Category: American Spectator

‘A Familiar If Odd Accent to City Life’

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Daniel Greenfield at FrontPage Magazine:

The New York Times called them “sidewalk ministers” who practice “tough love.” The paper quoted Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center who described them as victims of racism and claimed that they were non-violent.
The Washington Post, in its own puff piece on the Black Hebrew Israelites, also falsely described them as non-violent, and concluded that, “Israelite street preaching in parts of D.C., Philadelphia and New York is commonplace, a familiar if odd accent to city life.”
The odd accent to city life in Jersey City came amid a hail of bullets as two members of the racist black nationalist hate group opened fire in the JC Supermarket. Despite initial claims by the media and the authorities that the Jewish market had not been targeted, David Anderson and Francine Graham ignored passerby on Martin Luther King Dr, to get to the store and kill as many Jewish people as they could.
When the shooting had ended, Moshe Hersh Deutsch, a yeshiva student who was known for helping distribute food packages to the needy, Mrs Leah Mindel Ferencz, a mother of 3 who helped her husband run the grocery store, and Miguel Jason Rodriguez, the father of an 11-year-old daughter and a parishioner at an Assemblies of God church, were all dead.
Anderson, who left behind anti-Semitic and anti-police writings, had also killed Detective Joseph Seals, a father of 5, and wounded Officer Ray Sanchez and Officer Ferenella Fernandez.
The black nationalist terrorist had hated cops and Jews. He managed to kill both.

 

Greenfield makes a point that my brother Kirby made yesterday. Kirby showed me the Google Map of the area, and anyone can see that, after they murdered Det. Seals at Bayview Cemetery, the killers had an easy and obvious escape route — Chapel Avenue to Garfield Avenue to Bayview Avenue and then onto Interstate 78, where they could have fled in either direction. That they did not seek to escape the area is important, and what did the suspects do instead? They drove their stolen U-Haul vehicle directly to JC Kosher Supermarket. We have video that shows the killers ignored every other establishment in that neighborhood, and charged directly into this Jewish-owned business, guns blazing.

 

There is no doubt that the killers deliberately targeted Jews, as this kosher market was described as part of “a small Orthodox Jewish community of nearly 100 families, most of whom moved from the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn over the past few years”:

According to locals, the JC supermarket is the only kosher one of its kind in the area. It serves basic groceries, sandwiches and salads. Next door is Khal Adas Greenville, a building with a synagogue on a lower level and a yeshiva for children on the upper level.
“It’s a beautiful tight-knit community, very kind people, and it’s devastating that something like this happened,” said Rabbi Shmully Levitin, a Chabad rabbi who lives in this city across the Hudson River from New York.

Dismayed by the high cost of housing in Brooklyn, these Orthodox Jewish families seeking cheaper homes moved across the river to Jersey City, and their presence in this predominantly black community must have been apparent to the black racist David Anderson. Here’s an interesting report from (of all places) The New Yorker:

On Tuesday, each explanation for the shooting offered its own horrors, but, even after the scene was brought under control and the number of dead and injured known, some explanations were apparently more horrifying than others. In an Uber, on the way to the site of the shooting, my driver said, “They’re saying it’s not terrorism. Thank God.”
Except, as it turned out, there appeared to be a more insidious motive behind Tuesday’s violence. A few years ago, sixty-two Hasidic families moved into Greenville, refugees of high Brooklyn rents. . . .
Recently, old tensions had begun to simmer in the neighborhood. Some residents have complained about the insularity and new influence of the Hasidic community over the local real-estate market. The Hasidic community, meanwhile, has chafed at local politicians who told them their new shul was violating zoning laws. The shul sits next to the site of the shooting.

