LITHIA SPRINGS, GEORGIA
My family and I are gathered here this Saturday for the funeral of my Aunt Pat, one of the finest Southern ladies you can imagine, and I have been asked to speak a brief eulogy at the service. My brother and I rode down with my son Jim at the wheel, while my wife flew to Florida with daughter Reagan so that they could ride up with my oldest daughter Kennedy and Kennedy’s two young sons. We’re staying in a nice hotel on Thornton Road, now a bustling commercial thoroughfare, but I was telling Jim I can remember when this was a dirt road, as were many other roads in Douglas County when I was growing up here.
Memories are of course appropriate when you’re preparing for a memorial service, and one of the things I’m going to be telling the folks at the service today is that my Aunt Pat worked in the aerospace industry. She got married at age 17 and was a mother of three young children before she was 30, when she got a home-study course and began teaching herself shorthand, which qualified her to get hired as an executive secretary at the Lockheed Aircraft plant in Marietta (now Lockheed-Martin). When you describe someone as “working in the aerospace industry,” a secretary might not be the first job that comes to mind, but it takes a lot of people doing all kinds of jobs to make all those planes. My Dad spent 37 years working at Lockheed, mainly as a dispatcher on the C-130 flight line, and it’s always a moment of pride for me whenever I see the C-130 in action — the greatest cargo airplane in the world, and my Dad helped make it. Speaking of patriotic pride . . .
Monday is the Fourth of July, and we’ll be back home in time to shoot our annual family show in West Virginia, which isn’t going to be as big as some previous years, simply because my son Jim (my main accomplice in our pyrotechnic adventures) has been very busy the past year, and we don’t have quite as many fireworks as usual.
We hope to augment this small stash on our return journey home, which is why I’ve brought back the Big Yellow Button. Even though the PayPal contribution button is always on the page, sometimes I enlarge it for the benefit of near-sighted readers who may not have noticed it before.
Our usual request for tip-jar hits is $17.76. A 1,400-mile road trip is quite expensive under Bidenflation, so if you want to chip in $5 for a gallon of gas, that would be appreciated. Of course, on the Fourth of July weekend, you might want to pay tribute to such great American patriots as Andrew Jackson or even Benjamin Franklin, IYKWIMAITYD.
Helping defray travel expenses — God only knows how much we paid for two hotel rooms, because I was afraid to ask my wife, who booked it — and also maybe adding some extra fireworks to our Fourth of July are surely worthy causes, but as always the main thing is, keeping my wife happy. She likes it when the blog actually produces revenue, and keeping her happy is always Job One, so it’s once again my duty to ask readers to recall the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:
MORROW COUNTY, OHIO
As every regular reader of this blog knows, the yellow “donate” button takes you to my PayPal account, where you can contribute dollars, pounds, Euros, shekels, pesos or whatever to support the blog. (We used to accept rubles, but Putin ruined that recently.)
My wife and I are in Ohio en route to Michigan, where our 19-year-old daughter is a college freshman and wants us to meet her new boyfriend. We spent Thursday night at my mother-in-law’s home here in the rustic woodland where I saw bunnies playing in the backyard this morning. While we were driving through Youngstown, I dialed up my old friend Dave Weigel, who’s here in Ohio covering the GOP primary campaign. Weigel, like pretty much every other observer of this campaign, thinks J.D. Vance is the likely winner of Tuesday’s primary.
Trump’s endorsement has Vance attracting capacity crowds in his final campaign stops. There is a weird report today from Rolling Stone that Tucker Carlson swayed Trump toward Vance by repeating some kind of sexual gossip about “David McIntosh, the president of the conservative Club for Growth and a top backer of Vance’s rival Josh Mandel.” The report is deliberately vague about what McIntosh is accused of, and I don’t know why this would be relevant to the Ohio GOP primary. It’s unfortunate this primary has become so contentious. Both Vance and Mandel are Marine Corps veterans, and I think it’s very encouraging for Republicans to be attracting young military veterans as candidates.
