America’s most popular shoe is coming back to Amazon.
After a five-year hiatus, Nike shoes, clothing, and accessories are returning to the e-commerce giant.
The athletic brand swiped its products from the platform in 2019, as part of a push to sell more directly to consumers.
Things began getting awfully weird at Nike in 2019, a company that once existed to sell sneakers, starting most prominently when they issued a pair of Betsy Ross-flag embedded sneakers, likely only so that uber-woke Nike endorser Colin Kaepernick could dunk on them, to coincide with the Fourth of July. In Nike’s collective mind, this was evil and “offensive:”
Billionaire investor Bill Ackman tweeted, “The idea that @Nike would make light of the holocaust using Hitler-red imagery in a post-October 7th world is stunning. Heads need to roll. WTF Nike?”
WTF, indeed.
DISPATCHES FROM A WANNABE VICE PRESIDENT:
Let me help, Timmy.
“Texans, flee the nanny state and move to Somalia! Enjoy the jihad, stark racism, and crime.”
This was during the George Floyd riots. But the power to do this to their citizens was only extended to them because of the Covid lockdowns and executive orders. This way all may-june 2020
Perhaps Walz is referring to this sort of “freedom,” which was Tweeted by his campaign partner during the riots in 2020, and is still online:
As Ed Morrissey wrote last year, ‘Light ‘Em Up:’ Paintball Tim? “The entire episode speaks to Walz’ utter incompetence as an executive in the public sector. He’s an authoritarian whose instincts run to either inaction or over-reaction. His pandemic management speaks volumes in that regard, especially his COVID-19 Snitch Line and his vicious punishment for those who dared defy his authoritarian rule by decree. Just ask Lisa Hanson, who served most of a 90-day jail sentence for trying to re-open her coffee and wine bistro…The Walz administration was still prosecuting these cases in December 2021. By that time, practically the entire country had reopened. Even most of Minnesota had reopened by that time. Rather than drop the case as moot, the state threw a business owner in jail for two months, which is about two months longer than nearly all of the rioters got. That’s how authoritarian Walz is by nature, and that’s the Tim Walz that Republicans need to expose.”
Mission very much accomplished there. So why is Walz still acting like Hiroo Onoda? When does he get word that the war is over?
I’ve found that people who support green politics are slightly nastier than others in their everyday life, feeling that they had ticked the nice box and therefore somehow won the right to be nasty. When I was a volunteer at a blind home a while ago, I’d regularly take a couple of sightless ladies out for a walk; we’d set out along the bustling main streets of our city, one on each arm, only for me to have to shove them roughly into the nearest doorway as some hulking brute drove a bike at us right there on the pavement.
Inevitably, people have been killed by cyclists; when they are, sentencing is risible. Until last year it was based on legislation from 1861 only allowing for a maximum two-year sentence; things are better now, but cyclists who kill are still treated far more leniently than motorists.
It’s not being paranoid to believe that a lot of this behaviour is another form of male violence towards women, as female cyclists also report frequent harassment by their male counterparts. Victoria Pendleton said: ‘If I’m out about on my road bike and I overtake a man, I will hear a rapid crunching of gears as they try to “make amends for it”… usually followed with a pedal-mashing stomp past me.’
Funny, I would think male lefty cyclists would be uber-Alan Alda-style feminists, but as Kate of Small Dead Animalslikes to say, “Scratch a leftist, find a misogynist.”
George Washington University (GW) was sued in federal court by Jewish students on Thursday, alleging it allowed “pervasive and severe antisemitic harassment” on campus for years without any action from the school’s leaders.
Students Sabrina Soffer, Ari Shapiro, and a group of anonymous plaintiffs accused GW of failing to address a surge in hostility towards Jewish students, particularly following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, according to a copy of the complaint obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, claims the university violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by allowing a “hostile educational environment” to flourish unchecked.
The 176-page complaint details a litany of incidents that paint GW as a campus where Jewish students face relentless intimidation. According to the filing, anti-Semitic acts include physical assaults, vandalism, and verbal harassment, with university administrators allegedly turning a blind eye. The lawsuit cites specific examples, such as anti-Israel protests that escalated into violence and Jewish students’ property being defaced with anti-Semitic slurs.
The lawsuit comes at a precarious time for elite universities as the Trump administration takes action against schools that fail to rein in campus anti-Semitism. The same day the complaint was filed, the Department of Homeland Security revoked Harvard University’s ability to accept international students, though a judge paused that order on Friday.
