PAULA BOLYARD HAS THE DETAILS: We’re Learning More About That Church Shooting in MI—and the Good Deacons With Guns.
Archive for 2025
July 3, 2025
BUCKLEY: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America.
The revolution that William F. Buckley, Jr., set into motion itself remains far from complete. In truth, and in Buckley’s mind, the main idea was actually to create a counter-establishment that would eventually produce not a revolution, but a “counter-revolution.”
—Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America, by Sam Tanenhaus (1018 pages, Random House, 2025)
An accounting of the “life and revolution that changed America” might well have justified nearly 900 pages of text, but that was not the life of William F. Buckley, Jr. To be sure, his was a very consequential life, as well as an entirely fascinating life, not to mention a very full, if sometimes frustrating life to boot.
The result here is itself thoroughly fascinating, quite full, but occasionally frustrating as well. The phrase “if only” seems to apply, as in “if only” Buckley’s had actually been a revolutionary life….
To be sure, this is the life of a brash thirty-year-old conservative who founded a magazine that insisted that it was time to “stand athwart history yelling stop.” And yet here we are seventy years later, conservatives of all ages, still standing—or reeling—against history, while still yelling—or at least pleading—stop.
For that matter, Buckleyite conservatives are still waiting for, and working toward, the peaceful revolution that is both very much needed and might yet come, or the revolution that might well change America and renew and restore America all at the same time.
Did Buckley himself think that his had been a revolutionary life? If so, he either didn’t tell Sam Tanenhaus or Tanenhaus prefers to remain silent on the subject. Does Tanenhaus think so? Once again silence reigns. Would Tanenhaus have approved of such a revolution? Silence still reigns.
Regarding that last question, James Piereson’s review of Tanenhaus’ 2009 book, The Death of Conservatism, has some answers:
Like the liberal writers of the 1950s, Tanenhaus wants to see a conservative movement that accommodates rather than opposes liberalism, and thus one that will accept its role as subordinate to the dominant liberal tradition in American life. He acknowledges that there is an important role for conservatism, but it must be a “genuine” conservatism that preserves but does not seek to overturn liberal gains. In any event, he says, conservatives will have little choice but to accommodate to liberal leadership because the election of 2008 has effectively ended the era of conservative dominance in American politics. Much as liberals had to accommodate to conservatives after Reagan’s election in 1980, conservatives will now have to accept the newly dominant status of reform liberalism, or else accept the consequences of being turned into “the exhumed figures of Pompeii, trapped in postures of frozen flight.”
Incidentally, reading Piereson’s review, written during the heady Tea Party era, really does feel a bit Pompeii-like these days, particularly after seeing the Harris campaign aggressively courting Mitt Romney, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush last year.
THERE’S A LESSON HERE: Coulda Had a V-8: Dodge Charger EV Recalled for Being Too Quiet.
THEY SHOULD HAVE NAMED IT RAMA: NASA confirms that mysterious object shooting through the solar system is an ‘interstellar visitor’ — and it has a new name.
THE ANTISOCIAL MIND OF THE CAMPUS LAND ACKNOWLEDGER. It’s always been a problem:
“We acknowledge that this university is on stolen land.”
“Great! Can we have the land back, then, since you stole it?”
“No.”
That’s what a sociopath would do.
IT’S MY THURSDAY ESSAY FOR VIP SUBSCRIBERS: The Return of Kremlinology — Now with Chinese Characteristics. “Having undone Deng’s reforms, there are now multiple signs that Xi’s rule is coming undone. Over the last several months, I’ve read a series of credible-looking reports that Xi might have received a modified Khrushchev treatment.”
READER FAVORITE: Apple 2025 MacBook Air 13-inch Laptop with M4 chip: Built for Apple Intelligence. #CommissionEarned
IT’S A START: Report: DOGE Set To Cut 50 Gun Restrictions.
INDEED:
The far right in Congress believes we should deport illegals & kick them off welfare.
The far left in Congress wants to trans kids and eliminate the combustion engine. These 2 centers of gravity are not equidistant from the center of the spectrum
— James (@MoronDoctor_) July 3, 2025
BREAKING: Congress Passes One Big Beautiful Bill.
