Category Archives: daveolsson.com

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Daily Broadside | Being Led to the Slaughter Like a Herd of Cattle

I don’t know if it was my irrefutable logic, my stature as an unknown public servant, or my shameless good looks, but my access to Twitter was restored some time over the weekend. No notice, no explanation, no apology. I just clicked over to read something and ᗒ poof! ᗕ there I was, embraced once again in the land of 280 characters.

I had no confidence in being reinstated. Now that I am, I wonder why. My guess: the algorithm that swept Twitter for offending rule breakers took down every tweet it found, and then the Twitter Censorship Bureau went into clean-up mode, taking complaints about locked accounts one at a time. Or, maybe I just lucked out and got a more conservative reviewer.

Whatever the case, I now wonder if I’m on a “watch” list. I’ve been identified as a potential troublemaker, so maybe next time my good looks won’t be enough. In the meantime, it will be easier to write about the lunacy in our country if I can link to and quote Twitter posts.

So the big news this week is Trump’s indictment in Manhattan.

Former President Donald Trump’s unprecedented indictment has surged into the limelight and fueled public debate over whether this case is legitimate and shows no one is above the law or amounts to a political hack job meant to thwart Trump’s chances in the 2024 presidential election.

Expectations are that Trump will be arraigned at some point in the coming week, with a spokesperson for the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg saying in a statement that it’s now coordinating with Trump’s attorneys the former president’s surrender.

The Left’s maniacal obsession with Trump strikes me as Ahab obsessing over Moby Dick for crippling him. Trump interfered with the Left’s destruction of the United States, an unforgiveable sin and, even though they managed to keep him out of office in 2020, he’s still a threat to them and their agenda. The case that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg is trying to make is weak on the merits.

Former U.S. Attorney General William Barr has criticized the indictment, calling it a “disgrace” and a “political hit job.”

In an interview at the National Review Institute Ideas Summit, Barr said he saw the case against Trump as prosecutorial abuse and as “pathetically weak.”

“Judging from the news reports … it’s the archetypal abuse of the prosecutorial function to engage in a political hit job, and it’s a disgrace,” Barr said when asked to comment on the case.

Barr said that Bragg appears to have ginned up a technical misdemeanor into a felony, adding that this was something that federal prosecutors chose not to prosecute as a campaign violation.

This is lawfare in the service of a political agenda. Not only does “the statute of limitations bar the alleged charges” but “the case is based on a faulty legal theory.”

Trump asks a good question: “How much more are American patriots expected to take?” This is what I alluded to in my post on Friday.

What is happening is that the goons who run the Left are pushing the Right toward desperation. Desperate people will take desperate measures. Let’s hope we have time to turn things around before we get to that point.

I’m not one to advocate for violence or rebellion, but we are now being forced into the cattle race by lawlessness, lies, double standards and persecution, all enabled by the money our government takes from us in the form of “taxes” and uses to turn the instruments of political power against us. The goal is to take total control over us by eliminating as much of our freedom and independence as possible, promising us that if we only trust them, we will be safe and cared for by the government.

There is coming a moment when American patriots will have to make a decision. Will we passively go to the slaughter that’s coming, or will we object? It will have to happen before the head gate closes on our necks. It will be of last resort, when all other options fail.

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Daily Broadside | Trump Indictment, Tennessee Insurrection, Twitter Censorship and Double Standards

Right off the bat is the news that for the first time in U.S. history, a former president is facing criminal charges. Donald J. Trump has been indicted by a grand jury on charges related to hush-money paid to Stormy Daniels during his 2016 presidential campaign.

A Manhattan grand jury indicted Donald J. Trump on Thursday for his role in paying hush money to a porn star, according to people with knowledge of the matter, a historic development that will shake up the 2024 presidential race and forever mark him as the nation’s first former president to face criminal charges.

On Thursday evening, after news of the charges had been widely reported, the district attorney’s office confirmed that Mr. Trump had been indicted and that prosecutors had contacted Mr. Trump’s attorney to coordinate his surrender to authorities in Manhattan.