That’s my Army son and me at the awards ceremony for the Best Ranger Competition earlier this month at Fort Benning. Everyone on Facebook has made their comments on that photo, and I thought blog commenters might want to have their say. That road trip and this one have disrupted my work schedule this month, and you don’t even want to know about the finances (but just hit the tip jar). What aggravates me about road trips like this is spending hours away from my laptop, so I kill the time as a passenger by scrolling news on my phone, and yesterday I found something that brings me to this unpleasant topic:
Have we all forgotten about notorious grifter Brianna Wu? She inserted herself into #GamerGate as a competitor in the Harassment Victimhood Derby, ultimately seizing the prize from contenders Anita Sarkeesian and the Tattoo-Covered, Mentally Ill Ex-Stripper Whose Real Name Is Chelsea Van Valkenburg. Oh, what a feminist heroine “Brianna” is!
John Walker Flynt as a failed male (left) and after becoming ‘Brianna Wu’ (right).
Of course, Brianna’s transgender identity was never a secret — I mentioned it here in December 2014 — but one of the accusations against Milo Yiannopoulos was that he subjected John/“Brianna” to harassment by writing a February 2015 article “exposing” this status. How do you “expose” something that is already well-known? Never mind that, how about this: Where is the evidence that “Brianna” was harassed? This was one of the things that #GamerGate supporters kept pointing out during the drama of 2014, namely that while “Brianna” claimed to be the victim of terrorizing death threats, not once was a suspect ever identified or arrested by law enforcement. Sure, there were plenty of people on Twitter who said rude things about “Brianna,” but mean tweets are not a crime, or else everyone who ever said mean things about me would be in prison.
The Heroic Victimhood Narrative at the heart of the liberal media’s coverage of #GamerGate could be seen, objectively, as a warm-up for how the media portrayed Hillary Clinton as a heroic victim during and after the 2016 presidential campaign. The idea that it is “unsafe” to be a woman on the Internet — that all women suffer humiliating or terroristic abuse from men in their online interactions — is quite a popular theme among young feminists. Actually, I could tell you some stories about how women online suffer abuse from other women, but I am not at liberty to discuss that time enraged Harry Styles fans on TikTok went beserk after a certain teenage girl mentioned the singer’s receding hairline.
Crazy People Are Dangerous, as I have often reminded you, and there are obviously some kooks out there who need to be banned from the Internet completely, but why bring up Bill Schmalfeldt at this late date? The prevailing narrative is that women and members of “marginalized communities” have a monopoly of victimhood in terms of online harassment. Grifters gotta grift, and the grifter known as “Brianna Wu” parlayed her victimhood into two failed congressional campaigns in the 8th District of Massachusetts. In 2018, she got about 17,000 votes in a primary challenge to incumbent Democrat Rep. Stephen Lynch, then was trying again two years later, but quit in April 2020, blaming COVID-19.
That was so disappointing to me. Nothing would have made me happier than seeing a moderate Democrat like Lynch lose a primary to this kooky fringe candidate, which might actually make it possible for a Republican to win that otherwise safely blue district, but alas, grifters gotta grift and failures gotta fail and, as her critics have pointed out, “Brianna Wu” has always failed at everything, except grifting. If you know anything about Wu, you have to know this, that her claim to be a “game developer” rests entirely on “Revolution 60,” which was the subject of a lot of pre-release hype and subsequent fawning reviews from the “games journalism” community whose biases were the original cause of #GamerGate. To put it bluntly, “Revolution 60” sucked, and there was never any possibility of it becoming popular. The only reason anyone (other than the readers of Kotaku) ever heard of “Revolution 60″ was because Brianna Wu got a certain level of notoriety by piggybacking onto #GamerGate as an alleged victim of harassment. He/“she” was a failure as a game developer, just like he/“she” was a failure as a congressional candidate, and yet the media continue to pretend that he/“she” is a legitimate spokesperson, a credible source on the subject of online harassment.
Yes, NBC News cites Brianna Wu as a credible source, and Wu is also cited as a source in an incredibly one-sided Associated Press story about Elon Musk’s buyout of Twitter. This is why, incidentally, I was on the phone with Dave Weigel yesterday. Whatever his faults, Dave is an actual reporter — someone who goes out on the road and writes about what he personally witnesses, rather than just blabbering on Twitter all day, as so many young “journalists” now do — and I wanted to see how much he remembered about Wu’s #GamerGate drama. He has clear memories of the infamous “Wu-pocalypse” incident, where a comedian pretended to be a psychopath obsessed with Wu, an absurd “threat” that Wu took seriously. Dave’s busy covering the Ohio primary campaign now, but he might get around to taking a look at the whole Twitter “harassment” saga later. In the meantime, I’ve got to pack up and get back on the road for Michigan, to meet my daughter’s new boyfriend, but I might also spend some time this weekend working on an American Spectator column on the subject of “Brianna Wu,” whose KiwiFarms file is more than 3,000 pages long. Lots of research to be done there, IYKWIMAITYD.