These Jews were not invisible; they did not blend into the community. This neighborhood, known as Greenville (ZIP code 07305), is about 45% black, 25% Hispanic and 17% Asian, so that the total white population is less than 15%, and these are ultra-Orthodox Jews, the men with beards, etc. They were highly visible targets, and this kosher market was next door to their synagogue. This was an act of terrorism, and we have extensive evidence of the terrorists’ motive:

David Anderson, the 47-year-old man accused in the Jersey City mass shooting attack, likely used the identity Dawada Maqabath and other alter egos on social media and online, NBC News is reporting. Heavy.com has reviewed multiple posts made by that identity on the Internet; Maqabath and another identity attributed to Anderson made numerous extremely anti-police comments on various obscure social media and online video pages, glorified Baton Rouge police shooter Gavin Long, unleashed anti-Semitic and anti-Christian vitriol, and called non-black Jewish people “imposters.” . . .
Heavy has unearthed many of those postings, including the Instagram page mentioned by NBC, and you can see screenshots later in this article. The most recent post reads, “Revelations 1:13-15. Jesus comes from the tribe of JUDAH!!!!!!!!!!!! Yall n*gguz better wake the f*ck up before its too late. America has NOTHING for us but DEATH …”
He wrote on another page, “Revelation 2:9 ‘Blacks ARE Jews, the ‘jewish’ are imposters. Our ethnic identity crisis is fueled by the synagogue of satan (amalek) and wicked Israelites who love darkness as a cover for their wickedness. This lying profane blasphemous bastard. Ata lo yahudi, lo, ata mumzer. Ata goyim.”

The bizarre beliefs expressed by Anderson are directly derived from those propagated by the Black Hebrew Israelites cult, who claim that Africans are the authentic “chosen people” and that modern Jews have somehow stolen the identity of ancient Israelites. Whenever you encounter such a belief, you know that it is rooted in profound ignorance, but it is difficult to discern how dangerous this ignorance is in any individual case. There are actually lots of black people on the Internet ranting against cops, against white people, against Jews, so how can you tell which of these hateful people is a serious threat of violence? If you want to understand the size of this problem, consider the local black people in this Jersey City neighborhood caught on video blaming the Jews for this attack.

This is astonishing, and we ought to be deeply concerned about it. However, Democrats and the media have their own agenda:

When gunfire erupted Tuesday afternoon in Jersey City, cable news networks provided live coverage as police engaged in a standoff with the armed suspects. Liberals on Twitter began emitting their predictable rhetoric in such circumstances, blaming the National Rifle Association and smearing Republicans as somehow culpable for the shooting. At that time, little or nothing was known about the perpetrators, and there was no reason to believe the suspects were NRA members or Trump supporters, but the Left’s explanation for armed violence is a prefabricated narrative in which their political enemies are always the villains. Whenever the facts don’t fit this narrative, Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) immediately change the subject, and thus we can predict the Jersey City shootout will be quickly forgotten by CNN and other left-wing outlets.
It turns out that Tuesday’s deadly attack was perpetrated by two black people, David Anderson, 47, and Francine Graham, 51, who were reportedly connected to the so-called “Black Hebrew Israelites” cult. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.



 

Against Extremism

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But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao,
You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow.

What John Lennon said about left-wing radicals 50 years ago is wise advice that should be heeded by radicals of the “alt-right” today, although we might need to alter the lyrics slightly: If you go carrying pictures of Ernst Rohm, you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow.

The disastrous carnival of madness at Charlottesville in August 2017 was, for these young extremists, what the 1969 “Days of Rage” were to the SDS — proof that their movement had been seized by a totalitarian spirit incompatible with the mainstream of American political life.

What’s weird to me is that I actually knew so many of the guys involved in that scene. Here I was, a mild-mannered bourgeois grandfather enjoying life in my cozy family home amid the Appalachian hills, while that insane riot was going down, with latter-day Sturmabteilung mixing it up with Antifa thugs on the streets next to a Confederate monument near the campus of the University of Virginia. And I do not hesitate to admit that, for example, I’ve known Richard Spencer since 2007 and, when he was editor at Taki’s Magazine, I wrote several columns for them. You can read there, for example, my sarcastic thoughts about being “hate-listed” by the SPLC. (Wow, what a flashback — the time I introduced Suzanna Logan to Richard Spencer!) Even then, I knew that Richard was two or three clicks to the right of me; as I’ve said, what happened to Richard was that he read Nietzsche at a young age, and took it seriously. By the time I read Nietzsche, I was in my mid-30s, with a wife and three kids, and had been forewarned about the dangers of Nietzsche’s nihilism. Still, it was a disturbing experience to encounter Beyond Good and Evil and wonder, “What if he’s right?” That’s the thing about me — even when dealing with arguments that directly oppose my own values, I try to step back and objectively consider the possibility that I’ve overlooked something and thus might be, in some sense, mistaken in my beliefs.