Still though, look on the bright side!
Finally, my alma mater is being treated like an Ivy League school, just as it's dreamed about for the last thirty years. https://t.co/JZ87b39z54
Third, antinatalism sounds more like a pathology than an ideology.
Guy Bartkus’ social media posts — if authentic — are telling. He was depressed and felt worthless, so everyone must be worthless. He wanted to destroy himself, so he is somehow justified in destroying others.
Those interviewed in the Today.com article seem just as selfish and/or blinkered in their worldview. Ana describes herself as an “empath” whose heart is broken by human suffering, but concludes therefore that humans should not exist.
Amanda Sukenick, an activist from Chicago, describes her antinatalism as emerging from conversations about the Holocaust with her Jewish and Armenian parents. “I thought a lot about war and how conflict can’t be solved if we keep creating new people,” she says.
This is ahistorical nonsense. Human life on earth is dramatically better than it was 1,000 years ago or even just 100 years ago. There is less war, less suffering, less hunger, less misery. Modern humans have achieved that and more, and few of those living centuries ago could have foreseen it.
Sukenick describes her “perfect solution” to the problem of human suffering as “unplug(ging) the universe so there was nothing.” If this is her takeaway from the Holocaust, she has learned the wrong lesson.
But perhaps her most telling quote is this: “There aren’t children waiting in some sort of purgatory, desperate to be born. There’s nobody there, so we’re creating problems for no good reason.”
The real message here is that humans have no souls. There is no afterlife, no God, no meaning, no real value.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris blasted Anderson Cooper as a “motherf–ker” to colleagues following a tense interview over former President Joe Biden’s catastrophic debate performance against Donald Trump last year, a bombshell new book revealed.
The then-veep unleashed the disparaging remark after the CNN host grilled her on Biden’s cognitive health immediately following his disastrous showing in June — that ignited widespread panic and ultimately led to the octogenarian dropping out of the race.
“This motherf–ker doesn’t treat me like the damn vice president of the United States, she said to colleagues,” according to the new book “Original Sin,” co-authored by Anderson’s CNN colleague Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson.
“I thought we were better than that.”
To be fair, after eight years of the Obama administration and nearly four years of the Obama Biden administration, no wonder Kamala felt like she deserved a similarly fawning treatment from her party’s operatives with bylines. Which helps to understand who the “we” is at the end of Kamala’s outburst.
I’ve been keeping track of the capabilities of various AI companies and the capabilities they’ve put forward. One of the more interesting to me has been the advancement of AI video, which has grown in leaps and bounds over the past few years. People were creating some incredible things through various AI services such as OpenAI’s “Sora.”
But Google just introduced its Veo 3, and I think we might have a new king of AI video generation, and what’s more, I don’t see how Hollywood doesn’t see this and begin having anxiety attacks.
Veo 3 from Google doesn’t just look realistic to a point where you can hardly tell its AI sometimes… but it also introduced sound, and I don’t just mean background noise. I’m talking AI having full-on conversations with each other.
Here’s a sample. There are still those AI hiccups you get such as delayed reactions and random skewing of people or objects, but compared to how this was just a few years ago, it’s minimal. Moreover, pay close attention to how the speech differs based on the location they’re speaking in, such as slight echos or enclosed sound based on the spaces the AI figures fill. That in itself is incredible.
It’s so over.
Google Veo 3 AI does speech and sound for its video generation now.
I feel like even this announcement video from Google doesn’t cover the full range of what it can do. Watch this one as well, and once again, pay attention to the details. Crowd laughter, microphone pops, facial expressions and quirks.
We’ve come a long way in ten years from Industrial Light & Magic’s slow and expensive to create, and yet only so-so digital replications of the late Peter Cushing and 1977-era Carrie Fisher in Star Wars:Rogue One.
Mangione is nothing new. The Left has always turned violent psychopaths into cultural icons as long as they ostensibly supported the Left’s causes. Che Guevara got transformed into a literal fashion icon for decades, despite his bloodthirsty march through 20th century history in support of some of the worst regimes and terrorist groups of his era.
* * * * * * * * *
The Left loves its murderous “revolutionaries,” and Mangione is only their latest crush. They’ve run through the Mansons, the Weathermen, the Red Army Faction/Baader-Meinhof, and the Symbionese Liberation Army, just to name a few. If Antifa were dumb enough to take off their masks, no doubt a handful of them would also achieve icon status on the Left. They might even get their photos onto fashion items and have clueless entertainers toting them around to promote murder and mayhem, as long as their politics aligned properly.
