The Left can't help falling in love (10-23-2025--Hour3)

What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to vpetecleanershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. So, last hour I was talking about this guy, Graham Platner. Oh, there was one other, one other thing about this Democrat running for US Senate in Maine. There was one other thing that has now come out about him. There's just been this veritable poop storm or actually nor'easter of oppo research getting dumped on this guy. And it all happened after Janet Mills entered the race. She's the Democrat governor. There's a primary, and when she entered, all this stuff started coming out about Graham Platner, all these posts he made and the Nazi tattoo that he had on his chest, and like all of this bad stuff, right, there was one other, one other thing that kind of this one might hurt. I think I think Democrats will go along with the Nazi tattoo. They'll go along with the I mean because he's you know, talking to anti Israel, so like, I think that's on brand. I think they'll go along with that. And he did make all those nasty comments about the LGBTQ plus two I A community and such, But I think they'll chalk that up to youthful indiscretions from low those many four years ago. I think that they will. They'll look past all of this other stuff because he's all about the fighting of the fascists. They'll look past his time as a blackwater mercenary. They'll they'll pass all of this stuff. But this one might sting. This, this might be a problem. Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner, the self described working class manor terrible name for anyway, attended an elite boarding school in Connecticut that costs upwards of seventy five thousand dollars a year. Quite the working class dude, I'm kidding. Actually, this will not be disqualifying at all. He once described himself as a communist, described himself in his campaign launch video as a working class manor He does not appear to have lasted long at the Hotchkiss School to very elite school he was. Then in two thousand and two, there was a piece published in the Ellsworth American that lists him as one of four students in Sullivan, Maine who made a four hour or sorry, made a one hour long commute to John Baptist Memorial High School in Bangor, Maine, a more cost friendly private school. Platner is identified as a junior who's accustomed to the commute after three years. He said, what I like best is just the education. Being a private school, you get much more attention. The uh tuition there is about twelve thousand dollars per year in today's dollars. He apparently made a mark at John Baptist, winning an award for most likely to start a Revolution not a joke. A yearbook photo shows a young Platner holding a piece of paper calling to free Chechnya, Kosovo and Palestine. Platner also wrote an op ed for the Bangor Daily News that equated Post nine to eleven terrorist groups with freedom fighters and lamented that every terrorist is portrayed as evil in the media. Um His enrollment there stands in start contrast to the mainstream media's working class portrayal of Platner, who before becoming an oyster farmer and he worked at the State Department as a contractor in Afghanistan for Constellis, formerly known as Blackwater. I thought they changed their name to G x E. Didn't they change their name to x E like G or something? But then I don't know, maybe they had to change that because everybody was adopting in as a pronoun Maybe he referred to himself at one point as an Antifa soldier. Oh sorry, Antifa super soldier, which was also as a communist. Now he he's also a theater kid, which is also on brand. Yeah, he apparently everybody loved them. In his role in Oliver Twist as the artful Dodger in Oliver, he also did Civil War re enacting and his mom hired a seamstress to make his outfit. So there you go. No, I don't think going to a private school is going to deter Democrats from voting for him. That is sort of what they like. It's like, you know, we will condemn all of these other people to public schools and will say you hate children if you don't support the public schools. But we're not saying our kids to public schools. Right over at Politico, Jonathan Martin had a piece headline, Democrats keep falling for political fantasies? When will they learn? Will Democrats ever learn to stop swooning? And I will answer this question and the answer is no, No, because the base is too emotions driven. Right. This goes back to the old line that Bill Clinton said, Republicans fall in line, Democrats fall in love. That's how you end up with people like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. We've seen this play out with what's her face, Amy McGrath, right when she entered the race in Kentucky and they're like, she's totally gonna beat Mitch McConnell or Stacy Abrams or Robert Francis O'Rourke aka betto Right. There's another guy now down in Texas, James Tallerico. That's another one. And this guy in Maine Platner, is another example of it. He says, it goes something like this political outsider or mostly a new name, mounts a statewide campaign with online video that leans heavily on compelling by a biography or powerful oratory. Out of state liberal hobbyists then quickly fall in love with this guy. Because they're out of state, they don't know who he is, but they've seen his TikTok videos like Baby Jesus aka Jeff Jackson here in North Carolina, and so then they just started pouring all this money into this guy. Journalists then rushed to profile the latest heart throb before inevitable disappointment when the candidate loses or becomes another John Fetterman. Once his Democratic rival Janet Mills entered the race, we saw all of this OPO research right, and there is more to come, says Jonathan Martin. He says, I am told by sources very familiar with the Platiner opposition file who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Some of it is going to be even more localized, which will make for ready made targeted mailers and digital ads. I have learned, for example, that in twenty twenty, Platner went online and called the Hancock County Sheriff's office a den