Over the years, I’ve read all kinds of “extremist” literature — Marxism, feminism, whatever — and had to deal with these contradictions, but if you aren’t willing to confront your antagonist’s arguments directly (e.g., reading four entire books by Andrea Dworkin), you’re guilty of intellectual cowardice. That’s the problem with most liberals — they’ve never bothered to examine and carefully consider the best work of conservative thinkers. One of these days, I might meet a liberal who has actually read Thomas Sowell, but if it ever happens, that will be the first time it’s happened. Because liberalism is so pervasive among the college-educated classes, including the overwhelming majority of journalists, it’s easy for them to follow the herd and live inside an echo-chamber where everyone they respect and take seriously agrees with them. And so the rest of us, in the “basket of deplorables,” are dismissed as ignorant bigots, no matter how intelligent or well-educated we might be.

If you’ve ever had the chance to meet some of the intellectuals who have inspired the “alt-right,” you know how false the stereotype is. Paul Gottfried, Peter Brimelow, Jared Taylor, Amy Wax — they are not stupid, nor should they be dismissed as “haters” simply because they have devoted themselves to contradicting the liberal (and neoconservative) narrative about controversial issues including racial problems. Neither is it fair to blame “alt-right” intellectuals for violence perpetrated by the kind of idiots whose idea of a fun summer weekend is doing Hitlerjugend cosplay at a protest rally. (Here’s a clue for you boys: If you don’t want to be treated like a stereotype, don’t act like a stereotype.) Any intelligent person understands that, whatever “cause” you claim to represent, you will discredit your cause in the eyes of most Americans if you resort to lawless violence. That’s the story of #BlackLivesMatter in a nutshell — how many riots did we need to see before deciding that this was a bad movement? I’m certain that the Charlotte, N.C., riot in September 2016 played a crucial role in tipping the election to President Trump. The facts of that particular case — the local police chief was black, and the suspect was a career criminal — contradict the #BlackLivesMatter narrative of racist white cops murdering innocent black men in cold blood.

Anyone who would both to investigate the facts could see that this liberal victimhood narrative was false, and Heather Mac Donald, author of The War on Cops, pointed out that a police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by black man than the other way around. The mythology of #BlackLivesMatter was based on a lie, and that lie was not trivial. Protecting the public from crime is one of the most basic duties of government, and the dangerous falsehoods propagated in the name of “social justice” undermine the safety of every American — especially black people, who are most often the victims of violence perpetrated by black criminals. Why is it “racism” to tell the truth about this?

People get angry when they know they have been deceived, so if white voters were angry in November 2016, whose fault is that? When is CNN going to admit its role in creating the “alt-right”? If the mainstream media would just tell the truth, maybe people wouldn’t be so angry.

However angry we are, and however justified our anger might be, we must resist the siren voices who would lure us to destruction. If conservatives understand their duty to defend civilization against decadence, anarchy, barbarism and tyranny, then it is obvious that the August 2017 riot at Charlottesville was contrary to that duty. Never mind the role of Left in precipitating that violence; whose idea was it to invite every skinhead and Klansman on the continent to that rally? Who decided that a nighttime tiki-torch parade, a scene straight out of Triumph of the Will, was “good optics” for the Right?

Well, I’ve rambled on for nearly a thousand words, when all I wanted to do was to talk about the SPLC’s smear of Stephen Miller:

For most of its history, a wise observer once remarked, the American conservative movement has been an oxymoron: it doesn’t move anywhere and has never conserved anything. The man who made that observation died a few years ago, but not before suffering the common fate of anyone who tells the truth in America. He was denounced as a racist, banished from polite society, and “hate-listed” by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Such is the destructive fate that liberals (and some misguided soi-disant “conservatives”) have in mind for Stephen Miller, the senior adviser to President Trump. If you are a conservative who just stumbled onto this column online, and you are too busy to read past the first paragraph, let me sum it up succinctly: Protecting Miller from this dishonest attack is as vital to the future of the Republican Party as it is to oppose the Democrats’ efforts to impeach our president.
Even his worst enemies will admit that Stephen Miller is a genius. Whatever his IQ might be, it’s almost certainly at least one standard deviation above the average of your typical Republican political strategist. Miller has an uncanny knack for spotting the key stress points in our long-running culture war and finding ways to leverage these conflicts to gain support for Trump’s “Make America Great Again” agenda. It is precisely because he has been so effective that the Left has long sought a way to destroy him, and it is frankly shocking that a former writer for Breitbart News was willing to assist the president’s enemies in this project by leaking hundreds of emails to the SPLC. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.