The problem with Che Fever is that it sets the incentives to deliver on that prophecy. That’s why we’re seeing an explosion in violence, such as the arson at Josh Shapiro’s governor’s mansion, assassination attempts on Donald Trump, attacks on Tesla owners and dealers, and the thuggery of Hamasniks on college campuses. The Taylor Lorenzes of the media use them to promote La Causa and hail the violent nutcases as brave soldiers for change. And that’s because the moral compasses of the Taylor Lorenzes of the media skew toward cowardly backshooters and Molotov-cocktail throwers as “morally good,” whether they admit to it or not.
In some ways, the horrific murder of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim z”l at a Jewish event in Washington, DC by a Free Palestine Nazi is an exception to the rule. It is explicable in its logic, and its cause can be easily traced.
Its cause is Free Palestine Nazism itself: The first full-scale antisemitic movement in the United States since the 1930s, led by the Red-Green Alliance between radical progressives and Islamic supremacists.
Its logic is the same as antisemitic murder has always been: the satanic belief in the necessity, the obligation, to kill Jews. This is the logic of everyone from Haman to Hitler, and it remains unchanged since Amalek slaughtered the women and children of the refugees from Pharaoh’s oppression.
We know this is true because, like the movement that birthed him, the swine who committed the atrocity said so. But we know more than that: This is not a matter of one’s man guilt. The complicity is vast and collective.
Put simply, everyone involved in Free Palestine Nazism, from the foot soldiers to the collaborators, the entire antisemitic movement that took to the streets literally the day after the Oct. 7 massacre to hail the murder of Jews, is guilty.
Politicians are guilty, journalists are guilty, activists are guilty, students are guilty, professors are guilty, academic administrators are guilty, the leaders of international institutions are guilty, beloved NGOs are guilty, all of them are guilty. All of them stand indicted. All of them stand condemned.
Related: The tragic naiveté of liberal Jews. “The Nazis didn’t care whether a Jew lit Shabbat candles or marched for Socialist causes. They shoved everyone into the same cattle cars and crematoria. Today, those who chant ‘globalize the intifada’ don’t differentiate between Likud voters and Labor supporters or between reservists in the Israel Defense Forces and Israeli artists protesting judicial reform. Ditto for Rodriguez, who didn’t check the credentials of Lischinsky and Milgrim when he fired several rounds into their bodies.”
The only correct answer being, “Anyplace they want to be, that’s where.” Otherwise, when the Post’s then-sister publication declared at the start of 2009, “We Are All Socialists Now,” I didn’t realize there was a tacit “National” modifier in that headline.
The article itself, with four authors attached to its byline, is a bit more nuanced, until you get to this moment of moral equivalence:
Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel’s subsequent attacks on Gaza, followed by divisions around the world over what had caused the conflict and who was at fault, left the 40-year-old mother of three feeling confused with no easy solution to the conflict in sight. Now, after the shooting at the Capital Jewish Museum on Wednesday she felt similarly disoriented.
And this one:
The shooting at the D.C. museum was tragic, said Joseph Landson, 56, a Navy veteran from Springfield, Virginia. “It’s a horrible time” to be Jewish in America, he said.
The shooting was “just another in an unending string of anti-Israel attacks. Notice I wrote anti-Israel. I really don’t consider the attack antisemitic. New data could change my mind,” Landson said.
Landson, who can’t work due to chronic disease, said he tries to find balance between supporting Israel — but not unconditionally.
While he tries, he wrote The Post, to walk a middle ground, “it feels like moderation is becoming impossible.”
Yes, a shooter yelling “Free Palestine” after murdering two Israeli Embassy staffers outside of the Capital Jewish Museum does tend to make moderation a bit more difficult.
“Should they bring Elon Musk back? His platform X is pretty useful. He said he’s not going to put any more money into politics for the time being,” host Joanna Coles said. “But should the Democrats woo him back or is he too damaged at this point?”
After clarifying Coles meant bringing Musk back into the Democratic Party, the Democratic strategist answered, “No.”
“No? You think he’s done now?” the host followed up.
“Well, I can’t imagine that after all of this that he’d want — I mean, what does he bring? … Look at the damage he’s done to the federal government,” Carville said. “Why do we want him?”
Coles asserted that Musk’s X platform is valuable, but said Carville had a “fair point” about Musk’s government role. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) claims on its website that as of May 11 it had saved taxpayers an estimated $170 billion through terminating and renegotiating contracts, eliminating fraud, cancelling grants and cutting the federal workforce.