The Democrats, the MSM, the RINOs and the NeverTrumpers (a quartet of repetition, I say) have been persecuting Trump for years, ever since he rode down the elevator in 2015 and announced that he was running for president, and especially during his time in office. There has never been so much hatred and animosity standing opposed to such great love and loyalty to a president as there has been with Trump. The persecution of Trump has been one of the most degrading and embarrassing eras in our history.

I’m not going to defend Trump’s behavior, especially since it seems like the “hush money” was paid and nobody disputes it. What is disputed is whether he actually had an affair with Daniels, and whether the money was an inappropriate use of campaign funds or is considered a contribution to his campaign that was improperly accounted for. What gets me is the absolute double-standard the Democrats and their allies have. They have used our institutions to prosecute a relentless war on Trump, searching for a crime with which they can take him out of the presidential race.

This brazen misuse of our laws and the disregard for our history and norms is pushing us closer to the unmentionable. Did you all see the “insurrectiony” takeover of the Tennessee Capitol yesterday? Did you see the police trying to prevent protesters from entering, but failing, and the protestors disrupting the People’s Business?

(It’s here that I’d link to a Twitter video, but I apparently hate women who shoot 9-year-olds and the Twitter Nazis have locked up my account.)

Do you think Merrick Garland and the DOJ and FBI will be rounding up protestors and holding them indefinitely in solitary confinement? Or nah? Did I mention the double-standards that the Democrats and their allies have?

Also, speaking of my locked Twitter account, I learned that it wasn’t just me. Apparently, many conservative opinion leaders found themselves locked out of their accounts. Here’s what Sean Davis, CEO and the co-founder of The Federalist, wrote:

I had high hopes for Twitter under Elon Musk’s watch. After all, how could the tech giant get any worse after banning the New York Post, which was founded by Alexander Hamilton himself, for the crime of reporting on possible corruption of the family of a leading presidential candidate in the middle of a close election?

We now have an answer: by banning conservative Christians for reporting on the horrific mass shooting perpetrated by an apparent “trans” person who hated conservative Christians so much she stormed a Christian school in Nashville, opened fire, and murdered three 9-year-old children and three adult staff.

[…]

Well, it happened on Monday at a quiet Christian school atop a hill in the middle of Nashville. And by Wednesday afternoon I was banned by Twitter from accessing my account for reporting on the shooting, for reporting on the Trans Day of Vengeance which may well have inspired the cold-blooded murderer, and for sharing a link to a news story from The Daily Wire, another conservative news outlet based in Nashville.

Twitter claimed my reporting violated Twitter’s terms of service and that I had personally threatened, incited, glorified, or expressed a desire for violence. Such a claim isn’t just false; it’s defamatory. Twitter published a notice on my feed (which I can no longer even access) stating I violated its rules. Again, such a claim is false and defamatory. Twitter has a right to ban me for whatever reason it wants, but it doesn’t have a right to viciously lie about me.

Here’s his diagnosis of what Twitter is doing:

What the people behind this censorship are truly worried about is the prospect of the American people understanding the true evil underlying transgender ideology and the danger it poses to the country and its survival. They don’t want you to understand how every major institution of power in this country bends its knee to the radical trans movement, tells its adherents they are victims, and tells them that anyone who utters the verboten truth that boys cannot become girls and girls cannot become boys wishes to commit genocide against the so-called trans community.

What do you think is the logical conclusion of telling delusional, mentally ill people being surgically mutilated and pumped full of hormones that Christians and conservatives want to commit “genocide” against them? That’s the question you’re not allowed to ask because they know how you’ll answer it because you watched with your own eyes what happened in Nashville on Monday.

Finally,

When a rage-filled and mentally ill “trans” person shoots up a school, the media blame Republicans, or the NRA, or gun makers, or anyone other than the shooter and her warped ideology. They turn the victims into villains, and they turn the murderer into a martyr.

Twitter responded no differently. It didn’t ban us and lock us out of our accounts for lying, but for telling the truth. Why? Because the facts of Monday’s mass murder are fatal to the left-wing narrative, and the only thing the left wing and its myriad institutions in government, business, and media care about is the narrative. The narrative must be protected at all costs, even if it means lying about the facts and those of us who report them.