 

Back on the Bisexual Democrat Beat

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Bidding good-bye to a pathetic quitter:

The Gods of the Copybook Headings always have the last laugh, and those familiar with Rudyard Kipling’s poetry must have smiled at the sudden downfall of California Rep. Katie Hill.

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife) …

They probably don’t teach Kipling in public schools nowadays, and progressive Democrats like Ms. Hill would almost certainly condemn the great British poet as a racist and imperialist. Nevertheless, the common-sense verities once taught to every grammar school student remain as relevant as today’s headlines. When we forget those ancient lessons, bad things happen, and we have only ourselves to blame.
When Katie Hill ran for Congress in 2018, her open bisexuality was part of her campaign message. Indeed, so often did Ms. Hill proclaim herself to be bisexual that some of her rivals suggested she was exploiting this to gain endorsements (and money) from the LGBT organizations that exercise a powerful influence in Democratic Party politics. During the 2018 midterm campaign, when feminists and gay-rights activists were among the loudest voices of the anti-Trump mob, the Democrats nominated lesbian or bisexual women in several key races. What the New York Times celebrated as the “Rainbow Wave” didn’t actually elect that many lesbians or bisexual women — Hill was one of only three such first-time House candidates, along with Sharice Davids (KS-3) and Angie Craig (MN-2) to win seats in 2018 — but still this was a “record number” that “made history,” as every journalist in America seemed to feel compelled to write. At no point in the enthusiastic media coverage of Ms. Hill’s campaign against Republican Steve Knight in California’s 25th District, however, did any reporter ask, “Exactly what does ‘bisexual’ mean?” . . .

Read the rest of my column at The American Spectator. How many times do I have to repeat what I’ve said so often before? Never trust a bisexual.


 

Trump Country

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In 2016, Donald Trump got 84% of the vote in Johnson County, Kentucky. And you may ask, “Why does this matter?” Because there’s a tiny community in Johnson County called Butcher Hollow, which is the birthplace of Loretta Lynn, the First Lady of Country Music. If you start looking up the hometowns of Grand Ole Opry legends, you’ll find that practically all of them come from places that voted for Trump, including Merle Haggard, who was born in Kern County, California, which went for Trump by a 13-point margin. The political geography of country music might tell us more about America than just about any other metric:

Dwight Yoakam had me in tears Sunday night. I was watching the new Ken Burns PBS documentary series about the history of country music, and Yoakam quoted a Merle Haggard song, “Holding Things Together,” which is about a man trying to raise his children after his wife has left the family. When Yoakam sang the verse about a heartbroken father attempting to comfort his daughter on her birthday, he choked up, and suddenly the tears were streaming from my eyes, too.
They just don’t write ’em like that anymore, not even in Nashville. Those old songs about hard times and broken hearts, crying in your beer over a cheating woman — you can literally feel the pain in the twanging voices and the whining steel guitars. And the men and women who sang those songs knew a thing or two about hard times, having come from backgrounds of poverty that few Americans in the 21st century can imagine.
Give credit to Burns for this: His eight-part series reminds us that what our contemporary progressives denounce as “white privilege” has never been universal in America, and it certainly didn’t typify the backgrounds of the folks who made Nashville famous as “Music City, U.S.A.” Haggard, for example, was born in Kern County, California, in 1937, the youngest of three children in a family that had left a farm in Oklahoma after their barn burned down. The Haggards were “Okies,” characters right out of a Steinbeck novel, at the bottom of the heap in one of the worst economic eras in American history. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.



 

Democrats: No More Heterosexuals!

