ruben von higgenbotham

How to build a thriving city – 2023

I recently hopped in my car and drove from Seattle to Boise, Salt Lake City, Santa Fe, Flagstaff, Vegas, Bakersfield, then San Francisco, and back to Seattle. Coming from Seattle, a city that is clearly thriving in nearly every way, I started to notice little similarities in some of these other cities. Boise had a small tent city near the Capitol. Salt Lake City had obviously consolidated it’s roadways for bike lanes. And on it went. I was also recently in Milwaukee, and noticed this same trend. It was starting to adopt some of the ideas that made Seattle…

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Trump Derangement Syndrome 2.0 – a mutant variant that affects his supporters

Trump Derangement Syndrome (or TDS) has evolved – as most viruses do. It used to be he made his detractors so angry that they would lose their minds, become singularly focused on whatever it was he was saying or doing, stop at nothing to destroy him, and, in doing that, expose their own selfish intentions which were nearly always bad for America. However, there is a new variant of TDS – TDS 2.0 – and it’s infecting his supporters. TDS 2.0 is the belief that there is only one man on earth who can save America and the world,…

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The most important thing Tucker said

Everyone is talking about Tucker Carlson’s distillation of the January 6, 2021 security camera footage recently released to him. And well they should. As expected, he completely debunked the narrative that has gone on far too long by The Party and their stooges in the media. But let’s not blur the most important thing Tucker said (at the 6:45 mark): “[Chuck Schumer. Mitch McConnell. Mitt Romney. Tom Tillis.] They’re all on the same side. So it’s actually not about left and right. It’s not about Republican and Democrat. Here you have people with shared interests.” “The open borders people….

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It may be time to stick together

Matt Walsh – one of my favorite conservative commentators – recently wrote: “Imagine how much more effective conservatives would be if we had even the slightest sense of camaraderie or just a little bit of loyalty to each other as compatriots in the culture war.” In response to an objection, he then wrote: Meanwhile, after Nikki Haley recently spoke at CPAC, MAGA War Room observed that the speaker’s hall was very empty for Nikki Haley’s speech – implying that no one wanted to hear her. I responded by pointing out it was empty for everyone… Doesn’t seem very controversial…

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Conservativebrief.com: Make them stop

I’d love to know how much conservativebrief.com and deenquirer.com are paying headliner conservatives to promote them? If you follow conservatives like Ava Armstrong, Sebastian Gorka, or Dinesh D’Souza on Twitter, you’ve surely noticed the pattern of conservativebrief.com promotion: This is huge! She’s in trouble! It’s over! Court ruling a game-changer! Then, if you make the mistake of clicking on the linked article, you get a bunch of paragraphs that regurgitate everything everyone already knows about the related subject, without any news or developments of any kind. When it happens, it looks a bit like this: Here are the first…

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Trump’s 13D chess

Trump stooge Alex Bruesewitz has been earning his keep by trying to tie Governor Ron DeSantis to every retread RINO he can think of, best summed up in this tweet: The problem is that according to Trump, it was Trump who “got him elected.” If I’m any study of logic, that means if DeSantis is bad, Trump is a poor judge of character. When pressed on this, Bruesewitz said that DeSantis started out good, but then threw Trump under the bus. If that’s the case, Trump is still a bad judge of character. Is this an exception? Correct me…

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“Celebrate similarity”

Nearly five years ago, one of the first Bubbler posts I wrote was called “Celebrate similarity.” Back then, it was simply affirming Prince questioning what we hoped to gain by celebrating what divides us instead of celebrating what unites us. Because we don’t really teach US history anymore, fewer and fewer people understand this. But the United States was founded on a set of principles that attracted a diverse set of people from all around the globe – all of whom were united by one core idea: Freedom. They came to build a better life. Hard to say whether…

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A choice between crazy or normal

For the first time in my lifetime, and GOP may have accidentally veered into messaging. Last night, Sarah Huckabee Sanders gave the Republican response to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. In it, she did something you rarely hear from any Republicans. She had a concise message that resonated: Democrats and Republicans give you a choice between “crazy or normal.” She didn’t spend as much time as I would have liked, and only mentioned it two more times, but she cited as her examples CRT (which she should have defined), racism, indoctrination, use of LatinX, COVID mandates, and…

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Things are looking up

If you’re following events closely – and by definition, that means seeking out conservative news sources beyond the mainstream print, television, and internet media – you’ve probably concluded the United States is lost. Or at least we’re breathing our last gasp. That may be true… or it may not. Thinking long-term, which we arguably don’t have, I think the truth continues to catch fire, and more and more conservatives have their eyes wide open every day. What used to be called “conspiracy theories” are proving to be true. Take just last Friday. “Mitt” Ronna McDaniel, lapdog to the Republican…

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The conservative marketing problem: example #1,538… gas stoves

It pains me to say it, but Joe Scarborough was right about something. On his show this morning, he was talking about Republicans talking about gas stoves, and he said, “It’s so stupid. They’re talking about gas stoves instead of Vladimir Putin threatening nuclear war… instead of China invading Taiwan.” He’s right. That is stupid. But not necessarily for the reasons he thinks. It’s stupid because, once again, the Republican Party’s disaster of a marketing department (that’s me stupidly believing they have one) is reacting to the latest ridiculous idea from Democrats instead of going on offense and talking…

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