What About ‘Nonpartisan’ CTCL?

Let’s take a look at CTCL’s deeply partisan connections, something USA Today failed to note. The center’s funding spigots, beyond Zuckerberg and wife, include leftist groups such as the Skoll Foundation, the Democracy Fund, and the New Venture Fund, according to nonprofit tracker InfluenceWatch.

CTCL was founded by Epps-Johnson, Donny Bridges, and Whitney May. They all previously worked at the New Organizing Institute (NOI) which was described by the Washington Post as “the Democratic Party’s Hogwarts for digital wizardry.” As InfluenceWatch notes, NOI “was a major training center for left-of-center digital activists over the decade of its existence.”

“Epps-Johnson was also part of the inaugural class of fellows at former President Barack Obama’s Obama Foundation,” the activist tracker reports. Seems like an important detail when insisting that Trump and the GOP have “weaponized” poor Mark Zuckerberg’s donations. 

So it’s no surprise that Kochi relies on a leftist from the Brennan Center in lamenting that without the donations of Big Tech tyrants like Zuckerberg, local election offices will be forced to live with “outdated voting equipment, to make security investments in their voter registry technology … to open more polling places, whatever it may be.” 

All of this private donor money was sold to us as urgently needed to save democracy from covid, as the same “saviors” of democracy locked us all down. Even Biden says the emergency is over. But somehow the left’s defense of Zuckerbucks goes on, with the ready assistance of accomplice media players like USA Today. 

Here’s another important point Kochi missed: At least some Democrats voted to put a ban on private donations in election administration in Wisconsin’s constitution. All it took was approaching the issue from their point of view, with questions like, how would you like the National Rifle Association or Elon Musk cutting checks to local election offices? They didn’t much care for that. 

In the real world, voters are understandably concerned about left-wing and right-wing groups meddling in elections, which is what Zuckerberg and his leftist pals at CTCL did in 2020 — and CTCL is still doing in 2024, where allowed. 

But in Opposite Day world, Kochi is an excellent journalist and USA Today is a beacon of balanced journalism. 

https://thefederalist.com/2024/04/05/in-opposite-day-logic-usa-today-breathlessly-defends-zuckerbucks/

Disinformation October Surprise Is Coming

 Two of the most interesting things ever to happen in American politics happened in the past few years. A Democratic presidential campaign, representing the incumbent party, fabricated evidence that its Republican opponent and the eventual president-elect was a Russian agent, and the in-power party’s FBI legitimated the evidence in the eyes of the media so it would be widely reported and believed by the public.

To make sure it was believed, top intelligence officials of the outgoing administration went on cable television to call the new president a Russian mole and Vladimir Putin his case officer.

When the formerly incumbent party’s candidate was seeking to reclaim the White House four years later, the same former officials concocted a new lie to cover up embarrassing information about the candidate’s family. These highly connected former officials had five days to check things out before claiming Hunter Biden’s laptop had “classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The New York Post included a receipt showing the FBI had already been in possession of the data for 10 months. Its story documented how the Post acquired the same data. Specific, dated and verifiable events and messages weren’t denied by the Bidens, etc.

Obama intelligence officials James Clapper and John Brennan, and their 49 colleagues, lie today when they say they weren’t lying then.

These realties have been acknowledged on these pages, in a few other papers around the country, on Fox News and at some partisan websites. They might as well never have happened as far as most of the press is concerned.

New York Times

 resident chin-stroker Thomas Edsall, in the Trump era, has devoted 380 articles, many of them 3,000 words or longer, to raking over voter surveys and long quotes from political scientists psychoanalyzing the U.S. electorate. Not one examined the effect of these glaring events on voters or even acknowledged that they happened.

Democratic and anti-Trump Republican political spinmeisters, from David Axelrod to Mike Murphy to Bill Kristol, spend a hours a week on TV and in podcasts holding forth on politics, talking endlessly about Donald Trump, yet leave the collusion episodes unanalyzed as if they never occurred.

After years, the press finally acknowledges that pollsters find Trump voters every bit as concerned about democracy as Biden voters. “The two men are essentially tied on the issue of protecting democracy, with 43% of voters preferring Biden and 41% picking Trump,” says NBC. Unasked is why.