READER FAVORITE: ForestLeaf Colostrum Powder 50% IgG Highest Pure Concentration. #CommissionEarned
AFTER ACTION REPORTS: More Iran Strike Followup.
MSNBC REGULAR WANTS OTHER COUNTRIES TO SANCTION U.S.: ‘We Are The Bad Guys.’
Regular MSNBC guest Elie Mystal called on other countries to sanction the United States, claiming that especially after the American military carried out strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, “we are the bad guys on the world stage.”
Mystal, who also serves as justice correspondent for The Nation, joined ex-MSNBC host Joy Reid on her new eponymous show to discuss the targeted strikes against Iran, and they both appeared to take the side of the world’s most prolific and eager state sponsor of terror.
“Joy, I’ve argued — and I don’t say this lightly — but our country needs to be sanctioned,” Mystal declared. “We are the bad guys on the world stage. We are a menace to not only free people everywhere, but we are a menace to peaceful people everywhere at this point.”
Somebody needs to read the room – since when does the socialist, regulation-obsessed MSNBC care about “free people?” To the point where, “your kids are not your own:”
YES. AS I’VE NOTED, “DRILL, BABY, DRILL” IS THE UNDERLYING FACTOR IN TRUMP’S MIDEAST PEACE PLANS WORKING: Fracking Is America’s (Not So) Secret Weapon. “America’s shale revolution and ascension to the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer has made one fact abundantly clear: energy security is national security. No longer are geopolitical and national security decisions held hostage to the threat of energy price spikes. Because of oil from Texas and natural gas from Appalachia, Americans aren’t facing the energy supply shocks that were once guaranteed to follow rising Middle East tensions.”
ROLLING STONE’S ‘FACT CHECK’ ABOUT ZOHRAN MAMDANI IS EXACTLY THE PROPAGANDA YOU’D EXPECT:
The Democrats know they have a problem with a guy who says out loud what many of them do actually believe, which is where some in the media are helping them run cover when the commies in their midst say the quiet parts out loud.
The Left can always count on Rolling Stone for assistance with the gaslighting. According to RS, claims about Mamdani having communist leanings are among the “viral and persistent lies” about the possible next mayor of NYC:
While today’s zombie version of Rolling Stone is happy to inflict Mamdani’s radical chic politics on its readers, even its founder was smart enough to know when to get out of Dodge, as Joe Hagan wrote in Sticky Fingers, his 2017 biography of Jann Wenner:
Wenner said it was [his then-wife] Jane who ultimately catalyzed Rolling Stone’s move to New York [in 1977]. Her paranoia and anxiety had spiked to uncomfortable levels in the wake of the Patty Hearst episode. “San Francisco got very tricky at one point, because you had the Zodiac, the Zebra, and the SLA,” she said. “It was too small. There were too many people that were just too closely removed from the SLA and the Mansons…there was something creepy happening at that point.”
* * * * * * * *
Wenner once told Town & Country magazine that he would never take Rolling Stone out of San Francisco. Wasn’t the Bay Area the very essence of Rolling Stone, its integrity, its history, its point of view? But Ralph Gleason was dead, and the success of the Patty Hearst story had rocketed Wenner to a bigger stage, where he could hear the blare of [then-Saturday Night Live bandleader] Howard Shore’s sax. When Rolling Stone published a complete history of the Haight-Ashbury in 1975, by Charlie Perry, it was both an homage and a tombstone. The Hearsts were the last bit of glamour left in town, and Wenner had already done the backstroke in their pool, his visit captured for posterity by Garry Trudeau, who caricatured the scene in Doonesbury. Indeed, San Francisco was the Old World; New York was the New. Despite the recessionary gloom and high crime rate, New York slushed with ad dollars and teemed with Mailers and Wolfes and Ephrons who vied for choice checkered tables at Elaine’s, the hub of intellectual and literary life operated by the rotund matron Elaine Kaufman. Wenner was halfway there, so why not go all the way?
As Conquest’s First Law of Politics states, “Everybody is conservative about what he knows best.”