Well, on the road again, and with gas over $4 a gallon, I urge readers to recall the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:
As every regular reader of this blog knows, the yellow “donate” button takes you to my PayPal account, where you can contribute dollars, pounds, Euros, shekels, rubles or whatever to support the blog.
PayPal has been very, very good to me over the years, and I was disturbed when I read that PayPal is teaming up with the ADL and SPLC to defund alleged “extremist” sites. We know very well how Big Tech has spent the past five years deplatforming anyone who dissents from the “social justice” narrative, and it’s frighten to think that PayPal would join forces with an organization as thoroughly disreputable as the SPLC.
Obvious pretext to suppress any dissent — you’ll be shocked at what views they consider “white supremacist” just one year from now. https://t.co/FBFvBsOxo4
Chilling: @PayPal teams up with left-leaning group to combat “hate” funding after the SPLC pressured PayPal to blacklist conservative groups. https://t.co/VhNE5Xsw6e
I’m a Jewish American who has special appreciation for the ADL’s historical role as a watchdog against antisemitism. . . .
The point is that the ADL, like the SPLC, now weighs in on issues far beyond its original purview.
Just as there is no set definition of “hate speech” that everyone agrees upon, the definition of a “hate group” is nebulous and ripe for overuse by those with an agenda. So it should come as no surprise that the ever-increasing list of suspects has grown from unquestionable hate groups, like neo-nazis and the KKK, to organizations who espouse socially conservative views, like the Family Research Council, religious liberty advocates, and even groups concerned with election integrity.
The reclassification of political opponents as hate groups has been enabled by expansive redefinitions of terms like racism, segregation and white supremacy. . . .
I have no desire to defend genuinely hateful or extremist groups. Indeed, when I was COO at PayPal, we regularly worked with law enforcement to restrict illegal activity on our platform. But we are talking about something very different here: shutting down people and organizations that express views that are entirely lawful, even if they are unpopular in Silicon Valley. . . .
I implore my successors at PayPal and other Big Tech companies to stop throwing kindling on the fires of populism by locking people out of the online public square and the modern web-based economy. Silenced voices and empty stomachs are fuel for the very extremism you claim to oppose.
Read the whole thing. The problem with boycotting PayPal is that there is no comparable substitute. Right now, I’m trying to plan a reporting trip to Florida, perhaps in September, so I once again urge readers to recall the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:
Occasionally, when the need arises to rattle the tip jar, I supersize the PayPal contribution button, and today is such an occasion.
My family and I will be traveling today to a Midwestern state where our youngest son will be marrying his beloved Jasmine.
Having a wedding in the middle of a pandemic requires careful planning which, thankfully, has been attended to by the bride’s family. We may hope that one day our son will be telling our grandchildren how we managed appropriate social distancing on this happy occasion.
We can happily imagine the grandkids wondering about what grandpa did in “the old days” of 2020. “Dad, what’s a ‘blogger’?” And that’s when my son will explain to them how their grandfather reminded readers of the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:
Good Lord willing, tonight I’ll be in Crawford County, Ohio, then I’ll spend Thursday and Friday in Berrien County, Michigan, before returning to Ohio on Saturday, then back home on Sunday.
This is family travel, involving my youngest two children, including the handsome blond son who wants us to meet his future in-laws. Nevertheless, as fortune would have it, our trip will take us to two crucial Midwestern “battleground” states, and I’ll try to do something in the way of gathering politically relevant information. Almost certainly, I can find a way to contact the Berrien County Republican Party, perhaps swing by their headquarters in Saint Joseph (assuming, that is, that evil Governor Whitmer hasn’t shut down Republican campaign activity in Michigan).
All of which is a preamble to my usual Shoe Leather Fund reminder that the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:
Whenever it comes time to, uh, celebrate shameless capitalism here, the suggested donation is $17.76, because we love America.
Of course, our patriotic readers know what happened in 1776, and also know that this is why the Fourth of July is celebrated annually.
Because we love America. And we love tradition. So our family has a traditional celebration of our national independence. Which is to say that we shoot off a metric buttload of fireworks. Continue reading $17.76 →
“Hey, somebody told me you guys were serving beer?”
“Outside service only,” said the guy who had come out of the kitchen. “We’re closed now, though.”
“When do you open?” I asked.
“Three o’clock.”
“What time is it now?”
“Two thirty.”
“We’ll wait.”
So I walked back around to the parking lot, where Kirby still had the car running. “Park it. They’re opening in 30 minutes.”
We sat down at one of the outdoor picnic tables. It was a nice sunny day — a little cool and windy, but nice. An awning shaded the tables that serve as the Longbranch Saloon’s smoking area under normal operation, but which are now the dining room due to “social distancing” rules.
(Click photo to see full-size)
Only 25 people were permitted to congregate outside, which I suppose might be a problem on a weekend night, but on a Wednesday afternoon, Kirby and I were the only early-arriving patrons, so there was no danger of us violating the health department regulations. After a few minutes, the guy from the kitchen came out to ask us what we’d like to drink.
“Do you have any beer specials?” I asked.
“Not really. Everything’s two dollars.”
“Two dollar beer! Do you have Yuengling?”
Indeed they did. So I ordered Pennsylvania’s finest lager, and Kirby ordered iced tea, because he is a professional driver.
Normally, Kirby drives a semi truck, but last summer, high blood pressure resulted in the suspension of his commercial license, and this eventually led to the decision to move him up here with our family while he recuperated. His health has been improving, and we hope in a few more months he’ll be able to resume his life on the road, but for now my brother is the professional driver of our old Nissan. So he drove us the 30-odd miles to the Longbranch Saloon and Grill, the mailing address of which is Hedgesville, W.Va., but which is actually nearest a crossroads hamlet called Johnsonville. It’s about 10 miles west of I-81 via West Virginia Rte. 901, which passes the historic Hammond House at Spring Mills, then loops down to Hedgesville, where you turn right and head west on Rte. 9 for four miles then turn left at Baxter Road. The Longbranch Saloon is about a mile down Baxter Road on the right.
Anyway, when the man returned with our beverages, I asked his name — Brian — and if the kitchen was open. Yes, and he furnished us with menus, then left us to consider our choices. After a few minutes, he returned. I ordered the cheeseburger with fries ($7.50), while Kirby ordered the jalapeño poppers ($4), and I said: “Oh, and bring me another Yuengling.” Journalism is thirsty work, and after two months of lockdown, I’d gone through that first 12 ounces with surprising rapidity.
Honestly, there are few places in America where you are less likely to contract COVID-19 than in Hedgesville. West Virginia has one of the lowest infection rates in the country, with just over 1,500 known cases so far. The Mountaineer State didn’t report its first case until March 17, and a month later still had only 777 known coronavirus cases. The peak of the pandemic, in terms of daily new cases, was April 24, when 48 new cases were reported statewide; in the past week (May 14-20), 163 new cases were reported, an average of about 23 new cases per day. So far, there have been a total of only 69 COVID-19 deaths in West Virginia, which has a per-capita death rate 97% lower than the rate in New York.
Hedgesville is scarcely a hotbed of viral contagion, although Berkeley County has been relatively hard-hit by West Virginia standards, with 245 coronavirus cases and six deaths from the disease. This is no doubt due to the proximity to Washington, D.C. (about 90 miles southeast of Hedgesville), and the county being bisected by Interstate 81.
Despite the relatively low risk of infection, “social distancing” regulations were still in effect Wednesday at the Longbranch Saloon, so we were sitting outside on this pleasant spring day. The awning-covered outdoor dining area was adjacent to a wide lawn, with a weeping willow tree, and there was a fire pit, where I suppose people huddle around on cool evenings. After a while, Kirby and I were joined by a third patron, a retiree who had come to have a mid-afternoon beer, and we made polite small talk for a few minutes before Brian returned to bring us our food.
(Click photo to see full-size)
The burger was good, and served with crinkle-cut fries. Perhaps the gourmets of New York would turn up their snooty noses as such a meal, but they can’t go out to dinner because New York is still locked down under the regime of Mayor Bill de Blasio. Probably there are lots of people in New York — not the snooty gourmet types, but regular New Yorkers — who dream of sitting outdoors near a willow tree on a spring day, enjoying a $7.50 cheeseburger plate and a cold $2 Yuengling.
It’s “almost heaven” in West Virginia, if you appreciate simple pleasures, and I was grateful for Tim Carney’s Washington Examiner column this week that alerted me to the opportunity to enjoy a meal at the Longbranch. When the cook/waiter Brian returned, I asked him if he realized that this establishment was now the most famous saloon in West Virginia, but he apparently hadn’t read Tim’s column. If you keep up with the news in West Virginia, however, the news is good:
West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice signed an executive order allowing his state to enter the “Week 4” phase of coronavirus reopening on Thursday, which will include reopening indoor dining at restaurants, malls and outdoor recreation.
Large retail stores, tanning businesses, outdoor recreation rentals and campgrounds will also be reopened.
The new order also rescinds the requirement for out-of-state travelers visiting West Virginia to self-quarantine for 14 days upon their arrival.
The governor also outlined the plans for Week 5 reopening, expected to begin after Memorial Day, which will allow bars to open at 50 percent and museums, visitor centers, zoos, spas and massage businesses to open their doors.
At the same time, the Republican governor announced the results of his initiative to test every nursing home patient in the state, the first such policy in the U.S.
In total, 22,598 people at 123 nursing homes were tested, including 8,911 residents and 13,687 staff members. This resulted in the identification of COVID-19 in 28 new facilities. Thirty-one new staff and 11 new residents were identified as COVID-19 positive.
We finished our meals, and Brian brought the tab — $16.50 for a cheeseburger and fries, jalapeño poppers, two beers and an iced tea. I tipped $3.50, bringing the total tab to $20. Helping the local economy, like a patriotic American. There was a deadline looming, so we bid adieu to beautiful Hedgesville and made it back home by 5. Thanks to everyone who hit the tip jar for our trip to West By God Virginia.
When we got to Hedgesville, we turned right and the GPS on Kirby’s phone said, “Continue west on West Virginia 9 for four miles.”
“Four miles!” my brother exclaimed.
What the heck had gotten into my head, to bring us so far out into the boondocks of Berkeley County, W.Va.? I blame Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner, who reported this week that the Longbranch Saloon and Grill in Hedgesville was actually serving beer. Sitting down in a bar and ordering a beer isn’t something you would normally think of as a special experience, but these are not normal times. After two months of COVID-19 lockdown, I was craving it. As soon as I saw Tim’s article, I resolved to follow up on his scoop and, also, do my part to help stimulate the economy. It was my duty as a patriotic American.
So I rattled the tip jar and we hit the road, Kirby driving because he is, after all, a professional driver. We got off I-81 at the Spring Mills exit and turned right, headed toward Hedgesville. I had glanced briefly at Google Maps and had a general idea that the Longbranch was out in the sticks, but how far out in the sticks it was didn’t fully register until we made that right turn at Hedgesville. “Four miles!”
Kirby began humming “Dueling Banjos” and making Deliverance jokes, which is very unkind, promoting harmful stereotypes of the Appalachian-American community. But the SPLC has never objected to hillbilly jokes, so I suppose it’s OK. Westward we rolled, and Kirby said, “Now I don’t want to hear your bitching about not having a signal.” But my phone still showed a connection until, after the appointed four miles, we turned left onto Baxter Road, at which point Kirby’s phone said, “GPS signal lost.”
Fortunately, it was only another mile to the Longbranch, and after a few winding curves, there it was on the right side of the road. So I got out of the car, walked up to the front door and . . . locked.
What? Had Tim lied to me? Then I remembered what Ace had said about Carney being one of those spineless #NeverTrump cucks, and I was just about ready to believe it. We’d driven a long way for this, however, and I wasn’t giving up so easy. So I walked around to the side of the building and heard voices coming from inside. Grabbing the knob on the side door, I turned and . . . open!
Looking inside, I saw this was the back of the kitchen, not an entrance for customers. “Hello? Anybody home?”
No answer. But I headed around back, trying to see if there was anyone around, and was just about to give up when a guy came out of the kitchen.
“Can I help you?”
TO BE CONTINUED . . .
+ – + – + – + – +
Wanted to give readers the first half of the story, because you hit the freaking tip jar, but right now I’m on deadline for a column tomorrow for The American Spectator, a column that has nothing to do with taverns in West Virginia, so in the morning, I’ll pick this up where I left off.
