And so the War of the Baby Boomers has now come full circle, and for those of us who were in college at the end of the Sixties it’s déjà vu all over again. The urgent need of the postwar generation to protest something, anything, is now — like them — in its dotage but still lashing out at the thing it’s always hated: the United States of America. Only this time, they’re on the receiving end of the nasty activism of which they were the first modern practitioners.
And it’s happening precisely at Ground Zero of the anti-American revolution: Columbia University, the American home of the Frankfurt School. The tragic irony is that an “intellectual” movement of largely German-Jewish Marxists, refugees from National Socialist Germany, has now been weaponized against the Jews themselves, with anti-Semitic outbreaks on campuses and elsewhere across the country — this time with the Jews cast in the role of the Nazis. (The current moment is not, it should be noted, the first time Columbia’s had a Jewish problem.)
“I would like to observe that the older generation had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us. They gave us this Thing, knocked to pieces, red-hot, threatening to blow up; and then they are surprised that we don’t accept it with the same enthusiasm with which they received it.”
It’s a headline that certainly grabs your attention.
“Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice,” read the title of an April 29, 2020 article in The Atlantic.
Written by staff writer Amanda Mull, the story suggested Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s decision to reverse course on the state’s shutdown and lift restrictions on businesses was an experiment to see “how many people need to lose their lives to shore up the economy.”
The decision, readers were told, was reckless and deadly.
“Public-health officials broadly agree that reopening businesses—especially those that require close physical contact—in places where the virus has already spread will kill people,” Mull wrote.
Without the government to protect them, all Georgians could do is “try to protect themselves as best they can,” Mull said. But she concluded that, because of the way the virus works, another deluge of cases “could be inevitable.”
“[It] may be two or three weeks before hospitals see a new wave of people whose lungs look like they’re studded with ground glass in X-rays,” Mull wrote. “By then, there’s no telling how many more people could be carrying the disease into nail salons or tattoo parlors, going about their daily lives because they were told they could do so safely.”
In April 2020, businesses in Georgia were shuttered by government decree as in most of the rest of the country. Mr. Kemp was hearing from desperate entrepreneurs: “ ‘Look man, we’re losing everything we’ve got. We can’t keep doing this.’ And I really felt like there was a lot of people fixin’ to revolt against the government.”
The Trump administration “had that damn graph or matrix or whatever that you had to fit into to be able to do certain things,” Mr. Kemp recalls. “Your cases had to be going down and whatever. Well, we felt like we met the matrix, and so I decided to move forward and open up.” He alerted Vice President Mike Pence, who headed the White House’s coronavirus task force, before publicly announcing his intentions on April 20.
That afternoon Mr. Trump called Mr. Kemp, “and he was furious.” Mr. Kemp recounts the conversation as follows:
“Look, the national media’s all over me about letting you do this,” Mr. Trump said. “And they’re saying you don’t meet whatever.”
Mr. Kemp replied: “Well, Mr. President, we sent your team everything, and they knew what we were doing. You’ve been saying the whole pandemic you trust the governors because we’re closest to the people. Just tell them you may not like what I’m doing, but you’re trusting me because I’m the governor of Georgia and leave it at that. I’ll take the heat.”
“Well, see what you can do,” the president said. “Hair salons aren’t essential and bowling alleys, tattoo parlors aren’t essential.”
“With all due respect, those are our people,” Mr. Kemp said. “They’re the people that elected us. They’re the people that are wondering who’s fighting for them. We’re fixin’ to lose them over this, because they’re about to lose everything. They are not going to sit in their basement and lose everything they got over a virus.”
Mr. Trump publicly attacked Mr. Kemp: “He went on the news at 5 o’clock and just absolutely trashed me. . . . Then the local media’s all over me—it was brutal.” The president was still holding daily press briefings on Covid. “After running over me with the bus on Monday, he backed over me on Tuesday,” Mr. Kemp says. “I could either back down and look weak and lose all respect with the legislators and get hammered in the media, or I could just say, ‘You know what? Screw it, we’re holding the line. We’re going to do what’s right.’ ” He chose the latter course. “Then on Wednesday, him and [Anthony] Fauci did it again, but at that point it didn’t really matter. The damage had already been done there, for me anyway.”