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Longtime readers may remember Dr. Marcie Bianco. Three years ago, the Harvard-educated lesbian professor inspired me to write this:

Two traits are necessary to become a successful feminist:

1.Hate;

and

2. Dishonesty.

So long as a woman (a) despises men and (b) is willing to tell shameless lies in support of feminism’s anti-male agenda, there are no limits to how far she may go, particularly in the field of journalism. . . .
Dr. Marcie Bianco is not merely an atheist lesbian feminist public intellectual, she is the atheist lesbian feminist public intellectual. Did I mention she’s a Democrat who supports Hillary Clinton?

Well, her #Lesbians4Hillary campaign didn’t quite work out, but Dr. Bianco recently gained further notoriety:

Women are increasingly opting out of heterosexuality because it is “the bedrock of their global oppression,” NBC News asserted in a bizarre opinion piece this week.
“Men need heterosexuality to maintain their societal dominance over women,” writes Marcie Bianco for the NBC News website. “Women, on the other hand, are increasingly realizing not only that they don’t need heterosexuality, but that it also is often the bedrock of their global oppression.”
Ms. Bianco lumps together a series of recent news stories, “from Jeffrey Epstein to the Dayton and El Paso mass shooters, to Miley Cyrus’s separation and Julianne Hough’s declaration that she’s ‘not straight,’” which, she says, “together have laid bare the strictures of an American patriarchy on the edge of a nervous breakdown.”

Anyone who has read my book Sex Trouble is familiar with such arguments, which require no rebuttal except to look around you. The feminist assertion of patriarchal oppression is a conspiracy theory as demented, in its own way, as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Any woman who is not consumed by fear and hatred of males can survey the circumstances of men and women she actually knows and conclude that, so far as conflict between them is concerned, “it takes two to tango.” Sure, some guys are brutal a–holes, but there are plenty of bad women in the world, too. Nor do I think that lesbians generally endorse the Patriarchal Oppression Theory of Heterosexuality advanced by feminists like Dr. Bianco. It’s like the difference between being working class and being a Marxist. The ordinary working guy may not necessarily be happy with his life, but he’s not likely to view himself as a member of the oppressed proletariat engaged in some kind of dialectic materialist world-historical class struggle. Trying to explain a phenomenon as diverse and complex as human sexual behavior according to a rigid ideological framework like feminist theory is a fool’s errand.

The man-hating feminist is like those “incel” guys who can’t get laid and complain that “all women are whores.” The fact that he has been a complete failure with the opposite sex becomes the basis of a generalized hatred of women. The alternative explanation — to admit that perhaps his own errors or inadequacy might have something to do with his misfortune — is intolerable to him, and so instead the “incel” reverses the causality: He is the “supreme gentleman,” a la Elliot Rodger, and it’s an injustice that beautiful women don’t appreciate his superior qualities, instead preferring to date the loathsome Chad.

Do we need to know anything about Marcie Bianco’s personal experiences with men to determine whether her feminism is a sour-grapes rationalization? No, because feminism is always ultimately such a rationalization. There are happy, successful women in the world who are manifestly not oppressed victims of patriarchy, and feminist ideology only appeals to angry and unhappy women as an excuse for their own misery. Sic semper hoc. But we cannot laugh away feminist lunacy as a joke, because there are a lot of people who take it seriously, and most of those people are Democrats. This is quite unfortunate for men in the Democratic Party who, just a few years ago, thought that feminists were their friends. Take, for example, Pennsylvania State Sen. Daylin Leach. He was a progressive hero to Pennsylvania Democrats until 2017 when he decided to run for Congress. Well, there were women in the state Democratic Party who coveted that seat and Daylin Leach is a man. Suddenly (but perhaps not coincidentally) Leach found himself accused of “inappropriate” conduct toward women. First one woman, then another, and another — it’s amazing how the accusers come out of the woodwork in such circumstances — all with tales to tell of creepy behavior by the would-be congressional candidate. Finally, a woman came forward to claim that in 1991, when she was 17 years old, she was raped by Daylin Leach. Eventually, he was forced to withdraw from the primary, his reputation ruined by the #MeToo mob. Leach has insisted he is an innocent man, and Charles Glasser is willing to entertain the possibility that Leach got railroaded, but my point is this: Imagine if you were a young heterosexual man with political ambitions. Wouldn’t it seem to you that your future prospects as a Democrat are rather bleak? Does a heterosexual man have any future in the Democratic Party?

