Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
US military leaders are encouraging Christianity among their troops and justifying the war using Christian rhetoric and ideology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbhdEcOxfkw
“In just the past few weeks, Trump has floated—and senior members of his administration have defended—four policy proposals that would have been loudly denounced as socialist overreach had they come from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. And for good reason. Progressives champion similar big-government policies.
Start with the proposal to ban institutional investors from buying single-family homes. This is not conservative policy; it’s the federal government deciding who should be allowed to buy property based on identity rather than on behavior. It substitutes political discretion for voluntary market exchange and treats ownership itself as suspect.
The proposal rests on the false premise that allowing corporate investors to own and subsequently rent out homes is a major driver of high home prices. The practice is supposedly diverting capital away from construction, limiting the number of homes changing hands and crowding out owner-occupiers.
The data say something much different. Depending on the source, institutional investors own only about 1–2 percent of U.S. single-family homes. Estimates from the American Enterprise Institute and HousingWire show that even at the upper bound, this share is far too small to plausibly explain the 50 percent nationwide increase in home prices since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
…
the idea of ordering Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities, a kind of housing-specific version of the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing, in an effort to lower mortgage rates. Conservatives spent the last election cycle correctly explaining that subsidizing demand in a supply-constrained housing market only pushes prices higher.
…
the proposed 10 percent cap on credit card interest rates. Price controls on unsecured credit don’t make borrowing cheaper; they make it disappear for anyone deemed risky. When banks cannot price risk to certain borrowers, they stop lending to them. But borrowers don’t stop needing credit; they just get pushed into far worse alternatives.”
https://reason.com/2026/01/22/the-gop-looks-increasingly-like-a-home-for-elizabeth-warren-and-bernie-sanders/
A year ago, Rauch said Trump is not a Fascist, he’s a patrimonialist. Patrimonialist governments don’t follow the rule of law and bend the rules to enrich and empower the leader. They are not ideological. Later, Rauch concluded that Trump was doing too many things associated with Fascism, so decided he is best labeled as a Fascist.
He doesn’t think Fascists will fully take over the US like they did in Germany, so that should limit the extremes, but nevertheless, the actions of the administration fit Fascism. The government isn’t fully Fascist yet, but it has a Fascist leader.
There’s no one true definition of Fascism.
Trump’s demolition of norms about civility is a classic Fascist action.
Trump glorifies violence in his rhetoric. When agents of the state hurt or kill US citizens, he and his supporters make fun of the injured and killed, and lie about them and what happened. His communications revel in the extrajudicial killings of suspected drug smugglers.
Rauch discusses 16 more Fascist actions in his article.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Zq9Zh8DjZo
What the Neocons Got Right
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3klLJ5-E4s
Nostalgia is manufactured as easily as plastic trinkets, and it distracts adults who should know better. The 1950s, mythologized by the New Right in its push for a more traditional social and economic order, were not an idyll.
Instead it was an era of shorter life expectancy, of higher poverty by today’s standards, of legal and de facto discrimination, of limited economic opportunity for women and minorities, of gay Americans often being persecuted, and of far fewer consumer goods, technologies, and comforts. Implying that it was a golden age overlooks economic facts and the individuals whose rights and opportunities were sharply constrained.
The left’s narrative—that America remains fundamentally unjust and economically stacked against working families—is equally disconnected from empirical reality. As Michael Strain and Clifford Asness recently detailed in The Free Press, we live in the wealthiest mass-affluent society in human history. Typical workers’ real wages are dramatically higher than they were two generations ago. Post-tax incomes for the bottom fifth of the scale have more than doubled since 1990. Wealth for the poorest quarter of U.S. households has tripled. Consumption, the best measure of a lived-in well-being, is hitting record highs.
These data do not deny that some people struggle, but they show that the dominant narrative of national economic decline is false.”
https://reason.com/2025/12/04/the-horseshoe-of-doom-populists-left-and-right-say-america-is-failing-the-facts-dont/
Trump’s Director of Management and Budget is an extreme ideologue blinded by his ideology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSkaYL7-MLs
Popular pundit appears to contradict himself in real time and not have a solid foundation to his ideas and complaints.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGR65TnWOhM
Does a moderate version of socialism pretty much believe the same thing as liberalism?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgefM1AipFs
Trump-GOP’s Anti-Government Ideology Exposed By Deadly Texas Floods
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykbJQ7GXKzM
Americans when making a mistake, used to have their hearts in the right place but were just screwing it up. With Trump, the heart isn’t in the right place. Trump has destroyed conservatism and Christianity. Christianity was about helping the meek, not power and vengeance. Schools and society have become too focused on self-actualization rather than becoming better and more capable people; too focused on specific career skills rather than improving character.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pA9Bwd1zYDQ