The damage healed quickly once businesses began reopening on Friday, April 24. Mr. Kemp quotes a state lawmaker who said in a phone call: “I went and got my hair cut, and the lady that cuts my hair wanted me to tell you—and she started crying when she told me this story—she said, ‘You tell the governor I appreciate him reopening, to allow me to make a choice, because . . . if I’d have stayed closed, I had a 95% chance of losing everything I’ve ever worked for. But if I open, I only had a 5% chance of getting Covid. And so I decided to open, and the governor gave me that choice.’”
At that point, Florida was still shut down. Mr. DeSantis issued his first reopening order on April 29, nine days after Mr. Kemp’s. On April 28, the Florida governor had visited the White House, where, as CNN reported, “he made sure to compliment the President and his handling of the crisis, praise Trump returned in spades.”
Three years later, here’s the thanks Mr. DeSantis gets: This Wednesday Mr. Trump issued a statement excoriating “Ron DeSanctimonious” as “a big Lockdown Governor on the China Virus.” As Mr. Trump now tells the tale, “other Republican Governors did MUCH BETTER than Ron and, because I allowed them this ‘freedom,’ never closed their States. Remember, I left that decision up to the Governors!”
But then, many on the left forgot their obsession with lockdowns, when, to paraphrase Martha and the Vandellas, the summer of 2020 was here, and the time was right for rioting in the street.
April 28, 2024
EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN! Back in 1968, Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, kicking off a whole slew of doomsday literature and documentaries, and similarly-apocalyptic science fiction movies from Hollywood that wouldn’t stop until the massive success of George Lucas’ Star Wars completely upended the American movie industry in 1977. Perhaps leftist “intellectuals” were simply driven utterly mad when Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968; this 2010 segment of Matt Novak’s Paleofuture YouTube series gives a hint of the tone of the first half of the 1970s:
And with Trump showing surprisingly good poling numbers (insert the usual insta-reminder to eschew cockiness here), the Politico have dusted off their bell-bottom jeans, platform shoes, grown some groovy long sideburns, and is ready to boogie on back to the doomsday population trend! The Far Right’s Campaign to Explode the Population.
The threat, we are told here this weekend, is existential, biological, epoch-defining. Economies will fail, civilizations will fall, and it will all happen because people aren’t having enough babies.
“The entire global financial system, the value of your money, and every asset you might buy with money is defined by leverage, which means its value depends on growth,” Kevin Dolan, a 37-year-old father of six from Virginia, tells the crowd that has gathered to hear him speak. “Every country in the developed world and most countries in the developing world face long-term population decline at a level that makes growth impossible to maintain,” Dolan says, “which means we are sitting on the bubble of all bubbles.”
Despite this grim prognosis, the mood is optimistic. It’s early December, a few weeks before Christmas, and the hundred-odd people who have flocked to Austin for the first Natal Conference are here to come up with solutions. Though relatively small, as conferences go, NatalCon has attracted attendees who are almost intensely dedicated to the cause of raising the U.S. birth rate. The broader natalist movement has been gaining momentum lately in conservative circles — where anxieties over falling birth rates have converged with fears of rising immigration — and counts Elon Musk, who has nearly a dozen children, and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán among its proponents. Natalism is often about more than raising birth rates, though that is certainly one of its aims; for many in the room, the ultimate goal is a total social overhaul, a culture in which child-rearing is paramount.
NatalCon’s emphasis on childbirth notwithstanding, there are very few women in the cavernous conference room of the LINE Hotel. The mostly male audience includes people of all ages, many of whom are childless themselves. Some of the women in attendance, however, have come to Austin with their children in tow — a visual representation of the desired outcome of this weekend. As if to emphasize the reason we’re all gathered here today, a baby babbles in the background while Dolan delivers his opening remarks.
