Each election, the challenge both political parties face is winning over the mindless zombies that make up the majority of the U.S. electorate.
Often, I feel like a broken record. I keep writing the same sort of thing over and over. As one of my friends used to point out in High School, “the average intelligence in the United States is average” by which he meant that most people are C students, not As or even Bs. Or, to paraphrase H.L. Mencken, “No one has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”
I was back home at my parents’ house when Biden first took office. My parents were in the kitchen watching their news (NBC followed by PBS), and I was on the porch watching Fox Business. My father wandered in on the porch during a segment when Fox Business was covering the southern border and showing the hordes coming across. My Dad looked at it appalled. I forget his exact words, but it was something along the lines of, “My God, what is this?” as a crowd was shown under one of the international bridges on the southern border. I told him, “You voted for this.” Rather than get into a debate with me, my father turned around while mumbling, “I did not vote for this.” Of course, his news was not covering the crisis on the southern border at all, and if they did cover a tiny piece of it, it was to minimize the problem.
By that point in his life (since deceased), my father was a bit senile, so, I forgive him. Both he and I voted twice for Bill Clinton, but Clinton was actually a pro-law and order President. He signed the “Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994” which provided funding for 100,000 police officers, mandatory sentences, and prison construction. I served my first year out in the field under Attorney General Janet Reno. The Border Patrol was still under the Department of Justice at that point. Janet Reno was regarded as an immigration hardliner, she even deported poor little Elian Gonzalez back to Cuba.
However, times changed, but my father’s old habits never did. That was the old centrist Democratic party which is gone now. My Dad still trusted in the mainstream media to give him the truth. Garbage in/garbage out. He was getting open borders propaganda without realizing it.
My father was the one who told me when I was growing up that the best thing to be was an independent (not Democrat or Republican) because that way you evaluated each candidate on their merits and not on their political party. However, by the end of his life, he was a registered Democrat and I was a registered Republican.
The Democrats, and their allies the RINOs/Neocons, were instrumental in taking out Ken Paxton. I remember reading in a long forgotten book about how one of Goebbels’ techniques was to smear his opposition with as many stories as possible whether true or complete fabrications. He supposedly said something along the lines that even if the opponent could disprove all the accusations against him, the general public would still come away thinking there is something that must be wrong with them, after all, why were there all these stories?
In Ken Paxton’s case, he ran afoul of the Bushie Neocon wing of the Texas Republican party. They sought to take him out through lawfare, even though, they knew there was nothing there. The important things was not Paxton’s conviction, but his name being in the news with negative connotations. The charges of Paxton’s securities fraud were resolved through pretrial diversion, and Paxton was completely acquitted on all 16 articles of impeachment. However, Paxton couldn’t go back in time and erase all the negative stories about him already out there.
Above, from Goebbels’ 11 principles of propaganda. Also here
So, Cornyn and the Bushies tried to take out Paxton with lawfare/propaganda and failed. The Republicans who pay attention turned out in the primaries to get rid of Cornyn. However, between the Neocons and the Democrats (not to mention changing demographics), Paxton had an uphill fight.
Talafrico (Talafreako) had an advantage with an ethnic name. He had an “o” at the end and a lot of Hispanics are more comfortable with. One of the guys I knew from the Border Patrol was Italian and he married a young lady from the Rio Grande Valley whose family was Hispanic. He said that his wife’s parents didn’t realize he was not Hispanic when they first started dating.
The other principle that Goebbels’ used was taking over public spaces. Whether on Facebook, or, the physical street, the left has been very good at controlling public spaces. Liberal mayors in blue cities allow Antifa/BLM to take over and riot with mostly peaceful fires, but if a conservative tries that, then they will frame you and January 6 your behind. They fear the Republicans being able to take over the streets or public spaces, so, they squash it as quickly as possible.
Republican Speaker Mike Johnson warned Republican congressmen to stop holding townhall meetings with constituents after several townhalls were interrupted by protestors. My own congressman hasn’t been able to meet with regular constituents since 2025 because each one of his events gets mobbed by the type of “No Kings” fools that are trying to take over public spaces across the country.
Above, I would argue that this is what the left tries to do by insulting right wing Republicans as being Nazis even as they mimic the very techniques that gave rise to the Nazis. It’s O.K. if they do it though, they are doing it for a good cause (sarcasm).
As a final thought, in the great intellectual 1981 movie “Heavy Metal”, there was a little green glowing ball that represented pure evil (AI tells me it had a name, Loc-Nar). It seems to turn whoever comes into contact with it into evil. It corrupts all, but it is also eternal surviving one disaster after another and is never defeated.
I actually do believe evil is a bit like that in that it is never entirely defeated. The modern day democrats have identified racism and Nazism as the greatest evil in the world and went so hard at fighting them that they cannot wrap their heads around Friedrich Nietzsche’s quote, ““Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
20 year veteran of the U.S. Border Patrol. Author of "What Bridge Do You Work At? Or, Kids Are Cute; Therefore, Open Borders" & "East into the Sunset: Memories of patrolling in the Rio Grande Valley at the turn of the century". Books are available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, as well as Thrift Books.
Master's Degree in Justice, Law and Society from American University.
Grew up partly in Europe.