He’s right, you know. We are now, without question, living in a country that censors free speech. It doesn’t matter if Twitter or YouTube or Google are private companies. They are being allowed to censor political, ideological and moral thought on their platforms under the guise of “safety.”

We’re living out Benjamin Franklin’s famous quotation: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

What is happening is that the goons who run the Left are pushing the Right toward desperation. Desperate people will take desperate measures. Let’s hope we have time to turn things around before we get to that point.

If the Democrats didn’t have double-standards, they’d have no standards at all.

Have a good weekend.

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Daily Broadside | Planning to Fail: No Good Way to Get All U.S. Citizens Out of Afghanistan

Daily Verse | Jeremiah 15:1
Then the Lord said to me, “Even if Moses and Samuel were to stand before me, my heart would not go out to this people.”

It’s Thursday, my friends. Styrofoam cups do not a good flotation device make.

I wish there were other things to write about this week, but the catastrophe in Afghanistan remains the top story as even more bad news continues to surface in the wake of our incompetent Washington fool’s monumental failure in that stone age disaster of a country.

When Joe Biden was running for president, he hid in his basement for the majority of his campaign. We all knew that if he couldn’t handle the rigors of the campaign trail, he couldn’t handle the rigors of the office. Now that he’s been installed as Resident, he’s proved the assumption. After being summoned from his vacation to address the American people, he fled back to Camp David after making a threadbare speech that blamed everyone but himself for the disaster in Kabul.

Now we’re told that he cut his vacation short, returning Tuesday rather than on Wednesday as originally planned. Gosh, that had to be tough! All those pesky politicians disturbing his rest over a little intelligence failure and some lost armaments.

*shrugs* Big F***ing Deal, amirite?

But the lie that anybody but Joe Biden is responsible for the calamity in Kabul ain’t gonna hold. The National Pulse dropped a rather interesting story yesterday claiming that the Biden administration killed funding for a Trump-era “critical State Department program aimed at providing swift and safe evacuations of Americans out of crisis zones just months prior to the fall of Kabul.”

It wasn’t about Afghanistan per se, but it was about situations just like the one we’re facing in Afghanistan. A couple of key graphs:

In a lengthy article in Vanity Fair from May 2021, the Contingency and Crisis Response Bureau (CCR) – also referred to in overlap with a predecessor/partner bureau called “OpMed” is described as a “little-known team of medics and miracle workers—hidden deep within the U.S. Department of State.”

“Even before COVID reared its head, OpMed was finding ways to do all sorts of things, serving as the hidden hand behind daring and often dangerous operations to rescue Americans from peril abroad,” the article states, before going on to quote Secretary of State Tony Blinken on the importance of the program’s goals.

“The Bureau of Medical Services’ Directorate of Operation—or ‘OpMed,’ as we call it—is a lifeline for the Department of State and the American people… Though perhaps lesser known outside of the Department, it’s vital to our operations. That’s because OpMed provides the platform and personnel to save American lives around the world, especially in times of crisis. During the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, OpMed was integral to our evacuation and repatriation of 100,000 Americans to the United States as countries began locking down their borders.”

But The National Pulse understands that career officials inside the State Department objected to the Trump-era aim of creating a Contingency and Crisis Response bureau with the express purpose of avoiding a future Benghazi-style situation for Americans overseas.

Instead, Biden’s team revoked the funding and the approval for the plan, even as the COVID-19 crisis reasserted itself, and and Afghanistan withdrawal loomed. (Emphasis mine.)

“Career officials.” And now we’re hearing that the State Department has no plan—at least one based in reality—for evacuating American nationals or Afghans who want out.

President Joe Biden’s pledge to evacuate thousands more at-risk Afghans who worked for the U.S. government will run into the cold reality of a fast-closing window of time, insecurity all over Afghanistan and major logistical hurdles.

As one U.S. official told Reuters “too many things have to go 100 percent correctly” to execute the plan to move out those going through the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) process. The Pentagon is aiming to evacuate up to 22,000 SIV applicants, their families and other at-risk people.