Broadly speaking, the people who have paid as much as $1,000 to attend the conference are members of the New Right, a conglomeration of people in the populist wing of the conservative movement who believe we need seismic changes to the way we live now — and who often see the past as the best model for the future they’d like to build. Their ideology, such as it exists, is far from cohesive, and factions of the New Right are frequently in disagreement. But this weekend, these roughly aligned groups, from the libertarian-adjacent tech types to the Heritage Foundation staffers, along with some who likely have no connection with traditionally conservative or far-right causes at all, have found a unifying cause in natalism.
This just in: religious people seek to make babies! Speaking of which, the Politico’s long-form article feels much like a Bizarro World version of Mark Steyn’s America Alone book from 2006, which grew out of a lengthy Wall Street Journal and New Criterion article Steyn published at the beginning of that year headlined, “It’s the Demography, Stupid.”
Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries. There’ll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands–probably–just as in Istanbul there’s still a building called St. Sophia’s Cathedral. But it’s not a cathedral; it’s merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon Western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the West.
One obstacle to doing that is that, in the typical election campaign in your advanced industrial democracy, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much all parties in the rest of the West are largely about what one would call the secondary impulses of society–government health care, government day care (which Canada’s thinking of introducing), government paternity leave (which Britain’s just introduced). We’ve prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family, faith and, most basic of all, reproductive activity–“Go forth and multiply,” because if you don’t you won’t be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare.
Americans sometimes don’t understand how far gone most of the rest of the developed world is down this path: In the Canadian and most Continental cabinets, the defense ministry is somewhere an ambitious politician passes through on his way up to important jobs like the health department. I don’t think Don Rumsfeld would regard it as a promotion if he were moved to Health and Human Services.
The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyperrationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a 21st-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only by conversion. The problem is that secondary-impulse societies mistake their weaknesses for strengths–or, at any rate, virtues–and that’s why they’re proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam.
Speaking of which, if we are at war–and half the American people and significantly higher percentages in Britain, Canada and Europe don’t accept that proposition–then what exactly is the war about?
We know it’s not really a “war on terror.” Nor is it, at heart, a war against Islam, or even “radical Islam.” The Muslim faith, whatever its merits for the believers, is a problematic business for the rest of us. There are many trouble spots around the world, but as a general rule, it’s easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants: Muslims vs. Jews in “Palestine,” Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs. Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs. Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists in Bali. Like the environmentalists, these guys think globally but act locally.
Maryam Alwan figured the worst was over after New York City police in riot gear arrested her and other protesters on the Columbia University campus, loaded them onto buses and held them in custody for hours.
But the next evening, the college junior received an email from the university. Alwan and other students were being suspended after their arrests at the “ Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” a tactic colleges across the country have deployed to calm growing campus protests against the Israel-Hamas war.
The students’ plight has become a central part of protests, with students and a growing number of faculty demanding their amnesty. At issue is whether universities and law enforcement will clear the charges and withhold other consequences, or whether the suspensions and legal records will follow students into their adult lives.
As noted above, the students are fearful that their arrest records and suspensions will “follow them into their adult lives.” Based on their recent actions, I realize that we’re not dealing with the fastest set of tractors on the farm here, but I have a news flash for these rioters. Nearly every one of you is at least 18 years old and some of the juniors and seniors are in their twenties. You are already in your “adult life,” despite the fact that you’re not acting in a very mature fashion.
In 1993, at a Cato Institute dinner, P.J. O’Rourke famously said, “There’s only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.”
Why aren’t today’s college protestors willing to live the consequences of their actions? It’s almost as if they’re still in the Marlon Brando, “What are you rebelling against? Whaddya got?” Jurassic school of reactionary protests, and don’t actually believe in the cause du jour.