The feminist takeover of the Democratic Party is now so far advanced that it is almost certain they’ll nominate another woman for president in 2020 — and 2024, and 2028, ad infinitum — as the party’s complete surrender to identity politics is not without consequences:

If you want to know why Donald Trump is president, you might begin by examining the career of Marcie Bianco. An alumna of Harvard University (Class of 2002) with a Ph.D. from Rutgers, Dr. Bianco is an atheist, a feminist, a lesbian, and, of course, a Democrat. As president of the Harvard student Democrat organization in 2000, she worked for Al Gore’s doomed presidential campaign and, in 2016, she tweeted up a storm for Hillary Clinton, promoting the “Lesbians for Hillary” campaign for the activist group LPAC. Formerly an instructor at New York’s Hunter College and now affiliated with elite Stanford University, Dr. Bianco is a one-woman combination of almost everything that 62.9 million Americans voted against when they checked the box for Trump in 2016.
Perhaps concerned to maintain her status as the symbolic explanation for why Trump won, Dr. Bianco recently drew attention to herself by publishing (on the NBC News website, of course) a genuinely bizarre screed against heterosexuality. With the headline “Miley Cyrus’ split with Liam Hemsworth isn’t just celebrity gossip — it’s a blow to the patriarchy,” Dr. Bianco turned a recent bit of tabloid fodder into an argument that we are witnessing “an American patriarchy on the edge of a nervous breakdown” because “heterosexuality is just not working.” Somehow, a notoriously ditzy ex-Disney starlet’s lesbian liaison that prompted her husband to file for divorce isn’t a commentary on Hollywood degeneracy; instead, according to Dr. Bianco, it’s a heroic tale from the “vanguard of feminist thought,” with the former Hannah Montana actress “challenging heterosexuality” which is the “bedrock” of women’s “global oppression.” Conservative commentators reacted to Dr. Bianco’s argument in various ways. “THE LEFT IS INSANE,” declared Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit, while the Media Research Center’s Matt Philbin mocked Dr. Bianco’s feminist analysis as second-hand Marxism: “You suffer from false consciousness, Comrade Lady Girl. You don’t realize how unhappy you are. Reeducation will open your eyes to the exploitation of the capitalist, er, patriarchal oppressors.” . . .

Read the rest of my column at The American Spectator.



 

‘Revenge of the Nerds,’ IRL?

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After our podcast Saturday night, John Hoge and I went out to dinner and he was telling me about his latest engineering project. He does very important work for NASA, but the way he talks about it is so low-key you aren’t likely to realize exactly how important his work is. So we’re sitting there in the restaurant, and he’s talking in a rather nerdy technical way about a project to do maintenance work on satellites using remote-controlled equipment and I’m like: “SPACE ROBOTS!”

This is really exciting stuff, to those of us who aren’t NASA engineers, but to Hoge, “It’s just my job five days a week,” you might say.

So I call the waitress over to our table. Hoge and I have become regulars at this place, so much that the waitress knows our orders by memory, and I point to John and say, “Can you guess what he does for a living?”

“A teacher?” she guesses.

“No — he builds space robots for NASA. Like, C3PO.”

“Actually, more like R2D2,” Hoge corrects me.

 

Because of my own professional experience, I understand that words matter. How you describe something makes a difference in how it is perceived. The whole point of Hunter S. Thompson’s career, a point he made explicitly in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, is how the media create the gap between reality and perception.

Hoge’s tendency to describe his work in a mealy-mouthed way — engineering contractor at Goddard, blah blah blah — is a typical example of this. I spent the early years of my career as a small-town sports writer, where the challenge is to write about the local high-school girls softball team’s tournament victory as if somebody actually cared:

ADAIRSVILLE — Becky Ann Randall slammed a seventh-inning double Saturday to give Red Bud High School a 12-10 victory over Fairmount in the semifinal round of the Early Bird Invitational Softball Tournament, advancing the Lady Cardinals to Sunday’s championship against host Adairsville.
Randall’s two-RBI double was one of three hits for Red Bud’s senior shortstop in Saturday’s semifinal.
“Becky Ann has really stepped us for us as a team leader,” said Lady Cardinals coach Ruth Talley, whose team graduated six players after last year’s 14-7 season. “She’s always been a competitor, and we’re counting on her to make a big difference this year.” . . .