of overweight pansy and said quote cops are opportunistic cowards. That is not going to slow Platner's apologists, however, not going to happen the left wingers, so enamored with his politics have rushed to offer him the sort of grace that they would never bestow on a more moderate candidate, let alone a Republican. Collins. Susan Collins running for reelection could be endangered. She could lose this race. She could lose it to Janet Mills or Graham Platner. He says. The eagerness of Democrats to oust her and the lack of enthusiasm from mega Republicans who stay home when there's no presidential race that has Donald Trump on the ballot may prove too much for the five term incumbent to overcome, But he says is it too much to ask though, for Democrats to be a little more clear about winning elections. The point is not to find a savior. It's to get closer to fifty one votes in the US Senate. People need to act like discerning shoppers, not fanboys. This is why I say, do not fall in love with the politician. Okay, they're human beings. 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What about? What about? Okay, so what about Donald Trump? Yeah? Hey, you know what I said. I have been saying this for a decade that people have fallen in love with Donald Trump. That is a form of Trump derangement syndrome. I have been saying this for a decade. There are people that think Donald Trump can do no wrong, and they are just as bad in my mind as the people who think Trump can do no right. You've turned Trump into some sort of a caricature of a human being, a human being who makes mistakes, is fallible, He's not perfect, right, And I noted the similarities when people on the left or even Republicans that didn't like Donald Trump, and they would, you know, criticize Donald Trump and say like, oh, this is some you know, unique phenomenon that we have never seen before. It's a cult of personality. And I would always point out Barack Obama, What about Barack Obama. I noticed the same things going on when Democrats were chanting in stadiums filled with seventy eighty thousand people Obama Obama, right, it's kind of unsettling. It was. I'm not going to draw a comparison here with Nazism, but when you get that many people screaming somebody's name in a chant like that, it's kind of hard to not think cult of personality, you know, so don't fall in love with politicians, but Democrats have a hard time with this, particularly the further left you get, you know, more centrist kind of leaning people, more moderate people on both parties, in both parties, they tend not to fall in love with these elected leaders. But Democrats like this goes back to like JFK. Right, They just they elevate some of these candid it's to just ridiculous heights. And that's a lot of what we're seeing with this uh socialist up in New York City. Zoron Mamdani Mamdani, Ma'm donny. This is from a piece over at the Washington Examiner. And editorial talking about the socialist future of the Democrat Party. It's here, it is here. Okay, you got Mam Donna, you got a Kazu Coatez, you got Bernie Sanders, you got this guy Platiner up in Maine. Right, they are running Uh, they're not running away from the socialist tag. Right, The editors say, what these three Sanders, A Kazu Cortez and Mamdani have recognized for years, and what establishment Democrats are now starting to realize as well, is that if the Democrat Party is to have a future, it will be socialist. It is moving rapidly towards rejecting markets and the free choices that are the lifeblood are their lifeblood, and instead embracing outright government control of the economy and much else. Poll results support this shift. According to Gallup, sixty six percent of Democrats have a positive view of socialism and a negative view of capitalism. That is an all time high. As recently as twenty ten, a majority of Democrats actually preferred capitalism to socialism, but those days are gone. Other polling reveals that it is the youngest Democrats, those under thirty, who most support socialism. This is by the way, the result of the long march through the institutions. One of those institutions K twelve education, you know, and when people like me were pointing this stuff out, like what are we teaching these kids? We're obviously not how to read and do arithmetic. No, we're teaching them to be activists. We're teaching them that their country is inherently terrible and everything needs to be torn down and rebuilt, give government more power. Neil Boortz, the libertarian talk show host, he used to talk about this thirty years ago. He would say, Look, if you went to a Catholic school, do you think you would be learning that Catholicism is terrible? Of course not. Well, if you go to a government school, what do you think you're learning there? The Democrat's future is socialist. There is no denying it. At this point. The only question is whether the party is going to finally fall into that pit of tyranny and wealth destruction, and judging by Mamdani's primary win, along with the endorsements that he has picked up by guys like Chris van Holland, US Senator and Kathy Hockel, Governor of New York, like that future appears to be now Democrat elites have given up fighting against their socialist base. The socialists are taking over, and we'll see how it works out for them, and of course the poor New Yorkers who look like they're about to get socialism in the neck. Which brings me to a piece over at City Journal by Martin Gurry, a former CIA analyst and the author of a book called The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. And he walks through it's a very lengthy piece. I'm just going to give you some of the highlights here, but he walks through a thought experiment, like, let's suppose that socialism comes to New York City, right, whether it's Mom, Donnie or not, but we can use him as the sort of thought experiment mayor here. So socialism arrives in New York City, and it's here for the long term. And if you know, the editors at the Washington Examiner are correct, like this is now what the Democrat Party is. They will be the Democrats socialists. And so they the Democrats right now control