Head-explosion warning!

“[T]heir all-stick-no-carrot approach to autocracy has only created a suddenly vibrant resistance that’s protesting local Tesla dealerships and storming Republican town halls.”

—Jason Linkins, deputy editor at The New Republic, in The New Republic, in a column titled, “The Fight for the Post-Trump Future Has Already Begun.”

Linkins had served as a senior editor at ThinkProgress, and was a long-time staff writer at The Huffington Post, which should tell you all you need to know about his biases. I know Jason a little: his wife was an occasional cast member in productions of “The American Century Theater,” and he won some brownie points with me by being loved by such a talented, delightful woman. But as you can tell from the quote, he’s a manipulative Far Left activist, either completely deluded or  following the unethical mission of conning the public into seeking, then accepting, government domination of their lives.

By what perverted interpretation are the protests (read: domestic terrorism) at Tesla dealerships “vibrant”? They are unethical, cruel and moronic. Like the “storming” of town halls, these are pretty clearly organized efforts fueled by paid operatives, just like yesterday’s protests. Democrats aren’t even doing a good job hiding the artificial nature of these “resistance” efforts. Then there’s the predictable and dishonest framing of a President using legitimate Presidential power as “autocracy.” One seldom sees so many tells in a single sentence that all scream, “I am an Axis hack trying to deceive the public!”

That wasn’t the worst quote, in truth, just the one that struck me first as ridiculous on its face. Here are some others:

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The poster, whose output I have featured before, is Harvard educated, rational and erudite. Yet he posts things like that, clearly misleading and intellectually dishonest.

Never mind that quoting Winston Churchill on taxes as an appeal to authority on tariffs is a cheat. Never mind that the quote is misquoted (Churchill: “I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”). Never mind that Churchill, who indeed detested tariffs, knew the difference between a tariff and a tax.

The current Trump tariff assault has nothing to do with “making a man richer,”as even the opponents of his policy acknowledge. Furthermore, any quote relating to economic policy during the first half of the 20th Century by an individual who has been dead for 50 years is of dubious relevance at best. But most absurd of all, my friend’s “side,” literally every day on my Facebook feed, is advocating using taxes to redistribute income. My friend knows this: he has to. What is his post supposed to accomplish? Whom is it supposed to persuade?