But officials and refugee resettlement groups said that number, while admirable, will be much more difficult to reach now that the Taliban have seized the capital Kabul and most of the country.

Biden’s Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin, who’s chasing “white supremacists” (read: wrong-think conservatives) out of the armed forces, seems to confirm that, really, if you’re in Afghanistan and want out, you’re on your own.

In another report, Secretary Austin admits, “We don’t have the capability to go out and collect up large numbers of people.”

Biden the foreign policy expert! Wisdom gained after more than 50 years in Washington, right fellas? So wise! So stunning! Why, it’s almost as if the American draw down was planned this way!

Wait—maybe it was! Remember the little dust-up over the Hunter Biden laptop left at a Delaware computer repair shop? Remember his emails outlining his deal with a Chinese-funded company that included “10 held by H for the big guy,” the “big guy” being then-vice president Joe Biden?

The Biden criminal family is owned by the Chinese. And guess who benefits from the collapse of American support in Afghanistan?

Gropey Joe pulled out of Afghanistan after 20 years, zillions of dollars, and thousands of lives were lost. China stands to gain a great deal from this evacuation. The same China that has funneled tens of millions of dollars to Hunter Biden since 2009, and really kicked things into high gear in 2015 when Gropey Joe was vice president. Coincidence? You decide! You’ll have to do so without asking any questions because Biden, VP Harris, and Jen Psaki are all mysteriously AWOL.

The reason the Chinese are first in line as America exits is that they are pursuing world domination through their “Belt and Road” initiative, a program that has to run straight through Afghanistan, where there lies “an estimated trillion dollars worth of rare-earth minerals under its soil.“

Either China has Biden by the short-hairs, or he’s a incompetent moron. Or both.

But at least the tweets are nice, right? We all good with that?

Give me so-called mean tweets, gas for $1.96, and a strong military over this milquetoast pretender any day. I truly wonder if we’ll survive until mid-terms in 2022.

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Why I Left Facebook (and Eventually Came Back)

On February 19, 2020, I reached my tenth anniversary on Facebook. The next day I logged out and deactivated my account. I didn’t have any grand plans. I didn’t know how long I would be gone. I just decided I needed a sabbatical and took one.

◦◦◦◦◦

I am a voracious consumer of news, particularly of political and cultural topics. I have deep concerns and strong opinions about where our country is headed and decided a long time ago that I needed wanted to add my voice to the chorus of those on Facebook.

Because I enjoy a good debate, I was determined be candid with my views, but to do so with clarity, charity and objectivity. I never wanted to be unkind, petty or spiteful, all of which run counter to my natural temperament and to the grain of my Christian faith.

That seemed to go well for a long time. I hold many counter-cultural convictions and am not afraid of saying so, but I always tried to strike a reasonable tone while holding a firm line with those who disagreed with me.

Earlier this year, however, I had a couple of trusted friends separately tell me they saw an increasing stridency and lack of charity in what I was writing. Both felt I had overstepped one of those invisible boundaries that we all know are there, but don’t always define.

Those tactful confrontations coincided with the approach of my ten-year anniversary on Facebook. Because anniversaries provide opportunities to pause and reflect on how we’ve invested our time, I decided to make a quiet break with Facebook and consider the totality of what I was doing with it.

(Pro tip: Anyone who has spent 10 years doing anything with their discretionary time would be wise to evaluate whether it’s still a good investment.)

I didn’t know what to expect when I quit Facebook. Would I have withdrawal symptoms? Would I experience cravings? Would I feel left out? Would anyone notice that I had left?

No. No. No. And (checks notes) yes.

But what I learned is that I didn’t miss it.

Facebook is like a beehive. A colony is comprised of some 60,000 – 80,000 bees. It’s literally humming with activity as worker bees crawl around and over one another to build, clean and repair the nest, tend to the queen, feed the larvae, dispose of the dead, defend against intruders, fly in and out to collect pollen and nectar, and kick the drones out when food gets scarce.

Except for a few hours each night, the hive never stops. Just like Facebook.