Et cetera, et cetera. You’d illustrate the story with a photo of the “star” player of the game, and give it a headline and subhead that conveyed the idea that this was The Most Important Softball Game Ever, knowing that Becky Ann’s mama was going to buy six copies of the paper, cut out the article, laminate it, and send copies to all her relatives. Beyond this kind of scrapbook memorabilia function, I have no idea if anyone else ever paid attention to the local sports stories I wrote, but the coaches and players (and especially the players’ parents) loved the way I hyped up everything like it was really important. Why did I do it that way? Because I couldn’t see the point of doing it any other way. Like, why am I getting paid to cover these games, if the outcome doesn’t matter? Considering my own work to be valuable, I couldn’t maintain my self-esteem without trying to convince readers that the people and events I was writing about were important. Writing about high-school kids as if they were Athletic Superstars was essential to maintaining my morale as a journalist.

Words matter, and how we talk about ourselves affects how we are perceived by others. John Hoge was entirely honest with his low-key description of himself as an engineering contractor, but it’s also honest — and infinitely more impressive — for him to say he builds space robots.

True story: My son Jim was doing a home-remodeling job in Lynchburg, Virginia, and went out to have a few cold beverages. He got talking to a guy in the bar and when he introduced himself as Jim McCain, the guy said, “Like . .. The Other McCain?” Jim answered, “Yeah, that’s my dad,” and he didn’t have to pay for his drinks the rest of the night.

Oh, I’m just a blogger, in the same way Hoge’s just an engineer, but when I introduce myself to people, I tell them I’m a political correspondent for The American Spectator, which sounds more impressive.

Nobody ever paid serious attention to Santino Legan, Patrick Crusius or Connor Betts before they went on shooting rampages that have made national headlines. Legan killed three people and injured 13 others July 28 at a California food festival before killing himself. Crusius killed 20 people and injured 26 more Saturday in El Paso, Texas, before surrendering to police. Betts killed 9 people and injured 20 others in the wee hours of Sunday morning in Dayton, Ohio, before he was shot to death by police. None of these mass murderers had previous criminal records, and all three were young white men — Legan was 19, Crusius is 21, Betts was 24 — who might be described colloquially as nerds or losers. Politicians and pundits rushed to interpret these atrocities in a political context, but the rise of a genuine terrorist threat from such “lone wolf” killers — misfits or outcasts, filled with feelings of frustration and hopelessness — might better be understood from a sociological or psychological perspective. . . .

Read the whole thing at The American Spectator.



 

A Politically Incorrect Journey

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Portrait of R. Emmett Tyrrell in The American Spectator office.

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia
Because I have a story to cover tonight in D.C., I decided to beat Washington’s notorious rush-hour traffic and drove down to the offices of The American Spectator in the historic Old Town section of Alexandria. Along the way, it occurred to me how much political incorrectness I encountered along my route. I drove down George Washington Parkway — named for a slave owner — and past CIA headquarters, a notorious bastion of American imperialist hegemony. Then down past Arlington, once home of Robert E. Lee and now site of the Marine Corps Memorial, another celebration of militant nationalism. I passed the Pentagon and then Ronald Reagan Airport — how right-wing can you get? But as I entered Alexandria, the landmarks became downright reactionary, as monuments to the British colonial era were embodied in the names of Princess Street, Queen Street, King Street and Royal Street. How is it that Antifa mobs aren’t demanding that these historic tributes to hereditary monarchy be renamed? If the memory of slavery is hateful enough to make General Lee persona non grata in the 21st century, why is it still acceptable to memorialize British royalty?

Well, let’s not give the Left any ideas, eh? These thoughts occurred to me as I walked two blocks to purchase beverages, as the young Spectator staffers had not been warned of my arrival and had thus not prepared for a thirsty political correspondent. Selecting a pale ale from Flying Dog, my official brand, I returned to the office to file this brief update.

The National Affairs Desk in the Spectator office.

