Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 23. Sunrise is 6:50 and sunset is 5:28, for 10 hours, 38 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 85.3 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1960, the U.S. Navy submarine USS Triton begins Operation Sandblast, setting sail from New London, Connecticut, to begin the first submerged circumnavigation of the globe.
In 2021, this libertarian blogger posted (as part of a longer series) on the kinds of conservatives in Whitewater. See Whitewater’s Local Politics 2021: The Kinds of Conservatives in Whitewater, April 8, 2021. At that time, there were three conservative types of note: traditionalists (old-school types) transactionalists (deal-making types), and populists (what’s now called Trumpism or MAGA).
There was a question at the time:
The populists are often underestimated. I have been – and am – a critic of these rebranded Trumpists, but have never underestimated them.
These populist conservatives are not deal-makers: they want what they want, on their terms, as soon as they can get it. As the traditionalists fade away, the question among conservatives in Whitewater (and other places) will be whether the deal-makers or the populists dominate right-of-center politics.
There’s a sure answer now, four years later: only the conservative populists matter politically. There’s one movement, one way, one outlook.
A conservative might imagine himself as something else (a traditionalist or a deal-maker), and might be something else, but only in his house or in his head.
Conservatives in Whitewater’s public square are all populists.
Father describes moment humpback whale briefly swallowed his son: