December 10, 2024

December 9, 2024

MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: 2024: A Damn Close-Run Thing.

As always, if you like these please take out a paid subscription.

Posted at 11:25 pm by Glenn Reynolds

ANOTHER GREAT TRUMP APPOINTMENT:

She and I did a free-speech panel together at Stanford Law several years ago and I was quite impressed.

Posted at 11:14 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: You oughta know how all the pros play the game.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

REGIME CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN:

Posted at 8:55 pm by Ed Driscoll

ANNETTE BENING SAYS THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD ABOUT HAVING A “TRANS CHILD:”

Let’s look at that confession from Annette again:

“To have a transgender child has made ME so much more interesting”

Being gay or lesbian is just so passe. Too mainstream, too middlebrow. No one applies the stunning and brave label to the gay kid in Drama Class or the gay high school boy who announces he’s going into Fashion Design.

And for “celebrities” whose whole existence revolves around how much they appear in media, the new TrophyTransChild means being celebrated as a stunning, brave and affirming parent.

Last count there are at least 17 celebrities who are out there with TrophyTrans kids. Consider that actual transsexuals, as of 2014, made up about .53% of the population. Gender dysphoria in children was even rarer.

Gender dysphoria—formerly known as “gender identity disorder”—is characterized by a severe and persistent discomfort in one’s biological sex.8 It typically begins in early childhood—ages two to four—though it may grow more severe in adolescence. But in most cases—nearly 70 percent—childhood gender dysphoria resolves.9 Historically, it afflicted tiny sliver of the population (roughly .01 percent) and almost exclusively boys. Before 2012, in fact, there was no scientific literature on girls ages eleven to twenty-one ever having developed gender dysphoria at all. In the last decade that has changed, and dramatically. The Western world has seen a sudden surge of adolescents claiming to have gender dysphoria and self-identifying as “transgender.” For the first time in medical history, natal girls are not only present among those so identify — they constitute the majority

So the spectacle of multiple celebs with trans kids should raise a heck of a lot of eyebrows. And when there is even one gal, Heather Dubrow, with four kids, three of whom identify as “LGBTQ+” … ??!!??

Yeah, sure.

This isn’t just Munchausen-by-proxy, this is children realizing the only way to stand out from their fame-seeking parents and to get their love and approval is to be the NewThing that brings attention.

One of the recurring leitmotifs of Tom Wolfe’s epochal “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening” 1976 long-form article from (a long-gone version of) New York magazine was “Let’s talk about Me!”

By the early 1970s so many of the Me movements had reached this Gnostic religious stage, they now amounted to a new religious wave. Synanon, Arica, and the Scientology movement had become religions. The much-publicized psychedelic or hipple communes of the 1960s, although no longer big items in the press, were spreading widely and becoming more and more frankly religious.

Along with radical environmentalism, and the mask obsessions, riots, looting and statue topplings of 2020, we’ll look back at parents trans-ing their kids as this decade’s equivalent of the religious fervor that drove the left in the 1970s.

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

JOHN KASS: To Move Forward, Democrats Must Oust Obama.

Obama honors himself at every opportunity. But he is America’s one-eyed jack. And we’ve seen the other side of his face.

But who would lead the attack against Obama and risk the enmity of the well-heeled Democrat interest groups? Most importantly, who in the Democrat Party can play the iconoclast and take on the party’s neo-Marxist creed of racial and other grievances?

Obama pretends to rise above grievance, but he’s reliant upon it like an addict, like the “Revs” Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, though far silkier and smoother. Remember just weeks ago when Obama was lecturing young black men who weren’t enthralled with the presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris. Bitter and angry, he harangued them on what he could only understand as the sexism of the great unwashed. It was a rap he had used before. And it had treated him so well in the past. It reverberated in the halls of his many mansions. Perhaps even in that mansion on liberal Martha’s Vineyard, the vacation paradise for the immensely wealthy that was off limits to impoverished illegal migrants who’d crossed the border on Democrat invitation.

Yet those young men who he tried to shame didn’t live among the elites of Martha’s Vineyard or the Gold Coast of Chicago. And they weren’t insulated from the poor economy and pressure from the illegals. Instead, Obama was revealed by his own mouth to be be a complete and utter phony. You could almost hear regular people, those who had been Democrats, shouting “F You Barack” from every corner in every swing state.

Perhaps Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro could take on Obama. Maybe Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer would do it, or even that supremely, obviously ambitious Californian with the greasy hair, Gov. Gavin Newsom. But do any of them really want to challenge? Not just Obama but his acolytes, his proselytizers, his disciples, his praetorians.

Obama’s third term was brutal for America — but given what we’re seeing at the moment from today’s left, who are busy attacking Israel and egging on assassins of CEOs, would an updated version of 1968’s “Clean for Gene” or the Democratic Leadership Council that championed a centrist-appearing Bill Clinton in 1992 even succeed among Democrats? (Trump’s she’s “for they/them, President Trump is for you” commercial was made all the more devastating with the footage of Kamala personally championing sex changes for prisoners and illegal immigrants, because she thought that’s what it took pander to the Democratic Party base in 2020.)

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

HOW SUSPECTED CEO SHOOTER LUIGI MANGIONE WAS CAUGHT AT ALTOONA MCDONALD’S.

The man detained by police in Pennsylvania in connection with the shock slaying of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has been identified as Luigi Mangione.

Mangione, 26, is an ‘anti-capitalist’ Ivy League graduate*. He was taken into custody after a McDonald’s employee in Altoona, around 100 miles east of Pittsburgh, believed they recognized him as the gunman.

He reportedly had a 3D-printed ghost gun similar to the one used in the Wednesday morning murder, along with a gun silencer, a manifesto, and four fake IDs when he was arrested by cops.

A manifesto, huh? Jon Gabriel and John Podhoretz have thoughts:

Meanwhile, what hath AI wrought?

* Valedictorian, to boot: Person of Interest in UnitedHealthcare CEO’s Killing Identified as Prep School Valedictorian.

Finally, just wanted to get out ahead of the story and say that Luigi Mangione did not commit suicide:

Posted at 6:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

CORN, POPPED:

More:

You can read Jumaane Williams’ full statement here but this bit stands out from the rest of the nonsense and deflection:

We don’t know everything that passengers saw or felt on that train car, and can’t dismiss any real or realized fears. We do know that neither Blackness nor poverty nor nuisance constitute an imminent threat. Yet this verdict tells people that the system is okay with violence against marginalized people.

But marginalized, mentally ill people that the city has left to wander the streets untreated should be free to commit violence at will.

Got it.

Posted at 5:33 pm by Stephen Green

WELL:

I think we can chalk this up to the power of X. In the 2016 media environment, it probably wouldn’t have happened.

Posted at 5:27 pm by Glenn Reynolds

CHANGE: Is DEI doomed? “A second Trump administration is likely to be more motivated, better equipped and more focused on dismantling DEI initiatives on college campuses.”

Posted at 4:50 pm by Stephen Green

NOBODY LIKES A LOSER:

As far as I can tell, both Bidens avoided looking at Harris and Emhoff even when they turned in their direction.

Besides, Jill only has eyes for Donald.

Posted at 4:35 pm by Stephen Green