The New York Times is miffed because President Trump pardoned California Republican Patrick Nolan after “The American Spectator, a right-leaning publication . . . last year published an article that urged Mr. Trump to pardon him.” What? We’re merely “right-leaning”? We lean so far we’re nearly perpendicular! If the Spectator wasn’t pissing off the New York Times, we’d consider ourselves a discredit to our legacy.

Anyway, the reason I’m in the D.C. area tonight is because Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson is having a townhall event in Washington. Recall that, when I traveled to South Carolina to cover her campaign visit there two months ago, I was the only reporter covering her campaign. Since then, however, she’s hit the 65,000-donor threshold necessary to qualify for the DNC debates next month in Miami, and continues attracting media attention, e.g., “Marianne Williamson Is a Lefty With Soul” (New York magazine) and “‘I’m for Capitalism with a Conscience,’ Says Williamson” (Bloomberg News). Meanwhile, by contrast, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand still hasn’t hit the 65,000-donor mark, and shook up her campaign staff last week to try to catch up with Williamson, whose claim to fame is being known as “Oprah’s spiritual guru.” Can I pick ’em, or what? Williamson’s event in Northwest D.C. starts at 7 p.m., so I’ll have to pack up and get rolling, which means there’s only enough time to remind you that the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

Learning the Lessons of History

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What are we actually arguing about?

Willoughby Run is a stream too small to be called a creek. Trickling southward through the hills of Adams County, Pennsylvania, it runs between two low ridges and crosses U.S. Highway 30 east of what is now a golf course, but which on the morning of July 1, 1863, was farmland. On the ridge west of Willoughby Run was a tavern owned by Frederick Herr and on that ridge, two brigades of Confederate infantry assembled, having marched some seven miles from Cashtown that morning. These brigades belonged to a division commanded by Maj. Gen. Harry Heth, part of the III Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia, the vanguard of Robert E Lee’s force invading Pennsylvania. They marched that July morning toward a memorable clash near a crossroads town less than a mile east of Willoughby Run, a place called Gettysburg.
Heth and his men had little trouble brushing back the Yankee cavalry that had sought to obstruct their march toward Gettysburg where, it is said, Heth believed he might capture a supply of shoes for his ragged troops. As the Confederate brigades lined up on Herr Ridge west of Willoughby Run, the blue-coated cavalrymen pulled back to the ridge on the east side of the stream, on the farm of a man named McPherson. The Union cavalry, commanded by Brig. Gen. John Buford, kept up a desultory fire with their carbines, with little effect on the Confederate infantry at a distance of nearly a quarter-mile, concealed by trees on Herr Ridge. Buford’s troopers were supported by a six-gun battery of artillery, and Heth brought up his own artillery to return fire, as he reconnoitered the position. The Southerners believed the main Union army was still far from Gettysburg, and that they faced no more than cavalry, perhaps supported by some local Pennsylvania militia. Heth gave the order for an advance, with the two brigades deployed on either side of the road leading east. On the north side of the road was a brigade of Mississippi troops commanded by Brig. Gen. Joseph Davis, nephew of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. South of the road was a brigade of troops from Tennessee and Alabama, commanded by Brig. Gen. James J. Archer, a Maryland native and an alumnus of Princeton University.
Archer’s brigade was one of the best in the Confederate army, having led the charge that broke the Yankee line at the Battle of Chancellorsville. One of Archer’s regiments, the 13th Alabama, was led by Col. Birkett Davenport Fry, a West Point dropout whose career had included volunteer service in the Mexican War and the notorious “filibuster” expedition to Nicaragua. And in the ranks of the 13th Alabama that July morning were two young privates from Randolph County, Winston Wood Bolt and his brother Robert, whose fate is of more than passing interest to me. When Heth ordered the advance from Herr Ridge, Archer’s brigade marched down to Willoughby Run and waded across the shallow stream then up the hillside beyond. The 13th Alabama was near the right flank of the brigade, and their attention was focused toward the woods on their left near the road, where Union troops were putting up a spirited resistance. Someone on the Confederate line noticed that these Yankees were wearing a distinctive style of hat they’d seen in previous battles and called out: “Ain’t no militia. It’s them black-hat fellows again. It’s the Army of the Potomac.” . . .

You can read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.