Gov. Greg Abbott’s plan to reopen Texas will allow some businesses — like retail stores, restaurants, movie theaters and malls — to open as early as Friday, with new rules outlined by the governor’s taskforce.
Abbott also said a second wave of openings and looser restrictions that will include barbershops, hair salons, bars and gyms could go into effect as early as May 18, as long as the state sees “two weeks of data to confirm no flare-up of COVID-19.”
I’ll give this University of Utah student some credit. Unlike most “progressives” he wasn’t afraid to say exactly what Biden’s open border is really all about. I was so surprised he admitted it, I asked him to repeat himself.
● Jared Bernstein, member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors: “One thing we learned in the 1990s was that a surefire way to reconnect the fortunes of working people at all skill levels, immigrant and native-born alike, to the growing economy is to let the job market tighten up. A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers to get and keep the workers they need. One equally surefire way to sort-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.”
Although the UK has opted out, meaning it will not be a requirement on British roads, the technology will still be installed in most cars, and drivers can choose to switch it off on a daily basis.
Steve Gooding, director of the RAC Foundation, an independent research organisation, told the Sunday Times: “I think many motorists will tire of switching off ISA and they will just learn to live with it.”
Mr Gooding said it would take autonomy away from drivers, with cars increasingly deciding what drivers can and can’t do, and said it was the beginning of the end of people choosing cars based on top speed.
ISA has a forward-facing camera that can recognise speed limit signs and is integrated with GPS mapping data so the car always knows what limit applies to its location.
When fitted, the technology will send a warning beep or the steering wheel will vibrate when drivers pass the speed limit. If the driver does not take action, the accelerator will ease up, reducing the speed to keep in line with the limit.
Manufacturers including Ford have been offering ISA as an option on new cars since 2015, and it has been mandatory on all new cars sold in Europe since 2022, but could be switched off.
Flashback to Charles Cooke in 2017: The War on Driving to Come. Or as Iowahawk warned right around the same time, America “needs a Second Amendment protecting the right to keep and bear cars.”
Catholic advocacy group Catholic Answers released the desktop-accessible AI priest earlier this week, but users have dubbed the app “creepy”.
The Catholic chatbot has been offering sexist advice, outdated views on women, as well as absolutions in what one user called an “Ethical, Theological, and Privacy Nightmare”.
Father Justin was quickly defrocked of his robes, and now wears a shirt and blazer, after it repeatedly claimed it was a real member of the clergy.
The AI bot talks about its ‘childhood’ in Assisi, Italy and that “from a young age, I felt a strong calling to the priesthood,” Futurism reported.
The bizarre app appeared like it was convincing users that it was a real priest, with reported statements like: “I am as real as the faith we share.”
New details about Jim Biden’s foreign fundraising efforts are spilling out in a Kentucky bankruptcy court, where recent testimony indicates that President Joe Biden’s brother partnered with Qatari government officials in his quest to find money for U.S. health care ventures.
The sworn testimony by fund manager Michael Lewitt, a former business partner of Jim Biden’s, attests that two companies that facilitated the efforts were part-owned by “members of the Qatari government.”
One company named in the testimony partnered directly with Jim Biden in the multi-year fundraising efforts.
The second company provided financial backing for a series of loans that a hospital chain paid Jim Biden to arrange, according to documents and testimony Lewitt submitted in the course of the federal bankruptcy proceedings.
If substantiated, the alleged arrangements would constitute some of the closest known financial links between a relative of President Joe Biden and a foreign government.
More than 1,000 people marched through Hamburg on Saturday calling for a caliphate in Germany.
Protesters gathered in the northern city for a mostly peaceful demonstration against Islamophobia, but among the masses were calls for an Islamic state.
Joe Adade Boateng, leader of Muslim Interaktiv which organised the march, said in a speech at the march that Germany needed a “righteous caliphate” to remedy the misrepresentation Muslim groups have faced in the media.
He was greeted with cheers of “Allahu akbar”, or God is great, by a mostly male crowd, some of whom were holding up signs reading “Caliphate is the solution” and “Stop the media hate”.
In 2017, the Women’s March was launched in reaction to the #MeToo revelations, while in 2018, the anti-gun March for Our Lives dominated headlines. Neither attracted much violence; you could find that at anti-Trump protests.
In 2019, Greta Thunberg grimaced at the United Nations over climate change, which apparently was solved by blocking traffic and throwing tomato soup on Van Gogh paintings. This Monday was Earth Day, but it didn’t get much coverage. Environmentalism is so five years ago.
The pandemic put the kibosh on public gatherings, which made mass protests a bit hypocritical. So, the anger went online. In 2021, it was COVID masks and vaccines, while in 2022, anyone skeptical of funding Ukraine was labeled a Putin devotee.
But those annoying COVID restrictions were put on hold back in 2020, just as the virus was at its peak. Black Lives Matter protests swamped cities from coast-to-coast, often peaceful during the day but turning ugly by night.
Downtown Seattle was turned into the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone while Portland burned for months.
What uproar are we planning for 2025?
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.”
All the topics cited above are important issues for public debate. Sexism in the workplace to gun control to wars abroad, each is worthy of media attention, no matter the year.
What’s bizarre is the singular focus on one moral panic each summer to the exclusion of everything else. Earth Day was huge in 2019, while in 2022 it was met with a yawn.
Mr Biden’s speech, which lasted around 10 minutes, made no mention of the ongoing war or the growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
“Shame on you!” protesters draped in the traditional Palestinian keffiyeh cloth shouted, running after men in tuxedos and suits and women in long dresses who were holding clutch purses as guests hurried inside for the dinner.
Chants accused US journalists of undercovering the war and misrepresenting it. “Western media we see you, and all the horrors that you hide,” crowds chanted at one point.
Other protesters lay sprawled motionless on the pavement, next to mock-ups of flak vests with “press” insignia.
Ralliers cried “Free, free Palestine’’. They cheered when at one point someone inside the Washington Hilton — where the dinner has been held for decades — unfurled a Palestinian flag from a top-floor hotel window.
Criticism of the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s six-month-old military offensive in Gaza has spread through American college campuses, with students pitching encampments in an effort to force their universities to divest from Israel. Counterprotests back Israel’s offensive and complain of antisemitism.
Presumably, the DNC-MSM has no objections about the monsters they’ve created, and don’t lose too much sleep over the brief discomfort of walking the gauntlet on the way to their pampered dinner with their bosses — and John Gill, as well.
BLAIR’S LAW: “Coined by Australian journalist, Tim Blair as ‘the ongoing process by which the world’s multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force.’”
See also:
NOW: Mumia Abu-Jamal is calling in to the CUNY-CCNY encampment from prison. Students blast his phone call over the encampment audio system. pic.twitter.com/AIWGeYG6mm
“What had made March 3, 2022 a different kind of day?” reads the Post story. “Maybe it was the [electroconvulsive therapy]. Maybe it was timing, the mania and depression coming together in his brain. Maybe Greene was ‘the worst person at the worst time to cross my path,’ he says. Maybe he needed to ‘be heard,’ he says, and the threat had been an expression of his loneliness and regrets. If he still spoke to his children, if his mom were still alive, if he still worked full time, if he hadn’t been watching so much TV news, if the news wasn’t about a country where so many people were making so many threats, maybe that night would have been different.”
[Joe] Morelli said he was “manic” but “clear and focused” the day he called Greene’s office and issued threats in March 2022, the Post story reads. Morelli felt “untouchable, like he could jump from a building and land on his feet.”
Morelli had made the threats to Greene after seeing a campaign ad on TV depicting her firing a .50-caliber sniper at a Toyota Prius with the word “SOCIALISM” plastered on the side of the car, explaining she was “going to blow away the Democrats’ socialist agenda,” according to the Post. This angered Morelli, who was suffering from mania and depression.