You might assume a utilitarian motive—Mr. Trump would benefit politically if the truth were acknowledged. Unless correlation has no relation to causation, unless participants in a thousand focus groups are lying, the opposite is true. The dishonesty of his opponents remains Mr. Trump’s great legitimizer, helping him past Jan. 6 and on the road to the White House again.

The real motive for the press silence is fear and shame over acts that are close to treasonous.

Mr. Trump’s many demerits don’t need to be enumerated here, but, after nine years, the tone of cable coverage has become more like primate gibbering than reasoned commentary. If it stops, even for a moment, other truths might come up for air. Plainly false campaign memes—he called neo-Nazis fine people, he advised drinking bleach—usually have their season and disappear. The anti-Trump tropes never get a day off, constantly dunning viewers with Mr. Trump’s unique iniquity as if to rationalize his enemies’ behavior.

If the simple truth were admitted, Hillary Clinton would be a pariah. Adam Schiff would never appear on another ballot again. I’m not forgetting the complicity of the press, whose normal role is to take an interest in matters that are, you know, interesting. If it’s true that cowards die a thousand deaths, our media will bankrupt the fisc with all the end-of-life care it’s going to consume.

Mr. Trump turns out to be less of a danger to our institutions than they are to themselves. Worry about a future leader with President Obama’s gifts not Donald Trump’s—while remembering that the collusion hoaxes were promoted by official U.S. agencies in exactly the manner of Mr. Putin’s Russia.

All this is possibly going to matter a great deal this fall. Mr. Trump will tell his lies and tall tales and make his fabulous claims and the media will have to deal with it.

There’s also a significant likelihood that 2024 will see lies manufactured by agents and veterans of the national-security state, as in 2016 and 2020. Then the press will get a third opportunity. Those reporters and editors who are still capable of participating in the media business in good faith need to start thinking now about how they will deal with this if it happens again.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-october-disinformation-surprise-is-coming-election-9b67bf22

Extremism On The Ballot

 by Peachy Keenan via AmericanMind.org,

The 2024 election is between a dangerous madman and Donald Trump...

I hope everyone enjoyed a wonderful day with family and friends on the holiest day of America’s liturgical year, the Transgender Day of Visibility. I had never heard of this blessed Federal holiday until a few days ago, but my kids loved it. We had a visit from the Easter Drag Bunny and it/they filled the kids’ baskets with all kinds of treats. Puberty blockers, dilators, lipstick for the boys, packers for the girls. She/They is risen—and you will bow down and worship Her/Them!

Of course, Joe Biden’s Easter sacrilege was only the latest travesty that proves what you and I already know, which is that the 2024 presidential election is a contest between common-sense centrism and dangerously radical extremism. 

One candidate is a classical liberal whose positions are squarely in the middle of the political spectrum. On nearly every issue, his views are anodyne, conventional, mainstream—positions that were the norm, nationwide, in every state, on both sides of the aisle, within recent memory (not including a few fringe strongholds in Berkeley and the West Village).

His opponent, however, is a dangerous radical extremist; a divisive, fanatical agent of chaos who holds frightening positions that threaten to destroy America.

To preserve what’s left of Our Sacred Democracy, the extremist must be stopped.

Grand Unified Replacement Theory

The radicals we are up against are so deranged that they are embracing and even leaning into the Replacement Theory they once vilified and dismissed as fake. You will recall that “replacement theory” was a taboo conspiracy only racists and bigots believed in until about 15 minutes ago. But the extremists running the country recently decided that akshally, “replacement” is the perfect strategy to finish off what’s left of what you and the country formerly known as “America.” 

Replacement means you don’t need to worry about convincing Congress to pass new laws or give speeches or waste time governing. To get your way, just replace everyone.

But the extremists in charge are not going to stop after replacing you with “newcomers.” They’re replacing everything not nailed down.

Easter just got replaced with a demonic child abuse cult festival. 

Jews are getting erased, literally chased out of cities, harassed out of college, and replaced with ululating Hamas enthusiasts. 

Your grandchildren got replaced with fur babies. 

Formerly great universities have been replaced with plagiarizing paperclip factories.

Your borders have been replaced with Welcome Centers.

Your retirement has been replaced with twenty more years of work to pay for safe injection sites for your kids and free gender affirmation surgeries for the world.

As Elon Musk likes to point out on X, Americans are just four percent of the Earth’s population. Soon, they’ll be just four percent of their own country.

This is, in President Biden’s own words, going according to plan. “Just like we drew it up,” he tweeted ominously. 

The No-Brainer Election

An explosion in robberies and violent crime. Two dangerous new foreign wars. Forced conversion therapy on normal people to make them believe children can change their sex. Rampant hate crimes and open, gleeful discrimination against people who are not “of color.” 

Who is the extremist again?

The dangerous tyrant seeking re-election has the full support of our bloodthirsty elites, a warmongering foreign policy establishment, virulently antisemitic academia, and the entire mainstream media apparatus. Sometimes it’s hard to even fathom what we are facing, but then you remember that they had the nerve to arrest and sentence a young man to prison for… wait for it… sharing a funny Hillary Clinton meme. That actually happened in real life.

The humble moderate whom these frightening cretins hope to defeat this fall faces expropriation of his property to satisfy hundreds of millions of dollars in absurd fines, plus hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees to fight regime lawfare on a Hiroshima scale. The threat of prison looms. His support comes not from wealthy celebrities, titans of industry, or the tech billionaires. It comes from the peasants. The rabble. A ragtag coalition of nobodies, the working class, the powerless middle class, and a few anonymous dissidents forced to post samizdat from undisclosed locations to avoid the eye of Sauron. 

The radical extremist we face wants to empty our treasury so he can continue to launder hundreds of billions of our dollars through the most corrupt nation in Europe, which for decades was the world’s number one producer of child pornography, among other evils. 

He’s flirting with nuclear war, and even committed an illegal act of war by detonating an enormous oil pipeline that helped heat all of Europe. His military bosses are blackmailing brave American military families: if they don’t cough up the cash for Ukraine, he’ll send their enlisted kids to die in a hole in Siberia. Thanks to him, 13 Marines were blown up in Afghanistan, but if you’re a grieving parent who protests, he has you handcuffed and dragged to prison, as he did to one dad who dared to protest at the State of the Union.

This extremist lunatic is also doing whatever he can to trigger another Middle East quagmire that inevitably will put boots on the ground in all the old stomping grounds. He wears Catholicism like a skinsuit, blaspheming the rosary around his wrist as he excoriates actual people of faith who want to protect the unborn. He screams for abortion through 40 weeks, for any reason.

He sends his shock troops to arrest pro-life protestors and slanders parents as “domestic extremists.”

He’s so extreme he thinks young children can choose to change their genders with irreversible experimental surgeries that have catastrophic rates of failure. He wants parents who don’t allow schools to secretly change a child’s gender behind their backs to lose control of their children and go to prison.

He’s so radical that he thinks it’s funny when you can’t afford groceries, and wonders why you don’t buy the “other Raisin Bran” in order to save a dollar. He mocks you when he declares “Let them eat more chips,” as he pledges to increase the number of Doritos in each shrinkflated bag. 

Worst of all, this crazed extremist thinks it’s good to dissolve the nation’s borders, permanently and eternally. He wants to pack the country with the excess population of Central and South America, as well as Africa and Asia, to boost congressional reapportionment numbers and make America blue forever. Any kids that get raped or murdered are not his problem. The tree of extremism must be watered by the blood of America’s daughters like Laken Riley.

Our only hope, my fellow centrists, is to throw our entire weight behind the common-sense moderate running against Joe Biden. All he wants is to return the country to the way it was within recent memory (!):  a blessed land that enjoyed low illegal immigration, low crime, low prices, low inflation, low mortgage interest rates, and high patriotism and, imagine—optimism.

Our demands are simple. We want a leader who will make the country a place where normal citizens can go about their lives in peace, enjoy a bit of prosperity, not have to worry about politics constantly, and not get pushed in front of a train waiting for the subway on the way to work. 

A poll says most of the electorate is “unhappy” with their choice of candidates and wishes it wasn’t a Trump-Biden rematch.

Get over it and get on board. You don’t have any other option. 

The Regime’s iron grip on power can only be broken by finally calling them what they are: domestic extremists inflicting acts of terror, violence, and child abuse on innocent citizens. Their hegemony can only be broken by regular, reasonable people in the middle—in other words, you, me, and Donald Trump—exorcising them from power and driving them back into the fetid swamps from whence they came.

The current Regime represents an existential threat to our lives and liberty. They are no longer a political party; they are a violent hate group, and the group they hate is us.

Only God himself can show them mercy, and I doubt he will when the time comes.

Vote for the centrist if you want to live!

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/extremism-ballot