Politics – The Vine of Liberty

Politics Rant

Words on the Government Shutdown

Oct 30, 2025 Allyson

A Right leaning friend of mine posted the above, and it made me think. This was my reply to him:

I can think of several ways to make this go quicker, although I have my reasons for not being in a hurry (please note that “not caring the gov’t is shut down” is not the same as “wishing people would starve”… I am *not* saying that).

First, term limits on Senate, House of Representatives, and most (if not all) other posts higher than local city/town government. The terms should not match the Presidential terms, so that elections don’t happen at the same time and it’s more difficult to get all the same players on the field together.

Second, no pay during a government shutdown.

Third, no one leaves the Capitol when there’s no budget in place. Like… bring a cot, my dudes, and get comfy. It should then be catered by the people who feed high school kids in their cafeteria. They can work “regular” hours until it’s resolved, but they don’t get to leave the Capitol until there’s a budget in place. No hotels. No eating out. No ordering in. No visiting with family (except via video, when they’re not working). No exceptions other than major emergencies (deaths, terror attacks, that kind of thing). No more CRs, no more f*cking around.

I happen to be on the Republican’s side in this particular debate, for a lot of reasons, and I consider myself fairly conservative at this point. But I still want to have budgets in place. While they haven’t violated the Constitution in word, I believe they have done so in spirit. Paying our bills may not currently be “…deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition…” (Dobbs), but it SHOULD be.

I cannot stress how much I believe in term limits. If you want to talk about “this Nation’s history and tradition,” then you must own up to the fact that our Founders did not (and COULD NOT) conceive of an entire class of people who were nothing but politicians. They had just left England (and other countries with Kings, Queens, and Tyrants), and had no stomach for a ruling class. And here we are… we’ve built ourselves our own ruling class. Don’t believe me?

Have a look at the members of Congress. The longest a person has been in office in the Senate is 59 years. The shortest is 36 years. THIRTY SIX YEARS. In the House, the longest serving person was in 59 years. The shortest is 36 years.

They don’t need to build trust; they need to get out of the way and let some new blood in. Thirty six years is TOO MANY. That makes it the equivalent of a lifetime position. For many, these people got into office thanks to family. That means this is generational. Look at the Kennedy family. The Clinton family. Generational. This is not what our Founders worked so damn hard for. This is not why they dumped tea in Boston Harbor. Gezus.

Maine Wire Article on “No Kings”

Oct 21, 2025 Allyson

From the Maine Wire, Mon. October 20, 2025:

Maine Wire reporter Jon Fetherston was on the ground for multiple No Kings protests on Saturday.

Here’s how it went:

My day covering the No Kings rallies began early in Saco, Maine.

The weather was perfect, crisp and sunny and a crowd of about 500 people had gathered.

It was, without question, the most “normal” group I saw all day. Mostly women, polite, and eager to share why they were there. Yet when I asked more than 20 people a simple question…what happens tomorrow when the protests are over?

Not a single one gave me a clear answer.

The next stop was South Portland. That’s where the tone started to shift. Costumes and signs became louder and stranger.

Attendance was smaller, but the energy was more frantic. Secretary of State Shenna Bellows made an appearance. When I asked her why she had fired UPS and hired a small courier service following the Amazon box of 250 ballots found in Newburgh, she bolted. No answer. No accountability. A real leader would have faced the question, not run from it.

Then off to Portland.

Walking through Deering Park was a grim reminder of the city’s struggles, people passed out from drugs, open drug dealing, profanity everywhere, and a homelessness crisis visible on every corner.

The rally itself was hostile from the start. No one wanted to talk to a reporter from the Maine Wire. I was shoved, glared at, and called a fascist. One person told me directly, “The Maine Wire is not welcome here.” My response: “Now who’s the king?”

The scene only grew stranger. Adults in bear, dinosaur, and frog costumes paraded through the park.

Organizers from Indivisible and the ACLU refused interviews. One woman at the ACLU table called me a fascist. Another attendee scolded me for taking photos in a public park…then took mine in return. Triggered indeed.

Technical difficulties delayed the start of the program. When it finally began, the speeches were exactly what many expected: Shenna Bellows, Hannah Pingree, and Congresswoman Chellie Pingree. It was the same tired script…Trump bad, ICE bad, hurt feelings, but no solutions.

As I walked out, I passed a grown man in a bear suit, another in a frog suit, two older people dressed as dinosaurs, and a woman dressed as a clown. A woman celebrating her birthday told me she wanted the President dead.

