WELL, HE’S PRETTY MUCH MADE A FOOL OF HIMSELF: Here’s the price Mitt Romney is paying for standing against Trump. “Even GOP voters in this heavily Republican, majority-Mormon state have expressed dismay with Romney amid his latest anti-Trump rhetoric. In other words, he’s all by himself. Even Romney acknowledges he doesn’t have much influence with his fellow lawmakers.”
Archive for 2019
October 27, 2019
AT AMAZON, save on Bras for Women.
IF TRUMP IS ANTI-ISIS, THEN THEY MUST TAKE THE OTHER SIDE BECAUSE REASONS: Jamie Lee Curtis Rips Trump, Pities al-Baghdadi, Praises Dogs in Bizarre Rant. But remember, Trump’s the crazy, emotional one.
SEEN ON FACEBOOK: Fake, but accurate.
PLEASE SEND YOUR THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS TO THE INSTA-WIFE, WHOSE MOTHER JANET DIED YESTERDAY. It was not exactly unexpected, as her health was declining, but it was sudden, and thankfully painless. Still, it’s hard to lose your mom. (Bumped).
UPDATE: Thank you all for the kind words, they help a lot. Helen.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Progressives, Hispanics are not ‘Latinx.’ Stop trying to Anglicize our Spanish language.
Rather than making Latinos feel included, progressives are implying the way our families speak is fundamentally inadequate for the United States and progressive American culture. This is offensive to the 85% of Hispanics who, like my parents, speak Spanish to their children and whose most treasured heirlooms are often family traditions and memories in Spanish. Mine include the mellifluous sound of the baritone voice of my “abuelo,” mom’s favorite boleros and dad’s military stories.
Has their language joined the ranks of comedian Dave Chapelle, the Betsy Ross flag, and the interminable list of people and things that perturb our politically correct sensibilities?
Ultimately, what Hispanic Americans who take pride in our heritage see in “Latinx” is progressive preening attempting to solve a nonexistent problem at the expense of a beautiful language that Chicanos and other Latinos endured corporal punishment and bigotry to defend. Liberals should also realize it is impossible to reconcile their professed values — like multiculturalism, education and pronoun autonomy — with the peculiar strain of 2019 progressivism that seeks to radically change our language, disregards linguistic practices, and disavows our right to determine how we are described.
Leftists keep the right to determine things to themselves. Your job is to fall in line.
OPEN THREAD. You should make the most of this singular opportunity.
UPDATE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARIES ACCORDINGLY, COMRADES: “Governor Newsom Announces New Partnerships and Tools to Help California’s Most Vulnerable Residents During Power Shutoffs… New resource guide outlines resources available for those in de-energization areas.”
Or to translate the phrase “de-energization areas” back into English: PG&E Shuts Power to 2.8 Million Californians as Fires Burn.
Found via Seth Mandel of the Washington Examiner, who tweets, “A giant state bordering the ocean keeps running out of water so I’m not surprised it also runs out of electricity. What I find incredible is the humiliating Orwellianism of calling ‘de-energization’ for ‘vulnerable populations’ what is actually ‘shutting off poor people’s power.’”
Related: San Jose Proposes Leaving PG&E And Creating It’s Own Public Utility.
THIS JUST IN: CLASSICAL LIBERALS* ARE CLASSICAL LIBERALS. The Intellectual Dark Web is more liberal than you’d think.
The issue that commands the most consensus, not surprisingly, is free speech, with 89 percent of us agreeing it should always be allowed and 83 percent believing ‘people should be allowed to say and believe whatever they want, even if others think those words or beliefs are hurtful’. We’re also very respectful towards those who disagree with us, which is what you’d expect from a group committed to viewpoint diversity. More than half the respondents said they had a high tolerance for members of the political party opposite to them and wouldn’t mind if one of their children was going out with someone with diametrically opposed views.
What struck me on reading this is that most of us hold opinions that 70 years ago would have placed us to the left of the Overton window and 20 years ago would have put us squarely in the middle. But the shift to the left among the educated intelligentsia has accelerated so significantly in the past 10 years that it’s now commonplace to describe a group of ‘moderate secular liberals’ (Michael Shermer’s phrase) as ‘alt-right’ extremists.
Which dovetails well with the “America’s Delusional Elite Is Done” essay in the American Mind we linked to yesterday:
The failure of the conservative establishment to address the insanity of the new left is the chief negative cause of the phenomenon or movement in question. The new left has alienated large swathes of younger men especially who otherwise would have been sympathetic to its causes. Many voted for Obama and were very much of the “green” faction for example. They weren’t doing so because they were antifa or communists or radicals—in temperament, background, profession, many would have probably been young Republicans before George W. Bush—but did so because the Republican party of the time, the party of Romney and Paul Ryan, was bankrupt in ideas and spirit and had nothing to offer. Obama was promising accountability for the extremely destructive financial crisis of 2008 and for the Iraq War before that. But he didn’t deliver; he became instead a protector of a corrupt ruling class, and a racial demagogue.
The anti-male and anti-White rhetoric of the new left is extreme. The racial attacks on whites in particular approaches exterminationist propaganda seen only in, e.g., the Hutu against the Tutsi in 1990’s Rwanda.
For anyone who doubts this, consider the following few examples, which are far from complete:
A columnist for the Huffington Post, a major leftist publication, wrote an article titled “Towards a Concept of White Wounding,” apparently calling for racial violence.
The New York Times hired a columnist who had repeated vulgar racial attacks on whites, calling “whiteness” “awful,” whites “only fit to live underground like groveling goblins,” expressed great joy at “being cruel to old white men,” and declared that whites will be “extinct soon.” The Paper of Record stood by her when these attacks were exposed, and only quietly let her go recently when she supported a boycott against her own employer.