New York City, they control New York State. Right, So let's assume that this is a long term thing. So what is life going to look like under a leadership that is totally committed to this socialist vision? What follows in this thought experiment is a tale told in the future tense, an attempt to imagine how the unconstrained vision of socialism might play out in an unconstrained New York. He says, this is not prophecy, right, it's speculative, it's fiction. No actual, actual socialists were harmed in the making of this experiment either, Okay, So to start with the experiment, we have to define, like the basic question of what is socialism really? Okay, well, how about we look at the constitution of the Democratic Socialists of America. We'll use their definition. All right. If you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events, and I know you do too, And you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources. Why, Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with ground News. It's an app and it's a website, and it combines news from around the world in one place, so you can compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out at check dot ground, dot news slash pete. I put the link in the podcast description too. I started using ground News a few months ago and more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself check dot ground, dot news, slash pete. Subscribe through that link and you'll get fifteen percent off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. Piece by Martin Gurry, former CIA analyst, author of The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. This is published at City Journal called Socialism with a New York Face, and it's a thought experiment of an unconstrained socialist utopia that takes root in New York City. And the Democrats are you know, they would like to advance this idea. We're going to give it a shot. I guess up in New York. So we'll see what happens. So let's walk through, Like, first off, what is socialism? So for purposes of this thought experiment, we'll go to the Democratic Socialists of America and their constitution. They define it as quote, a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality, and non oppressive relationships. Okay, that's their definition of socialism. The weightiest words here are equitable in planning. See, every form of socialism known to history has fixated on absolute equality as the political end as the goal. Right, it is achieved. So the thinking goes through scientific planning and enforced by the rational application of state power. A new planning body would have to be created, because they always are created, staffed by experts and technocrats and such. So let's give it a name like the Central Planning of Thing Already or CPA. Okay, So almost immediately we run into a contradiction here. See, socialism promises to place resources under popular control. That's what they say in their definition, a social order based on popular control of resources and production, as well as economic planning, equitable distribution, and then feminism, racial equality, non oppressive relationships. Okay, which is, look, we're just taking all of that at face value because I could play the rim shot on every single one of those. Okay, but like this is the point of the thought experiment. We're gon we're going to follow their line of thinking. Okay, But the contradiction arises immediately because there's this promise to put the resources and production under quote unquote popular control, so that, for example, tenants rather than landlord wards, take charge of the buildings that they occupy. However, implementing a planned economy requires concentrating immen's power in the hands of a small group of government specialists. That's the central planning authority of the CPA. These are the experts, the bureaucrats, technocrats, right, they got it all figured out, much like in the Soviet Union, where they would you know, issue their quotas for production. It's a famous story about the production of nails and they sent, you know, sent out the quota this year, you got to produce this amount of nails, and the factories produced that number of nails, and they did it in like a month because the bureaucrat technocrat crowd didn't know actually how many nails would be needed. Whereas in a free market system, the demand for nails would send signal to the producers of the nails, we need to make more nails, right because a small cadre of technocrats far away in the capital are never going to be smarter than the free market. Because you and me and all of us together, we are all the free market. We are all making these decisions of what we want, how much we'll pay for it. Are we willing to delay the purchase or do we make the purchase now? Like all of these factor into the decisions, trillions of factors in any given moment. There's no way a group of people in a central planning authority can replicate that. It's impossible. They cannot do it. It's a fatal flaw of socialism. Okay, So that in the nail story, when they made all of the nails and then they hit their quota and then they're just kind of lounged around for a long time, and then they went and built They made the biggest nail. They made like some I don't know, fourteen ton nail because they had nothing else to do. So it has made a really big nail. Anyway, The two approaches here are incompatible. The contradiction is an intellectual phantom that vanishes in a puff of smoke on first contact with reality. The public quote unquote is an amorphous entity. It is incapable of actually organizing anything. Okay. Socialism has always been a top down system in which a you know, far seeing vanguard brain trust, acting on the public's behalf, commands the resources needed to achieve the proper degree of equality. We'll decide for you. We are smarter than you. Oh but it's popular control. Yeah, yeah, no, it's not really. You can yeah, sure, you want that little shop. You can run the shop, but we're gonna tell you what to sell and how much to sell it for. The mayor and his planners will embody this new class of visionary leaders. Their mandates will fill the