For instance, DOGE has substantially cut the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which reportedly squandered taxpayer funds by supporting initiatives that pushed a far-left agenda abroad, along with indirectly backing extremist groups.
“It’s just that he used to be a Democrat,” Coles added. “Then he got embraced and suckered in by the Republicans.”
“Maybe he used to be smart and then he went crazy,” Carville responded.
“I mean, what does he bring?” Yes, the party whose leaders proposed sending men to the moon and demanded that electric cars be a moral imperative are now casting into the cornfield the African-American immigrant who builds spacecraft and electric cars, and who led DOGE, which was an extension of the proposals of Carville’s former boss and Barack Obama.
As Glenn noted in the very early days of Instapundit, “As the old saying has it, the left looks for heretics and the right looks for converts, and both find what they’re looking for. The effect is no doubt subliminal, but people who treat you like crap are, over time, less persuasive than people who don’t. If people on the Left are so unhappy about how many former allies are changing their views, perhaps they should examine how those allies are treated.”
I’ve been researching comedy,” CNN’s Elle Reeve announces grimly at the start of her hour-long interview with comedian Tim Dillon, released this week more than a month after it was recorded. What follows is an extended whine about the manner in which legacy broadcast media in America has ceded its status as the gatekeeper of the American cultural narrative to podcasters.
Is it the most satisfying piece of television I’ve ever watched? Possibly, yes.
The irony – and it’s almost too perfect to articulate – is that had Dillon not demanded, while appearing recently on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, that CNN release the interview in full rather than packaged into a tightly edited segment to fit a specific narrative, it probably would never have seen the light of day.
The viewer quickly becomes aware that Reeve – who has the unfortunate habit of speaking with her eyes closed, as if she cannot bear to look at Dillon – is still far from over the bewildering failure of the American people to seize the God-given opportunity they recently had to elect Kamala Harris as president.*
She wonders if this catastrophe was not the fault of a gang of Rogan-led podcasters who have become the new establishment.
To his credit, Dillon responds to her question in good faith: “To hang this defeat on a few podcasters and to say they were the problem, I just don’t buy the narrative. I don’t think I’m the new establishment. If you weigh a few comedians with podcasts versus all of the people who supported Kamala Harris… multi-billionaires, huge media institutions, a whole political party apparatus, I just don’t think most people are going to buy that. It seems a great way to excuse running an unpopular candidate on a platform the American people weren’t sold on.”
* * * * * * * * *
Watching Reeve’s interview, it is easy to see how through her questions she deliberately casts a wide net, seemingly comfortable in the knowledge that anything contentious or controversial in the responses will be amplified in the editing process. She pushes Dillon, for example, on the fascist-style salutes Elon Musk and Bannon supposedly made, the Machiavellian manner in which Rogan apparently controls American comics, and what she perceives to be the modern cancellation of left-wing comedians.
To this last point, Dillon cites the vast and ongoing success of left-leaning comedians Chelsea Handler, John Mulaney, Sarah Silverman and Bill Burr. When he mentions Louis CK, she instinctively makes a throat-slitting sign to imply cancellation. He continues: “Is Trevor Noah not popular? He does arenas. He’s one of the most popular comedians in the country… Where’s Amy Schumer? I don’t know. Maybe she’s in her $15 million townhouse in Brooklyn. I think she’ll be OK.”
CNN journo tells Tim Dillon that there are no left-of-center comedians. Tim Dillon rattles off a dozen 😂 pic.twitter.com/qgiH5DiWuX
* Christian Toto notes that Dillon told Reeve, “his podcast bookers reached out to both Sen. Bernie Sanders and Gov. Tim Walz to appear on his podcast, presumably before Election Day. Both declined the invitation.”
As Natalie Sandoval of the Daily Caller adds, Tim Dillon Agrees To Interview With CNN And It Went Exactly How You Expect. “Kudos to CNN for airing the entire interview. The true ineptitude of the CNN brain trust, sans editing, is a sight to behold. If only there was a way to play Reeve’s portion of the interview at double speed. Not that I’d dare fast forward through a second of her insights, but because she speaks with all the vitality of a patient hooked up to a morphine drip.”
Say what you will about Cathy Newman grilling Jordan Peterson, at least she brought plenty of energy to the proceedings. Reeve appears in the interview to be the equivalent of this meme if it had downed a whole bottle of Mandrax:
(Artwork by Jon Gabriel.)
THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning – Oh, Dear…
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is not only exceptionally good at her job, but she refuses to suffer fools gladly. NBC News Washington correspondent Yamiche Alcindor found this out the hard way, and it was glorious. On any given day, there are 50 or so correspondents in the briefing room clamoring to be called upon, so when Leavitt acknowledges you and says, “Go ahead,” your questions should be well-thought-through and on point. Thursday morning, Alcindor chose to pour milk on stupid and gobble it down.
And how:
"What’s unsubstantiated!?"
Things get heated when NBC News’ Yamiche Alcindor questions the veracity of the White House’s video on the political persecution and murder of white farmers in South Africa.
The music had been bad, all afternoon. I didn’t feel like listening to anything that my own device was serving up, since it’s in that mood where it thinks I only want chamber music, like it’s Sunday morning at home and I’m buttering a croissant and the music is dialed down low to indicate that we are cultured people who appreciate the finer things, even if they’re an indistinct stream of rote Baroque cliches turned out by the yard by some bewigged guy who was probably dosing his syphillis with mercury. But this meant listening to the execrable pop krep on the gym speakers. And here I thought: this is it, the sign that my brain has gone over, something’s wrong, a wire snapped, a lobe died.
It was Wild Thing by Tone Loc. But it was different. I don’t know how to describe it. The guitar part was . . . wrong somehow, and the fill that followed was correct but thicker. The vocals were meaner. The whole thing was darker and abrasive, like the original, except after five years in jail. When I looked it up I saw that it was indeed Wild Thing, but a re-recorded version.
Whew. If someone had said “say, you have a look of sudden relief,” I would have said “I just realized that Tone Loc’s producer had intentionally fuzzed up the guitar, and that this was not a sign of a stroke.”
We are at a cultural dead-end when people are re-doing those old songs, just playing with the knobs.
The original “Wild Thing,” from 1988, of course sampled Eddie and Alex Van Halen’s guitar and drums from “Jamie’s Crying.” I assume this is the remix that Lileks is referring to:
It’s just sludge, made by slicing up Ton Loc’s “original” version on a DAW, editing the daylights out of the drums, adding some additional synths and percussion, and reprocessing the guitars and vocals through some outboard effects boxes. It’s a tuned-up copy of a copy of a copy; the aural equivalent of the fourth Michael Keaton in 1996’s Multiplicity:
The leftwing media has argued for a clampdown on rightist rhetoric claiming that it’s “stochastic terrorism.” The idea is that right is “demonizing” some people and thereby increasing the odds that an unhinged person will take the rhetoric as a “permission slip” to shoot the people right-wing people are criticizing.
Drew Holden has a question. Given that a left-wing assassin just gunned down two young, beautiful, completely-innocent people by shouting “Intifada!” and “Free Palestine,” where are the screaming headlines about Stochastic Terrorism today?
* * * * * * * *
After the shooting, the CNN anchor’s main concern is the optics against anti-Israel protesters, not the safety of Jews. Her guest pushes back. It’s an incredible moment of television. pic.twitter.com/8iBFbQgNAA
In a development worthy of a Bond film, Chinese scientists have invented contact lenses that allow a wearer to see in the dark — even when their eyes are shut.
The lenses have enabled users to detect infrared light, a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum usually invisible to the human eye.
Unlike bulky night-vision goggles, which also pick up infrared, they do not require power from batteries. Instead, tiny nanoparticles are embedded into a type of flexible, transparent polymer material already used for conventional contact lenses.
The particles absorb infrared light and convert it to red, blue and green wavelengths, which the human eye can see.
“Our research opens up the potential for non-invasive wearable devices to give people super-vision,” said Professor Tian Xue of the University of Science and Technology of China.
In a paper published in the journal Cell, he and his colleagues suggest that the contact lenses could, with further refinement, be useful not only for night vision but also in foggy or dusty conditions, because infrared penetrates to a greater degree than visible light.
In trials, the lenses were sensitive to low intensity infrared emitted by LEDs. The light they detect sits just beyond the range of human vision, in what’s known as the near-infrared spectrum. Anything that reflects near-infrared, such as landscapes or people, could potentially be made visible.
For now, however, image sharpness limits their usefulness for night vision. Because the lenses sit so close to the retina, fine detail is blurred. To compensate, the team has also made a pair of glasses that harness the same technique, offering a crisper view.
Making the lenses responsive enough to pick up the low levels of infrared that occur naturally at nighttime is another challenge, though this could possibly be overcome by using a lamp to bathe an area in infrared light.
