Archive for 2024

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Mesha Mainor Discusses Her Quest for Justice and Accountability in Fulton County. “On Tuesday, we brought you the news about Georgia State Rep. Mesha Mainor (R-56th District) filing a lawsuit against Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and others over the failure of Willis’ office to prosecute a stalking case against Mainor. PJ Media received the video of Mainor’s press conference, and the statements from that video reveal more about the suit and the problems that plague Fulton County’s legal and law enforcement establishment.”

NO, CRIME ISN’T DOWN: Enduring Lawlessness in Our Cities. Crime continues to plague the American urban core at much higher levels than before the pandemic. Jeffrey H. Anderson, a former director of the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, rebuts the claims of Biden and the legacy media that the crime wave is over.

THIS MEANS THE ESTABLISHMENT HAS DECIDED TO SAVE ITSELF, AND THROW THE PROTESTERS UNDER THE BUS: College protests updates: NYC mayor blames ‘outside agitators’ for protests.

Related: UCLA falls to anarchy after counterprotesters confront anti-Israeli encampment: ‘Horrific acts of violence:’ The unrest started at 11 PM and continued for two hours before law enforcement officers arrived at the scene. Well, the police probably were in no rush to save the “defund the police,”/”All Cops Are Bastards” crowd.

Of course, protest violence doesn’t become a serious problem until it stops being one-sided.

UPDATE: UCLA protester says ‘Zionist thugs’ released rats into anti-Israel encampment. Meh, who’d notice? They’d fit right in.

REMINDER THAT TODAY IS VICTIMS OF COMMUNISM DAY. It’s disgraceful that this dishonest, murdering ideology is still celebrated in academia and in our media. When you see someone celebrating that, remind them that they’re apologists for mass murder and theft.

Meanwhile:

IF THE WEST’S RULING CLASS WANTED TO WRECK THE COUNTRIES IT RULES, WHAT WOULD IT DO DIFFERENTLY?

THEODORE DALRYMPLE: Orwell’s Arresting Ambiguities.

Occasionally [Orwell biographer D.J Taylor], whose own judgment is pretty good, misses something important. For example, he describes the effect that Orwell’s time in Spain had on him:

Spain, it is safe to say, politicised Orwell in a way that his exposure to homegrown socialism in the previous five years had not. To begin with, it offered him a vision of how an alternative world, founded on the principles of freedom and equality, might work.

Orwell told the general litterateur, Cyril Connolly, who had been with him at Eton, that he had seen “wonderful things” in Barcelona, then a revolutionary city in the control of the Trotskyist POUM. Taylor continues:

It was, he declared, “the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle.” Churches were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Shops and cafes bore inscriptions saying that they had been collectivised. Tipping was forbidden by law, all private motor cars had been commandeered, and all the trams and taxis had been painted in the anarchist colours of red and black. “In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist.”

Everyone dressed the same too, in drab overalls, Maoist avant la lettre.

Barcelona, then, was a Catalonian Pyongyang: and it is important to recall that Orwell approved of it. At this stage of his development, he was an enthusiastic totalitarian, and the shallowness of his belief that such uniformity was a triumph for freedom and equality is rather startling in a man who, a very few years later, was to be the greatest literary scourge of totalitarianism in the world.

In his 2000 essay, “In the Land of the Rococo Marxist,” Tom Wolfe wrote that the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the subsequent publication of the Venona transcripts “made it damned hard to express your skepticism, your cynicism, your contempt, in Marxist terms… Not to mention the Spanish Civil War—archives! Turns out the Loyalists secretly called in the Soviets at the very outset of hostilities—and if they’d won, Spain would have been the first Soviet puppet state!”

In “Orwell’s Bad Republicans,” a 2007 book review at the American Spectator, Hal G.P. Colebatch noted:

When the heroics of the Spanish Civil War come up — Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Hemingway’s fictions or the effusions of various poets — there is a very large and usually unremarked elephant in the room: Orwell, who actually fought, and Hemingway who wrote about fighting, were on the wrong side.

The strategic point is simple: had the Stalinists won war, then during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact from 1939 to mid-1941, they would have allowed Hitler to cross Spain and seize Gibraltar. Had this happened, the British forces in the Mediterranean, including the British Empire’s last remaining field army in action, would have been cut off. The British army and fleet could probably have been supplied through the Suez Canal, at least for a while, but their positions would have been immeasurably weakened, and the enemy’s position immeasurably strengthened.

Fortunately, as Dalrymple wrote, “It was all to the credit of Orwell that he changed his opinion of totalitarianism so diametrically, but had he died just after the publication of Homage to Catalonia, not living long enough to write his anti-totalitarian masterpieces, he would have been remembered, if he was remembered at all, as a literary forerunner and praise-singer of some of the worst features of communist regimes.”

ONCE THE STRONGEST CONSTITUENCY ON CAMPUS, COLLEGE STUDENTS HAVE BY AND LARGE TURNED THEIR BACK ON FREE SPEECH. Take a step back from the recent campus turmoil and dig into the data with Sean Stevens and me in the latest chapter in our ongoing series, ‘The skeptics were wrong, Part 3.”

INDEED:

There’s a lesson here, one young Gen Z men are already learning.

HOUSE THEM IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY DORMS: White House considers welcoming some Palestinians from war-torn Gaza as refugees. “Top U.S. officials have also discussed getting additional Palestinians out of Gaza and processing them as refugees if they have American relatives, the documents show. The plans would require coordination with Egypt, which has so far refused to welcome large numbers of people from Gaza.”

Egypt has good reason for its decision — what is the Biden administration’s reason?

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: ‘Free Palestine’ Brownshirts Need a Heavy Dose of Consequences. “These administrators, professors, and their youthful charges happened to be throwing their ignorant hatefests the city that has the largest municipal police force in the United States. It was never going to work out well for them.”

IT WOULD TAKE A HEART OF STONE NOT TO LAUGH: Stunning and Brave: Pro-Hamas Protesters Suddenly Beg to Go Home When Police Show Up. “Listen to the cheers as they are all hauled away in buses for booking. More than any media pundit, this video will tell you what America — yes, even in New York City — thinks about these lawless, anti-American, antisemitic protesters.”

Plus:

RISE OF THE RESISTANCE:

UPDATE: There’s a GoFundMe to reward them with a party: Pi Kappa Phi Men Defended their Flag. Throw ’em a Rager.

At present there are 685 donors, totaling over $19,000. I wonder if GoFundMe will try to take this down. Expect major blowback if they do. Momentum has shifted.