With huge news breaking on the national and world stages at a great pace these days, here is a little small news for those with ties back to the legacy site just to mark the occasion…

Six days ago my account at that legacy site was terminated…permanently cancelled. No real surprise here, it had been in the works for months. The extensive termination email notice appears as if 90% of it was prepared well in advance and the site hero (essential to its very survival!), a moderator, and one of the pals of the Upper Member Feed all attempted to bait me over the last couple of weeks into committing that final straw. As was transparently hinted at in one of my recent posts there about the Brute Squat clearing the Thieves’ Forest…it has been clear for months what is going on. I will have more to say on my case in a couple of months or so…

I do want to note that there was a time a few years back when Ricochet (the Member Feed, of course) was second only to the early generation of the RedState Diary Page (2006-2008) as the greatest little sort-of-center-right-ish community on the interwebs. The current EJ and Yarob Show…not so much. Speaking of anti-intellectual twaddle…

I feel the need to shoehorn this little item in from my last post over at the legacy site (and the one that precedes this one here). This is a slightly paraphrased comment snippet from a wise Ricochet Member under a post I made in April 2018 about the then very troubled RedState.com. (For the record, April 2018 was approximately five months after I had been banned from the RedState bandwidth after banging heads for the previous eleven months with what was then a very virulent – and oh-so-very-irrational – strain of the early Never Trump virus. Can you even imagine such a thing?):

[It has been] observed that there are now probably more anti-Trump writers than there are platforms for anti-Trumpism.

Ain’t that the truth!

It’s that situation which has made Trump supporters so angry at the NeverTrump contingent. In spite of decades of failure to stem the tide of the cultural transformation of America and to defend successfully the average, hard-working, middle-class American conservative, this formerly dominant intellectual wing of the movement continues to hold top positions in the major conservative platforms. Worse, they have used those platforms to lecture, hector and shower opprobrium on Trump and those they considered so morally obtuse as to vote for him.

After watching […] boilerplate liberalism …become the soundtrack to daily American life, and after decades of dealing with the supercilious scorn of liberals, Trump voters have had to contend with non-stop vicious personal abuse from the quarters they had once assumed housed their defenders.

So now RedState finds that it is out-of-synch with its target audience and is jettisoning its dead weight. Golly! Years of impotent opposition to and comfort with progressive policies, modern cultural attitudes and “universal” values finally reached a limit. Who could ever have foreseen that?

[Emphasis added]

A couple of notes on that…

First, the referenced “virulent – and oh-so-very-irrational – strain of the early Never Trump virus” leading into that quote was very different than the current version. It was very shallow and juvenile back then. Today it takes many forms but the one of interest here is where the practitioner (usually holding a position of power over those he targets) freely reads some erroneous position of his foe from between the lines of a comment (or just makes it up completely) and then spends the day attacking that ghost with selectively clipped quotes and a few semi-relevant factoids. A wonderful response by a wiser, much more mature member than me to yet another case of this persistent anti-intellectualism was posted on the day I was booted out:

Not my take, but then your take on my take is always whatever you want it to be.

[UPDATE: I did want to document here how – as observed from behind this keyboard – this behavior became noticeably more aggressive following the elections and took on a more frustrated tone the closer we got to the inauguration. The behavior “from the top” also seemed to signal to the small (but vocal) contingent of pedants and chirpers in the neighborhood to mimic it. Some of this flow-down behavior is what was referenced in the Highlight Reel – (Some of) The Best of the Never Trump Ouija Board (January 1, 2025) post here.]

Second, while I have no insight into whether the Member Feed over there is in any way part of an actual business, I will use a slightly modified line from above to present a probable future partial headline about the site based on my earlier RedState experience and the trajectory of the activity over the last several months:

So now Ricochet finds that it is out-of-synch with a viable target audience…

I suspect there will be an acknowledgment of the issue on this front by about July of this year. Regardless, good luck to friends and former friendly neighbors in the old neighborhood.

Now back to more important matters…and a few less important: Enjoy Super Bowl LIV later today.