VICTORIA TAFT: Well, Now We Know Why Trump-Hating Newspaper Hid Reader Comments on Assassination Story… “We first got tipped off about the comments situation from a post over at Powerline, but even John Hinderacker didn’t know the comments were as wildly non compos mentis as the Post’s choice to be the leader of the free world — President Autopen, himself, Joe Biden.”
WHAT’S THE OPPOSITE OF A SILVER TONGUE?
I wasn’t really sure how to vote but after watching Hakeem for 30 seconds I’m firmly a yes.
— Tim Burchett (@timburchett) July 3, 2025
Hakeem Jeffries: “A deportation machine will be unleashed on steroids” if the BBB passes
YES! 🔥 That’s what 77 million Americans voted for 👏 pic.twitter.com/14xkI3ZD9R
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 3, 2025
Related:
The first six months of Trump’s presidency has been the best six months any president has had in my life. It’s transformative & historic on a level none of us 50 & younger have ever seen. Trump 2025 is far more impactful than Trump 2021 would have been. Panic setting in with Dems
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) July 3, 2025
President Carter’s accomplishments in the first six months of his only term: He pardoned most Vietnam-era draft evaders.
President Reagan’s first six months of first term: POTUS freed hostages from Iran, survived assassination attempt, fired striking air traffic controllers,…
— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) July 3, 2025
IMPROVE YOUR SMILE: URAGLOW Sonus Electric Toothbrush. #CommissionEarned
RUY TEIXEIRA: Is Our Democrats Learning? “Democrats have a hard time thinking outside their own views of Trump and the GOP. They are deeply convinced that Trump is perhaps the worst person to ever walk the earth and find it difficult to relate to voters whose views are more mixed. They are convinced that a breaking point from Trump’s actions will inevitably be reached where voters will wake up and realize Democrats were right all along, with happy political results to follow. This fallacy undergirded Democrats’ thinking in the 2024 campaign with rather unhappy results when that breaking point was not reached. Democrats’ reliably florid responses to Trump’s outrage-of-the-day in 2025 indicates that they are still hoping that breaking point can be reached and that they are puzzled, indeed outraged, that voters have not yet mounted the barricades. Conveniently, the expectation of a breaking point let’s Democrats off the hook from changing very much in their own party.”
Of course, that kind of thinking both predated Trump, and also helps explain why GOP voters took a chance on him in 2016.
OLD AND BUSTED: Bomb Canada, The Case for War.
The New Hotness? And now let’s bomb Glastonbury.
A small yield nuclear weapon, such as the American W89, dropped on Glastonbury in late June would immediately remove from our country almost everybody who is hugely annoying. You would see a marked reduction in the keffiyeh klan, for a start, and all those middle-class Extinction Rebellion protestors would find, in a nanosecond, that their rebellion was pointless, because extinction had arrived even more summarily than they expected. Go on, glue yourselves to that, Poppy and Oliver.
Street drummers, liberal politicians, provo vegans, radical rappers, spiritual healers, Billy Bragg, that bloke who owns Forest Green Rovers, druggies, tattooed blue-haired hags, almost the entirety of middle-class London – all evaporated. I am not saying that we should do this, of course – it would be a horrible, psychopathic thing to do. I am merely hypothesising, in a slightly wistful kinda way. One on Glasto, one on Brighton, and the UK would soon begin its recovery, with only a few chunks of gently glowing cobalt 60 left to remind us of what we are missing.
One on Glasto, one on Brighton, and the UK would soon begin its recovery
The BBC would cease to exist, too. It identifies Glastonbury as an expression of the UK ‘coming together’, which shows you how much it understands about the country. It has poured millions of pounds of licence-payers’ money into its coverage, and 400 staff were there last weekend, including the director-general, Tim Davie. Or at least 400 staff were actually working there – I’ll bet another 400 or so were there in their little tents, desperate to surf the vibe or whatever the phrase is. All those people, then, and they still couldn’t get it right.
Perhaps bombing is overkill, but “A lack of charges or punishment for the Glastonbury performers would be the ultimate confirmation of Britain’s two-tier policing and judiciary.”