vacuum left by the abolition of the private economy. Tenants who once dreamed of ownership will find that they have traded their landlord for a political commissar. The CPA will the Central Planning Authority, will set out to control the means of production. It's the first commandment of socialism, but the means will quickly overwhelm the ends. See, you can't control New York's material resources without also controlling the direction of people's private lives. This is why it's tyrannical. It is inherently counter to freedom. It is counter to human nature. Individual goals and plans must be suppressed. Individualism is hateful to the socialist because it breaths inequality. So if you dreamed of opening a little bodega in Washington Heights, the mayor will say no. Now, if you already own one, you'll be made essentially an employee of the authority. The economic logic of socialism tends towards the dictatorship of the new class. That dictatorship, in turn rejects fixed rules, standards, and norms, because, after all, different people have to be treated differently in order to achieve the equal outcomes. Right freedom versus equality. That's the rub. Here's a great idea. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina. 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Cabins of Ashville has the ideal spot for you for any occasion, and they have pet friendly accommodations. Call or text eight two eight, three, six, seven seventy sixty eight or check out all there is to offer at Cabins offashville dot com and make memories that'll last a lifetime. Again. This is from City Journal by Martin Gurriy, talking about what New York City would look like if it went socialist right like and they were unconstrained in their unconstrained vision. It's a thought experiment. So he's talking about the economic illogic of socialism tends towards dictatorship. And he says socialists do love redistribution. But how in a planned economy is the wealth created to pay for all the free stuff? How do you create wealth? Socialists exhibit a remarkable indifference to the supply side of the economy. Right, They're all in on the demand side. Oh, you want this, here you go, you want that, Here you go, you want that, here you go, never thinking how do we make this stuff to give to people? Right? They seem to assume also that production will continue as before, except even better. Right, workers will now be liberated from drudgery and placed in charge of their own shops. They will feel in fire to boost both the quantity and quality of their output, thereby growing the city's wealth. Except that assumption rests on a fallacy. Control of the economy will not lie with the workers. It will lie with the planners, because that is always the case. So production quotas will be assigned by the CPA, much like teachers assign homework. So you end up with drudgery persisting, and when salaries are all equalized across the board, then productivity plummets. Every instance of socialism in practice has cannibalized the capitalist economy down to the bone until a crisis hits. Declining productivity means fewer goods and services on offer. Price controls then ensure that the entire population is chasing a shrinking supply of goods. So the question becomes how to plan for equality in an economy that is rapidly shrinking? What do socialists do well? We have historical examples from post war Britain to present day Cuba. The socialist answer to this question of how do you plan for equality in an economy that's rapidly shrinking? The answer is always the same. The ration card rations always the same. The attractive idealists, by the way, and then he goes through he talks about like violence occurring in all of that stuff. I'm gonna skip ahead in this thought experiment, though. He says, the attractive idealists who won power like Zoron Mamdani, they will be devoured by those who know how to wield the power. See, and that is also historically true, right, the idealists that you know, talk a good game or photogenic flash that smile at you, charismatic. Yeah, they get they get pushed to the side, and I pushed to the side, I mean, you know, imprisoned or murdered, and so they get kicked out. Once the power is consolidated, then the most ruthless, psychopathic types take over the city's information campaigns. Then will you know, discard the capitalist fetish that separates truth from falsehood? Which I thought was a fantastic line. It's one of those things. See, lies in a free market are surfaced and the liars are punished. That's what a free market does. People realize, oh my gosh, this product is crap. They leave reviews on Amazon, and then nobody buys their stuff because it's some knockoff or whatever. It doesn't work, and then that that product is no longer offered. See, but if you got the central plan authority dictating this stuff, you got limited supply. Well, now they're information campaigns. You can't communicate that you're making inferior quality things, so now you have to suppress truth. It's always a part of the socialist experiment as well, because their ideology has failed consistently in the past, socialists have perfected the art of what have they perfected as signing blame. Even in a scarcity economy, they can produce an endless supply of scapegoats. It really is what socialists excel at, because when their plans don't work, they blame external actors, foreign saboteurs. And then when the plans don't work even more for a longer period of time, then they start blaming you. They start blaming their own people, and cruder, more easily hated stereotype is going to be needed to target. Of course, that could only mean the Jews. Of course, you got to go after the Jews, So that's probably going to be coming down the pike. Socialism has followed a predictable history, historical trajectory, and the pronouncements of the Democratic Socialists cling monotonly monotonously to those of the old time religion. That's what we're seeing. I don't think New Yorkers are going to be able to get off of this course. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my patreon page or go to thepetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.