“A few things Morelli hated about that ad: He had especially disliked Greene ever since he saw a video of her heckling a survivor of the Parkland, Fla., school shooting, outside the Capitol in 2019,” the Post story reads. “He also hated guns, like the one she had pointed at the word “SOCIALISM.” Then there were times when Morelli hated himself, and his connection to that word, because he relied on disability benefits, which he considered to be a form of socialism, one he believed in, but one that had been a source of some shame, too.”
Yes, it’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, she of the Jewish space lasers and “Gazpacho Police.” But it’s still astonishing to read the WaPo’s fawning profile of a man who threatened a politician. But then for the Post, no enemies to the left, to coin a socialist-approved phrase.
“Ninety-nine percent of the time, to 99 percent of people, I’m an extremely polite, sweet guy,” Morelli told the Post. “In ordinary life, it takes a lot to get me upset.”
“He takes a sip of coffee. He gets up from the couch, opens the back door, and for now, at least, as he leaves the apartment, he feels no anger. He is a stone in a lake, gently and slowly floating,” the story ends.
I didn’t know stones could float. Say what you will about Ben Bradlee, but he would have had the good sense to draw a red pencil through at least that line, if he didn’t nix this story entirely. In contrast today, as Josh Barro asked in 2022: Are There Any Adults at the Washington Post? As Iowahawk noted around the same time, Barro was clearly asking the question rhetorically:
UPDATE: “We’re Going to Get the Society We Incentivize,” John Hawkins writes, asking, “What kind of society do you want to live in?” “This is another reason why it’s so dumb to cheerlead protesters going to people’s private residences or confronting politicians in public. One day, you’re AOC cheerleading on the dirtbags harassing Brett Kavanaugh in public…Next thing you know, you’re the one being harassed in public. The video starts with her saying, ‘I need you to understand that this is not okay.’ This is why it’s valuable to have rules of conduct that apply universally, as opposed to, ‘Anything my tribe does is okay and anything those other guys do is bad.’ It never ends up working that way long-term.”
Even though all of this is a direct violation of these universities’ alleged codes of conduct, as well as numerous local, state, and federal laws, those who have the power to stop them have refused to do so. Many have endorsed the mob and more still are too terrified to take action against what they know to be evil.
They have good reason. They know quite well that if they were to take effective action, if they were to enforce their own codes, laws, and alleged principles, they would have to expel large sections of their student bodies. They would have to fire equally large numbers of faculty. They would have to cleanse their administrations of enablers and collaborators. They would have to break the regime. This, they are utterly unwilling to do.
The reason is 1968. Even if they know that the mob is immoral and indeed monstrous, those who should know better—who do know better—are still ‘68ers. They believe in the basic tenets of 1968ism: America is corrupted by racism, imperialism, patriarchy, and their attendant evils. Radical action is necessary to change this. There are no enemies to the left. The chickens come home to roost by any means necessary. Ideological deviationism cannot be tolerated. Ideological deviationism is whatever they happen to disapprove of at any given moment. If all else fails, exterminate all the brutes.
The result of all this is now clear: The ‘68ers and the radical left as a whole have collapsed into something very like Nazism. Whatever their protestations otherwise, the parallels are obvious: Theirs is a minority movement that wields the mob to impose its ideology on the majority. It sees the past as compromised and corrupt and will redeem it by any means necessary. It looks to a glorious future of tyrannical virtue. It takes over institutions of education, government, and culture and uses them to destroy those institutions and impose a totalitarian regime. It is perfectly willing to use horrific violence to achieve this. Its capacity to tolerate dissent is nil. And now, it has embraced racism, antisemitism, and genocide. Exterminate all the brutes.
All of this was probably inevitable. Radical movements always compound their radicalism and the world always resists them because that is the nature of the world. In the end, their compounded radicalism results in compounded and enraging failure. Indeed, despite their best efforts, the ‘68ers have succeeded in only partial conquest of elite institutions. A strong conservative movement parries them at every turn. They know that to impose a totalitarian regime on a nation with a 250-year history of political and social liberty is all but impossible. The only recourse is vengeance through apocalyptic violence. If they can’t have the country, no one else can either. They feel compelled towards a seppuku, a glorious suicide, a mass self-immolation, and they intend to take everyone else down with them.