“In the future, by working together with materials scientists and optical experts we hope to make a contact lens with more precise spatial resolution and higher sensitivity,” Xue said.
Geordi La Forge smiles. I wore contact lenses for most of the 1980s, but I think I’m going to hold off a bit though before I put nanoparticles developed by CCP scientists directly in front of my eyeballs.
The former Los Angeles Deputy Mayor of Public Safety, Brian Williams, pleaded guilty on Thursday to threatening to bomb City Hall.
The Department of Justice announced that Williams, 61, of Pasadena, has been charged with a felony count that carries a statutory maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison.
Williams made the threat on Oct. 3, 2024, while he was in office. According to the DOJ’s release, Williams crafted the threat to appear as if it came from an unknown man who was “tired of the city support of Israel, and has decided to place a bomb in City Hall.”
It started while Williams was in an online meeting that day with “multiple people in connection with his official duties,” the release detailed.
During the meeting, Williams picked up an incoming call on his city-issued phone, excused himself and called the L.A. Police Department’s Chief of Staff.
In the conversation with the LAPD chief, Williams said he had just received a call from an unknown man who was threatening to bomb L.A. City Hall.
However, detectives uncovered that what had really happened was that while he was in his online meeting, Williams used the Google Voice application on his personal phone to place a call to his work phone, meaning Williams crafted the actual threat.
In our day, the notion of the clarifying and cleansing power of violence has become a key element of activist thinking on college campuses, as embodied not by ignorant young students but by advanced-degreed teachers. George Washington University lecturer Jessica Krug made a name for herself by justifying child murder in the name of anti-colonialism (before being drummed out of the public square for claiming falsely to be African-American). The 2018 slaughter of 15-year-old Lesandro “Junior” Guzman-Feliz by a machete-wielding Dominican gang in New York City might have been ugly, Krug conceded. But it was also reminiscent of revolutionary reversals like the South African practice of “necklacing,” in which collaborators with the apartheid government had their necks fitted with a rubber tire filled with gasoline that was then set alight. “That kind of violence toward people who are collaborating, or who are working against their communities,” Krug said, “we have to consider a radical moment in 2018 in which people are using machetes to hack apart a 15-year-old boy who’s working with the police.”
Down in South Carolina, Clemson University professor Bart Knijnenburg declared, “I admire anyone who stands up against white supremacy, violent or non-violent” during the “Punch Nazis” craze. Over in Ohio, Oberlin assistant professor Jenny Garcia observed that “protests, even when there is violence, right, can make it a more salient issue and provide greater pressure on elected officials and candidates.” She went on: “When we see the destruction of buildings, when we see violence—either by police or by protesters themselves—we actually see greater response by elected officials.” Former Texas A&M associate professor of philosophy Tommy Curry dispensed with all the high-flown euphemisms and got right down to business. “In order to be equal, in order to be liberated, some white people might have to die,” he mused.
This intellectual environment is profoundly redolent of the one in which the violent radicals of the late 1960s and early 1970s were steeped. Terrorist groups like Weather Underground, the FALN, and the Black and Symbionese Liberation Armies—organizations that engaged in targeted assassinations and thousands of domestic bombings from the late 1960s through the late 1970s—immersed their members in revolutionary literature to help their followers think of actual people as abstractions, the better to disengage their emotions from the maiming and killing they were pursuing.
In his chronicle of the Students for a Democratic Society and its devolution into a variety of factions, Kirkpatrick Sale identified the psychological predisposition that had radicalized so many of the SDS members. “There was a primary sense, begun by no more than a reading of the morning papers and developed through the new perspectives and new analyses available to the Movement now, that the evils in America were the evils of America, inextricably a part of the total system,” he wrote. “Clearly, something drastic would be necessary to eradicate those evils and alter that system.”
This explanation is as true of today’s left as it was of the left when it was written in 1973. Just as 1960s and 1970s liberals came to echo revolutionary rhetoric that contributed to the foul atmosphere in the country rather than looking to stem the passions and cool the national temperature, so too do today’s liberals make common cause with those who believe the American system is delegitimizing itself.
Read the whole thing.
Flashback: Jon Gabriel last year: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same. “One year, statues are toppled and the next, Jews are bullied, but it’s amazing how the far-left treats such wildly diverse issues with the same small toolbox. It has ever been thus. As one radical wrote for a Students for a Democratic Society publication in the 1960s, ‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.'”
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