Sherman R. Frederick/Properly Subversive
Three stories crossed my Nevada desk of late, to which I must once again point out the intersection between reality and the political Twilight Zone in which national Democrats live.
The first story came along when Democrats on social media touted the idea that Kamala Harris and AOC were THE dream ticket for the 2028 presidential election.
The second came when Hillary Clinton held a roundtable discussion on women’s rights at the Munich Security Conference. One of the people she invited to speak was Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE), a trans woman. In the Democrat pretend world, who better to speak on global pushback of women’s rights than a dude in a dress?
Then came a third story in which behavioral scientists, for the first time, discovered apes do, in fact, also possess the ability to pretend. In a string of experiments, scientists set a table and hosted pretend tea parties with Kanzi, pictured at right, to see if he’d play along.
He did.
Kanzi held the teacup and pretended to drink the fake tea.
It’s a breakthrough because scientists previously were unable to document the ability of apes to understand what behavioral scientists call in the business “secondary representations.”
Those are conditions we know are not real, but we nevertheless engage in — think childhood tea parties or sword fights with sticks. The ability to do that enables the human mind to “depart from the here-and-now and generate imaginary, hypothetical, or alternate possibilities that are decoupled from reality.”
Democrats adapted well to that, as exhibited by the ability to pretend a Harris/AOC ticket makes sense or that dudes in dresses can actually speak for the female struggle.
More study is required, of course, but it must be said that Democrats continue to push the boundaries of secondary representations.
Would Kanzi engage? We suspect he’s way too smart for that.
MILITARY MESSAGE
I listened in, start to finish, to President Trump’s speech to troops at Fort Bragg last week.
He clearly loves being around the best of the best in the military. It seems to energize him and to humble him.
While the president patted himself on the back on several economic topics that were in the news that day, his primary target at this event was to remind military servicemen and women, and those who support the military, that if Democrats get back in power again, they will reverse the headway made during his term.
And he wasn’t subtle about it.
“We now have a military based on merit, not political correctness,” he said. “We have a waiting list for all branches of the service.” So vote Republican in the midterms, or “(Democrats) will decimate our military.”
Whether presidents should be making that kind of pitch in front of a military audience is an open question, along with how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
But he isn’t wrong.
Military pride has been restored under Trump. And you can bet he’ll be taking that message to the people during the midterms.
(Sherman R. Frederick is a longtime Nevada journalist and a member of the Nevada Press Association Hall of Fame. You can read more from him at shermanfrederick.substack.com.