Few things make me happier than this kind of blue-on-blue violence.
If that’s not already awesome enough, imagine the look on Times’ publisher A.G. Sulzberger’s face when he learned that Biden would sit down for a Howard Stern interview, the guy responsible for all this.
Better still, imagine the look on Sulzberger’s face when Biden made news on Stern’s Sirius XM show for finally agreeing to debate former President Trump (at least for now).
Whether it’s a Republican or Democrat doing it, I do not care. Nothing makes me happier than watching the elite corporate media, especially a fake news outlet like the serial liars at the New York Times, treated with contempt because that’s what they all deserve: scorn and contempt.
Whatever it takes to knock these outlets off their unearned pedestals is okay with me.
And the Times is in a real pickle. Normally, to pressure a president or politician to do its bidding, a news outlet will hammer and hammer the guy until the pressure makes him fold. The Times can no longer do that to a Democrat, especially Biden. The tail (subscribers) wag the dog (Sulzberger) over there. If the Times hits Biden too hard or begins to tell too many truths about him, their far-left subscribers will revolt and cancel subscriptions. This is a newspaper beholden to its extremist customers, which has killed its independence.
This means Biden can snub them without any fear of the Times doing something that might cause any serious political damage to his reelection campaign.
The great Roger Scruton would have been 80 this past February 27th, and to commemorate the event, Jash Dolani, a poster on X, put up a list of 11 Scruton quotes, which I repost below:
1. Scruton on the fundamental right-wing impulse: “Conservatism starts from the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.”
2. The hypocrisy of liberals: “Liberty is not the same thing as equality, and that those who call themselves liberals are far more interested in equalizing than in liberating their fellows.”
3. Scruton on when to ignore a writer: “A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t. Deconstruction deconstructs itself, and disappears up its own behind, leaving only a disembodied smile and a faint smell of sulphur.”
As a modern conservative, Scruton defends a form of democracy unknown to Aristotle. Following David Hume and Edmund Burke, however, he opposes the idea that the “political order is founded on a contract.” For Scruton, the state of nature is a chimera—an invention of modern political philosophers who had forgotten the debt and gratitude owed to our predecessors. The fictitious state of nature—so central to philosophical liberalism—obscures the fact that membership in a community, with its requisite duties and obligations, is a precondition for meaningful freedom. “Absolute freedom”—doing whatever one wants—is always an invitation to anarchy or tyranny. In the modern world, the nation is the political form that guarantees membership and self-government.
In all of his political writings, Scruton takes on the Left for scorning existing norms and customs, and for promoting a “culture of repudiation.” The Left is “negative.” It dismisses “every aspect of our cultural capital” with the language of brutal invective: accusing every defender of human nature and sound tradition of “racism,” “xenophobia,” “homophobia,” and “sexism.” Like 1984’s “two minutes of hate,” this language tears down, intimidates, and can never build anything humane or constructive—it is nihilistic to the core. At the same time, Scruton wants to reach out to reasonable liberals who eschew ideology and who still believe in civility and the promise of national belonging. His conservatism can discern the truth in liberalism (another Aristotelian trait) while the partisans of repudiation see half the human race as enemies.
Getting beyond “the culture of repudiation” seems particularly timely this week.
One of the men who was part of the siege of the Capitol building is John Earle Sullivan, an extreme BLM activist from Utah. He was arrested & charged in July 2020 over a BLM-antifa riot where drivers in Provo were threatened & one was shot. https://t.co/C0WQsEfcIGpic.twitter.com/Kxm5du2Ozs
John Earle Sullivan who previously gave a speech at a Black Lives Matter rally in DC, has been sentenced to 6 years after being charged with felony obstruction of an official proceeding and civil disorder.