Symone Sanders, currently a senior adviser to Joe Biden and previously the national press secretary for Bernie Sanders, mocked a disabled white teenager who was tortured on camera in 2017 by a black mob screaming “Fuck Trump! Fuck white people!” and otherwise called cases of antiwhite political violence “a protest.”
The New York Times—again, hardly an unknown blog—published an opinion column by Michelle Goldberg with the eliminationist title “We Can Replace Them,” ostensibly against “white nationalism,” but in fact directed against a demographic white majority as such, which the author seeks to replace with nonwhites for what she imagines to be political advantage.
Kevin Drum at Mother Jones, a major organ of the Left that pushes the security establishment’s Russia Hoax conspiracy theories, called this summer for “a literal or figurative war” on whites and a “race war” that the DNC must be willing to get “Lincolnesque” about.
Major leftist and establishment media such as Newsweek publish cover stories titled “Is Your Baby Racist”; major publishers promote books titled White Fragility, or The Dying of Whiteness, and CNN—not white nationalist outlets—runs graphics on “The Vanishing White American.”
Again, all this is par for the course these days; as everyone knows, state-funded universities routinely hold “white privilege” seminars and orientation sessions, promoting a concept the plain meaning of which is to dispossess people of property and civil rights based on their biology.
And again: “In New Jersey, two high school boys stand accused of racially harassing and intimidating four younger black girls. The accused are of South Asian (Indian) descent. You might think that this ugly display is a reminder that the sin of racism is a universal part of the fallen human condition. You would be wrong, according to Princeton historian Nell Irvin Painter. Writing in The New York Times, the L’Osservatore Romano of the Cult of Social Justice, Painter tells us that it’s really whitey’s fault.”
* “Progressives” hijacked the L-word beginning in 1919, after the hash Woodrow Wilson made of their ideology during WWI.
HE KEEPS LURING THEM OUT INTO AN EXPOSED POSITION AND THEN CUTTING THEM OFF: Al-Baghdadi takedown catches Dems flat-footed, blunts criticism of Trump’s Syria pullback. Which is weird, because he’s supposed to be a demented toddler, and they’re supposed to be sophisticated and savvy.
I DUNNO, THEY MAY KEEP YOUR GUYS COOL BUT THEY DON’T HEAT UP THE LADIES: A Kilt Is A Sperm’s Best Friend. Still there may be something to it. When I was single and had a hot tub in my bachelor pad, I always hoped it was reducing my fertility. Recently a friend of mine impregnated his wife after several years of trying, only after taking several months off from the hot tub.
SMART DIPLOMACY: Kurdish-Led Syria Forces Accept Russian-Brokered Pullback Deal.
CHICAGO MAYOR LEARNING THAT EVENTUALLY, YOU RUN OUT OF OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY:
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is dealing with a 12-day-old teachers strike that features a contest between the most radical union in the U.S. and one of the nation’s most radical mayors.
It’s not going to end well for her.
When the strike began she told the teachers “there is no more money.” All that did was whet the appetite for battle by the teachers who are now almost certainly going to get almost all of what they want.
Lightfoot is being hit over the head by reality.
* * * * * * * *
Chicago reached that “upper bound” years ago and residents have been voting with their feet. In their eagerness to sate the appetite for tax dollars, public unions’ ever-escalating demands have made Chicago the only major city of the top five to lose population over the previous decade.
Related exit question: Is Chicago The Next Detroit?
OUR LONG NATIONAL THROUPLE IS OVER: Rep. Katie Hill to resign amid allegations of inappropriate relationships with staffers.
JODY SAID IT’S MINE BUT YOU CAN HAVE IT FOR SEVENTEEN MILLION: Samsung Satellite Crashes Into Family’s Backyard.
It’s actually a balloon.
VLADIMIR BUKOVSKY HAS PASSED AWAY. I recommend his Judgment In Moscow, which I blurbed.
SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Jane Fonda Accepts British Academy Award While Getting Arrested at D.C. Climate Protest.
Actress and left-wing activist Jane Fonda accepted the Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award For Excellence In Film on Friday and delivered her remarks via a pre-taped video due to her arrest in Washington D.C. over her weekly climate change protests.
As Glenn likes to say, “the 21st century isn’t working out as I had hoped.” I think the 1968-era Kubrick who made 2001: A Space Odyssey would strongly agree. I’m not at all sure the Kubrick who made A Clockwork Orange three years later would be all that surprised at its current state.
U.S. STRIKES KILL ISIS SPOKESPERSON* ONE DAY AFTER BAGHDADI’S DEATH IN SYRIA RAID.
I’m looking forward to reading his fawning obits in the Washington Post and Bloomberg.
* Using the gender-neutral noun is a fine choice by Newsweek, considering ISIS’ strong commitment to feminism and equality.
WASHINGTON STATE REFERENDUM: A Duplicitous Attempt to Revive Racial Preferences.
NEO: And then there’s the reaction to al-Baghdadi’s death.
It makes one wonder what the present-day editors of the WaPo would make of Hitler’s death if they had to report it all over again:
“Animal-loving vegetarian with ambitious plans dies tragically”
Or Stalin’s:
“Former seminary student who became leader of a great nation is deeply mourned”
ADDENDUM:
I wasn’t far off from what was the actual NY Times headline for Stalin’s obit, which read, “Stalin Rose From Czarist Oppression to Transform Russia Into Mighty Socialist State.” [Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.]
Wow. That seems to be a real Times headline and not a parody site.
At some point, planet Earth slipped into the Spock’s beard alternate universe where the Babylon Bee is more accurate and trustworthy than the New York Times and the Washington Post.