When all was said and done, there was no plan to win an election, no acknowledgment of Trump’s victories in both the popular vote debate and the Electoral College, no mention of Middle East peace deals, and no coherent strategy. Just costumes, slogans, and weak speeches filled with distortions. The median age was over 60, very few people under 30. Has the younger generation figured it out, woke is not the way?

Tomorrow morning, the sun will rise and Donald Trump will still be President.

My response:

Congratulations!

Oct 19, 2025 Chris Johnson

Congratulations to the No Kings protesters! They did it! There are no kings in the US. Trump is still our president.

I had to go out yesterday to sign up at a new range. The new range is nice. But they are a membership club; pay in advance for a year, take an orientation class, provide proof you can pass a background check (a CCW or a recent firearm purchase qualifies), and proof of a safety class.

This was a worrisome trip because I would need to head out near the local college town; I knew the “No Kings” idiots would be out protesting the lack of freedom of speech. And they might have become violent. Best to avoid.

I was able to avoid because the range isn’t near the town. It was good to know that I didn’t have to deal with them.

On the way home, pulling into my local town square, who should be there? Those selfsame people I was trying to avoid.

There were some yelling across the street as there were counterprotesters. I couldn’t tell who were the protesters and who were the counterprotesters. Or maybe it was just poor English on the part of the protesters, making their signs impossible to understand.

The sad part is that this nonsense has made it to my little town. My alert posture just went up a few more notches.

Burning van with large flames and black smoke

General Politics

It Is Always About Violence

Sep 27, 2025 Chris Johnson

Communism, an idea so good it has to use force to keep its citizens in.

The fact is that Communism requires that all dissenting voices be silenced. They are silenced with violence. People are sent to re-education camps, they are disappeared in the dead of the night, and they are grabbed off the streets, never to be seen again. All with the authority and violence of the government.

The image of people being disappeared is what the anti-American agitators are using when they say that “masked men are kidnapping people off of the street.” It invokes images of communist countries doing just that.

The difference is that these people are not being disappeared. They are being arrested. They get lawyers, or they had lawyers.

When ICE agents detain a criminal illegal alien outside a courtroom, that criminal has had due process.

Are these arrests violent? Only if the person being arrested makes them that way.

Soft Violence

When the Tea Party came into existence, I wanted to fly the Gadsden flag. I did not for fear of how it might affect my wife and children. I flew an American Flag instead and still worried.

People were silenced by fear of reprisals. This was the time of cancel culture from the left.

Voice a double-bad-think opinion, and you were canceled. Voice a bad-think opinion, and you might only be warned.

You were made to feel alone, but for a few lonely voices in the dark. You were told by every talking head that you were guilty of bad-think and would be punished if found out.

This is also the screaming and in your face, just shy of physical assault.

Physical Violence

This is where you start to see the laying on of hands. Physical beatings, shoving, and punching. Actual battery.

In Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s famous book The Gulag Archipelago, he talks about being stuffed into a cattle car. The violence was being dealt out not only by the guards but also by fellow prisoners.

But they weren’t “fellows” in the classic sense. Most of the prisoners were regular people stuffed in the pipeline leading to the Gulag. These were criminals, and they colluded with the guards for privileges and in exchange kept the rest of the prisoners cowed.

We see that in the criminal attacks in Seattle. Roaming gangs of violent thugs impose their beliefs with truncheons and bats. And if those don’t work, even more.

In Cabaret, the maître d` of the Kit Kat Klub kicked some Brownshirts out of the club. The cowards were not willing to do anything about it at the time. Instead, they waited until the maître d` had left the club, then beat the shit out of him.

They sent the message, “Oppose us, and bad things will happen to you.”

We see this type of thuggish behavior in the cities. We see it when conservatives set up tables to have a conversation and are driven off campus by gangs of feral louts.

And the state defends these thugs. Regular folk who stand up for themselves and others are punished by the state. Look at how the authorities treated prayer groups defending themselves vs. the antifa lice that attacked them. Look at the violence against federal buildings by antifa and then what happened when grandma walked through the Capitol.

This violence is vastly asymmetric, and it is intended to be. At every step of the process, you are told to back down. You are told that you have to restrain yourself. And if you don’t? Ask Kyle what happens.

Murder

Ask Lincoln how Democrats behave when they lose. Ask JFK, killed by a communist. Ask almost any victim of political violence in the last century how Democrats behave.

Unfortunately, you can’t. Most of those people were murdered.

The goal of the left is to create an event to prove the right is the more violent.

The problem is, we are. When we react, we do it with force and with a will to get things done.

Again, ask Kyle. When it was time, he pulled the trigger, and cos-playing degenerates died. That boy showed remarkable trigger discipline.

And this is not new.

In 1977, JoAnne Deborah Byron, AKA Assata Olugbala Shakur, was convicted of murdering a police officer.

This happy little communist worm was a member of the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army and other groups. She was a murderer, a terrorist, and a bank robber. After she was convicted, she was sentenced to life + 26-33 years.

Of course the standard whining leftists blamed it all on racism.

She escaped, stayed on the lam for a while before moving to Cuba to live the life of a privileged Communist.

On September 26th, 2025, she became a good communist. Cuba has reported she died of health complications.

News Politics

We’re The REAL Victims!

Sep 21, 2025 Chris Johnson

On September 10th, 2025, Charlie Kirk was murdered. He was assassinated for his speech. He was a moderate that was willing to listen to anybody and engaged in honest dialog.

As Jesus did, he got angry from time to time, and his emotion came out, explaining in clear, short, easy-to-understand words what his point was.

He was a threat to the Left because he was bringing the youth out of the leftist bubble of never-ending lies.

He was winning hearts and minds.

Because he was winning, he had to be silenced. Intimidation did not work. Low-level violence did not work. So they killed him.

How did “they” kill him? They created a permission structure where it was acceptable to kill those you disagreed with. Words are violence, and violence begets violence. “It was Charlie’s fault” that he was killed. If only he had not been so violent.

Immediately after his murder, we started to see the blood vultures. This time they were not dancing in the blood of dead children; instead, they were dancing and painting themselves in Charlie’s blood. Dancing in joyful celebration of the death of a moderate conservative.

It was and is disgusting. They were in the FA stage, knowing there was no FO stage.

But Charlie’s death changed that. And the FO stage became very real. Hundreds of people have lost their jobs for being vile, disgusting subhumans.

That paint of blood they so proudly wore was used to fire them. And they whined.

They whined about “free speech”.

Here is the short, simple truth: they used their right to free speech to slander and attack Charlie and his family and us. They took joy in the death of a good man. They clearly expressed their hatred for over half of this great country.

Their employers used their freedom from association to get rid of their sorry asses. They weren’t fired to silence them. They were fired because their employers didn’t want them contaminating the workspace.

Health facilities had no choice. The legal liability of keeping a health care worker after they express an interest in harming people who are not part of the sheep herd is greater than they could risk. Other employers looked at losing 50% of their business and decided they were going to cut their loses.

Nobody in the government ordered this. Reasonable people in the government decried the vile, evil, disgusting statements of these subhumans. They did not step on the First Amendment.

We took the left’s tools and used them. And employers were able to get rid of the trash stinking up the workplace.

Of course some bigger names couldn’t help themselves. An author of horror novels lied about Charlie. The pushback was verbal, but he was smart enough to read the writing on the wall. But far too late, the damage was done.

A movie based on one of his pieces has just come out. People are choosing to avoid it. Nobody called for a boycott. His movie is still being screened.

It is being screened to nearly empty theaters. Theater owners understand that upsetting 50% of the country is going to reduce customers.

The momentum kept growing; more and more FAFO was happening.

A late-night political hack opened his failing show with his normal monologue. He lied about the murderer’s affiliation. He attacked 50+% of the country.

His show had been falling in popularity for years. He was avoiding his job of “comedian” to focus on being a political hack.

Broadcast TV still exists. There are very few independent TV stations. Most are owned by larger groups. These stations get their content from multiple sources, but the primary one is their national affiliate, such as ABC, CBS, or NBC.

Every TV station is entitled to preempt a broadcast with their choices. If they would rather not air “Why The Racist, Evil People Are Racist, Evil People,” they don’t have to.

That is their choice. When they go to their advertisers and their advertisers say, “We don’t want our advertisements aired on that show.” They might not have any choice. That is where the slot is.

At that point, the advertiser might choose to pull their ad. To spend their money elsewhere.

When the station starts to hemorrhage money over political content, they might decide to preempt.

If the station preempts a show, that means they don’t show the broadcaster’s advertisements. That means the broadcaster is losing money.

They don’t like losing money.

So they took this political hack off the air.

The government didn’t. Trump didn’t know about it until he was briefed on the hack’s firing. He didn’t request it.

While the FCC has been considering investigating the broadcaster’s lying about known facts, they hadn’t done anything. This was a stupid statement to make, but it happened.

So here is the situation: According to the left, this political hack being let go is the definition of destruction of free speech. Charlie being murdered was just the consequence of being a “Nazi.”

You see, they are the real victims of political violence, not Charlie, not you, not I.

Charlie's Voice Music Politics

Come Out Ye Libs and Wokes

Sep 16, 2025 Chris Johnson