Prosecutors in the case said that Sullivan sought to “incite violence” and “foment anarchy” during the Capitol protests on J6, according to NBC News.
”I brought my megaphone to instigate sh*t,” he told jurors in the case. He previously gave a speech at a BLM rally in DC in 2020.
Read the whole thing.
THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC CALLED AND SAID THAT IT’S TIME TO HIT THE BRAKES ON 2024:
Want extra layers on this one?
The drag queen, “Lil Miss Hot Mess”, is University of Arizona Professor Harris Kornstein.
Kornstein received a $60,000 grant from the National Endowment for Humanities https://t.co/7xANUV2dRo
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) in a forthcoming book describes shooting a family dog after a hunting trip, according to a report in The Guardian, which obtained a copy of the book, “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward.”
In the book, Noem, who has been discussed as a possible running mate for former President Trump, describes growing angry with the nearly 14-month-old “Cricket,” a wirehaired pointer, during a hunting trip.
Noem shot the dog after taking it on a pheasant hunt.
She writes that she had taken Cricket on the hunt hoping she would learn from older dogs, but that instead the younger dog ruined the hunt by “chasing all those birds and having the time of her life,” per the Guardian.
On the way home, the dog escaped her truck and attacked a local family’s chickens, “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another,” Noem wrote.
When Noem tried to grab the dog, she wrote that it whipped around to bite her. Noem said she wrote the family a check for their chickens and helped them dispose of the carcasses “littering the scene of the crime.”
“I hated that dog,” she wrote, adding that Cricket was untrainable, dangerous and worthless as a hunting dog.
“At that moment,” Noem wrote, “I realized I had to put her down.”
After Jim Treacher’s classic “Obama ate a dog” discovery in 2012, and all of Biden’s woes with Commander, I’d assume that publication of this is battlefield prep by the Democrats to reduce the odds that Trump picks Noem as his veep nominee (“Kristi Noem puppy” is the first autocomplete upon entering her name into Firefox’s Google search bar and according to the search engine, “about 261,000 results” immediately pop up). But why on earth would Noem put this detail into her de rigueur election year book and give them the ammunition?
An arrogant New York District Attorney refused to stop for a cop after she was caught speeding because she ‘didn’t feel like it’ and was stressed from dealing with murders all day.
Monroe County DA Sandra Doorley had a tense interaction with a Webster police officer on Monday after the cop tried to pull her over for driving 55 miles per hour in a 35 miles per hour zone.
Bodycam footage shows the heated exchange – in which Doorley said ‘I didn’t feel like stopping on Phillips Road at 5:30.’ The officer responded ‘That’s not your choice… you know that.’ Doorley quipped back ‘I made it my choice.’
According to Doorley, instead of pulling over at the time she decided to call Webster Police Chief Dennis Kohlmeier to say she was not a threat and would talk to the officer back at her house.
As the officer informs her that she made the situation a bigger deal than it needed to be by refusing to pull over, Doorley can be heard responding with ‘just write me the traffic ticket.’
The officer reminded her that it was no longer just a traffic ticket – and that not complying with an officer’s order to stop and pull over is an ‘arrestable offense.’
Doorley explained that she didn’t see the point in pulling over when she was so close to her driveway. ‘I thought it would be easier. I was wrong,’ she said.
As she refuses to step outside her garage, she hands the cop the phone to speak with the police chief telling him ‘leave me alone, this is ridiculous’.
The officer can be heard telling her: ‘What do you want us to do? Not do our job because it is you? You broke another law because of that. You should know better.’
Footage of Doorley reminding voters that there are two classes of people in America. Don’t try this if you see red lights in your rearview mirror:
NEW: Monroe County DA refuses to stop for police after she was caught speeding; ‘I didn't feel like stopping…’
Sandra Doorley was driving 55 mph in a 35 mph zone on Phillips Road in Webster when she chose not to pull over
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