Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds

CATCHING UP WITH 1998: CENTCOM Just Noticing Troop Cell Phones Are a Problem. “This full-blown drooling idiot soldier has a video of the entire inside of his command hut, makes sure he gets shots of all the desks and monitors as he’s swinging on his protective gear at a run. With sirens blaring, he throws open the door to charge outside into the darkness and proceeds to show anyone watching how to get to the bunker and how it, too, is protected from incoming. And this soldier, of the tiny, TINY brain, thought this was a good thing to load to social media for the world to see.”

THE ONLY PROBLEM IS, THE REPUBLICANS ARE THE DEMOCRATS’: Kurt Schlichter: The Democrats Are the Republicans’ Secret Weapon.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve done a lot of media hits and found that I keep facing the same question, even from otherwise friendly interviewers. And it’s a good question.

“Kurt, what are the Republicans offering the voters as a solution to huge problems like affordability, war, and election integrity?”

And my answer is… I don’t know what the hell they’re doing. I know that we’ve got a bunch of poncy dorks running out the clock in the Senate after their constituencies have rejected them for their track record of failure, posturing and posing, and making sure that we absolutely don’t get anything done like the SAVE Act because if true conservatism means anything, it means not doing what conservatives actually want done. Or something.

We’ve got the House. We’ve got the Senate. Lord knows we’ve got the presidency. We even seem to have the Supreme Court. And what do we have to show for it? Actually, a hell of a lot. Donald Trump’s track record is incredible. He’s done more and achieved more and rolled back more of the communist march through our institutions than any president, including the glorious Ronald Reagan, ever dreamed of. But you know what? That was last week. Dudes, what have you done for us lately? That’s the question you’ve always got to answer as a political party, and the answer right now is “Diddly squat.”

Thune, Cornyn, et al. are traitors to their party, and possibly to America. But:

It’s awful to have to run on a platform of “Yeah, we suck but look at those guys—that’s some serious sucking.” But here’s the thing. While we suck, they seriously suck. They supersuck. They are a festival of socialist sucking of such insane intensity that it redefines the concept of sucking such that Stephen Hawking would need to do mathematical calculations otherwise applicable to a black hole to fully express the totality of their sucking.

Let’s look at what the new pinkos on the block had to say on last weekend’s Sunday morning shows. The Democratic Socialists of America is trying to engineer a hostile takeover as they somehow believe that the current crop of Democrats isn’t socialist enough. What’s on their agenda? It’s kind of astonishing that they say it out loud. Their chair, a behemoth called Megan Romer who looks exactly like you would expect the leader of the DSA to look like, came out against having a Senate, having a president, having a Pentagon, having borders, and having prisons. She didn’t hide it—obviously, hiding is not her strong suit—but instead proudly admitted it. This is the cutting edge of the Democrat Party. Congrats, guys. Even John Fetterman, who I used to consider a leftist and now he’s pretty much Genghis Khan in comparison to the rest of his party, called it “anarchy” and asked why the Democrats can’t call out the DSA.

True enough. Read the whole things.

MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: Why Fauci Matters.

KIRA DAVIS ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why do they all have the same glasses? Liberal white women, big glasses, and the legend of Clipboard Karen. “I’ve said it about the weird Antifa looks – blue hair, septum rings, bad skin – and I’ll say it now. This is a uniform. The reason all the worst (public-facing) women look like this is because it’s a uniform. The colorful hair and the nose rings are the rioter-class uniform. The blond corporate cut and the oversized black, square glasses are the manager-class uniform. Same army, different ranks.”

WELL, I NEVER DID:

OVERPRODUCTION OF ELITES: Degrees of Discontent: How Higher Education Created a Downwardly Mobile Elite: America has produced more credentialed elites than the economy has room for—and the DSA is where the surplus is landing. “Those attracted to the DSA appear to be people whose credentials are misaligned with their economic outcomes. Its members are disproportionately rich in credentials yet occupy positions that fall short of the status and financial success their credentials were expected to deliver. . . . Rather than producing a prosperous professional class, American higher education has produced more graduates with elite aspirations than the economy has elite careers to offer. The result is a growing class of frustrated members of an overproduced elite.”

Kenneth Anderson was onto this back during the “Occupy” Movement (remember that?)

Professor Kenneth Anderson of American University has suggested that the Occupy movement is best understood as a struggle between the upper and lower tiers of the elite. In recent years, the upper tier, composed of bankers, financiers, etc., has become decoupled from the lower-tier sub-elite of “Virtue Industry” workers in fields like education, nonprofit activism, social work and the like—with the latter feeling betrayed and abandoned.

Mr. Anderson writes: “It was, after all, the upper tier New Class, the private-public finance consortium, that created the student loan business and inflated the bubble in which these lower tier would-be professionals borrowed the money. It’s a securitization machine, not so very different from the subprime mortgage machine. The asset bubble pops, but the upper tier New Class, having insulated itself and, as with subprime, having taken its cut upfront and passed the risk along, is still doing pretty well. It’s not populism versus the bankers so much as internecine warfare between two tiers of elites. The downward mobility is real, however.”

Still true. (Updated to add missing Ken Anderson link.)

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

THIS:

Torches and pitchforks.

OPEN THREAD: Hump Day.

MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: Why Fauci Matters.

HAHA:

Not as good as Tony Soprano’s version in general, but it fits this setting perfectly.