As a member of the hive, I contributed to the frenzy by posting and sharing and clicking and liking and commenting while my feed served up endless notifications from friends and pages I follow. I loved (almost) every minute of it. If you’re part of the hive, you participate in the life of the hive because being a drone on Facebook—a silent observer—misses the point of the entire experience.

(Parenthetically—and to acknowledge the obvious—you can participate on the platform as much or as little as you desire. Facebook is what you make of it and has long since evolved beyond its original intent as a way to stay connected with personal friends. After a couple of years of minimal involvement, I realized there was much more to it that piqued my interests, and I chose to dive in.)

It wasn’t until I stepped out of the hive that I realized how frenzied it was. How frenzied I was. I breathed a little easier without the pressure to prompt and respond and, while I hate to admit it, I felt less anxious.

What I did miss, however, were the online relationships I’d cultivated. I missed the insightful writing, the incisive intellect, the witty repartee, the verbal jousting and the plain vanilla personal posts that were shared for no other reason but to enjoy a #humblebrag.

So I’ve chosen to rejoin the hive, but I’m going to do it a bit differently.

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While I was gone, I started a public blog at DAVEOLSSON.COM. (Thanks for being here!) With several years of curating and commenting on the latest political and cultural news and building a small cadre of friends on Facebook, I’m ready to broaden my influence.

Facebook offers some great features, including restricting who can and cannot see your page or specific posts. That makes for a mostly safe, but small, audience. Because I feel so strongly about what I usually write, I realized that I would eventually want to go public. I need to be a voice in the wild.

DAVEOLSSON.COM will now be the primary outlet for my writing, with my Facebook page playing a supportive role. For my friends on Facebook, content will stay the same. I’ll still curate articles with an excerpt; I’ll still mark some as “must-reads”; I’ll still share things I find humorous.

What will be new are original thought pieces I write on topics I feel strongly about. And all of it will be hosted at DAVEOLSSON.COM and posted to Facebook.

I’ll also post content on Facebook that I don’t post to DAVEOLSSON.COM. Some things are just for the few of us, and I’ll figure out what those are along the way.

I want to develop the site into a thought leadership platform concerning faith, culture and politics. I wrote about it in my first post.

It will take some time to catch a rhythm and build an audience, but I’ve already established a feature called “Morning Links” that reflects my view on what is important or interesting to know each day. If you subscribe to DAVEOLSSON.COM, you’ll receive an email notification that will take you right to the new content.

I’m new to owning a site and am feeling my way along. I’m tinkering with features and experimenting with new ways of designing and sharing content. Any encouragement is appreciated. Please visit regularly and, if you like what you read, share with your network of friends.

Taking a break from Facebook was a worthwhile exercise. I learned that I can live without it, but I did miss the friends I’ve made. I’m glad to be back.

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Begin with the end in mind

The bit of common sense making up my headline can be applied to every project, proposal or plan ever created. If you’re going to undertake something worth your time and effort, it’s most efficient if you have an idea of what you’re trying to accomplish and why you think it’s necessary.

Of course, not everyone applies that dictum to what they do, which is why countless efforts fail and Stephen R. Covey made a fortune selling it.

I mention this because I’m launching daveolsson.com today without much fanfare but with a specific end in mind: becoming part of our national conversation about culture and politics.

There are plenty of people who already occupy that space with trenchant—and often witty—insight (see some of them in my Frequent Haunts list, right). But there are two reasons I want to contribute:

  1. I have a point of view that I think is under-represented in the national conversation. As a politically conservative evangelical Christian, not only is my point of view unappreciated by the culture at large, but the loudest voices seem to be openly hostile to such a viewpoint.
  2. I believe that whether or not my voice is “winning” in the marketplace of ideas, more citizens like me need to speak up. I’m nobody special; just a guy with a love of God and country who has a keyboard and an Internet connection. But there’s a lot of us out here and we need to be heard.

Over the years I’ve learned to be candid about what I think. Some people like it, some people don’t. For me, it’s too much work to make sure everybody’s happy. What you read here is one guy’s take on our shared American life as one nation, under God.

You’re welcome to tag along—and I hope you do. Bookmark this site, tell a friend or two, and share content you think is worth knowing about.