In The Mailbox: 04.29.24

What a wretched week this was for the Senators. First we got swept by the Twins, and then lost two out of three at Montreal, where at least we weren’t freezing since this year’s Expos have moved into Olympic Stadium. Next week, we have a three-game series against the Tribe and two games against Kansas City, which is having a slightly worse season than mine.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

The hitters ain’t hitting. Again.

Is New York City in 2024 Better or Worse Than Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692?
The Daley Gator
Flappr
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

TikTok Inluencer Hangs Herself
The Daley Gator
Flappr
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

Max Azzarello: ‘Just Another American Driven Insane by the Past Few Years’
EBL
357 Magnum

Crazy People Are Dangerous
The Daley Gator
EBL
357 Magnum

FMJRA 2.0: Home For Tax Day
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

Para-Dogs
EBL
357 Magnum

Rule 5 Sunday: Super Extra Double-Scoop Post-Tax Day Leather Edition
Animal Magnetism
Flappr
A View From The Beach
EBL

In The Mailbox: 04.22.24
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

It’s ‘Protester,’ NOT ‘Protestor,’ Dammit!
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 04.23.24
Battleswarm Blog
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 04.26.24 (Morning Edition)
EBL
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum

‘Selma Envy’ and the Left’s Increasing Embrace of ‘Eliminationist Rhetoric’
EBL
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 04.26.24 (Evening Edition)
EBL
357 Magnum

Top linkers for the week ending April 26:

EBL (13)
357 Magnum (12)
A View From The Beach (9)

Thanks to everyone for all the links!

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Category: FMJRA Award

Secret Service DEI Quota Hire Goes Completely Berserk at Andrews AFB

Posted on | April 27, 2024 | 1 Comment

In 2016, Michelle Herczeg was a Dallas police officer when she “filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against the city, claiming she was assaulted by a male superior and asking for more than $1 million in damages.” The lawsuit was dismissed. Filing bogus discrimination claims would normally be seen as a red flag, and it turns out Michelle Herczeg had more red flags than a May Day parade in Beijing, but that didn’t stop the Biden administration from hiring her as a Secret Service agent:

An incident involving a physical attack by a female Secret Service agent tasked with protecting Vice President Kamala Harris is raising questions about whether the agency had thoroughly vetted her during her hiring and whether an ongoing push to increase the numbers of women in the service and boost overall workforce staff played a role in her selection.
The Secret Service agent assigned to Vice President Kamala Harris was removed from her duties Wednesday after physically attacking the commanding agent in charge and other agents trying to subdue her, according to an agency spokesman and knowledgeable Secret Service sources.
Several sources in the Secret Service community identified the agent who physically attacked her superior as Michelle Herczeg. The altercation occurred at approximately 9 a.m. at Joint Base Andrews, the home base for Air Force One and Air Force Two, the call signs of the Boeing aircraft used by the president and vice president.
Herczeg showed up at the terminal and began acting erratically, grabbing another senior agent’s personal phone and deleting applications on it, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The other agent, a shift leader, was able to recover his phone and then acted as if nothing had happened.
But Herczeg’s bizarre behavior didn’t stop. She then began mumbling to herself, hid behind curtains, and started throwing items, including menstrual pads, at an agent, telling him that he would need them later to save another agent and telling her peers that they were “going to burn in hell and needed to listen to God,” a source told RealClearPolitics.
Herczeg also screamed at the special agent in charge (SAIC), rattling off the names of female officers on the vice president’s detail and claiming they would show up and help her and allow her to continue working. At that point, other agents on the scene believed Herczeg was suffering from a mental lapse, and the superior officer, SAIC, approached her to tell her she was relieved from the assignment.
“That’s when she snapped entirely,” one source recounted.
Herczeg then chest-bumped and shoved her superior, then tackled him and punched him. The agents involved in restraining Herczeg were especially concerned because she still had her gun in the holster. They wrestled her to the ground, took the gun from her, cuffed her, and then removed her from the terminal.

Gosh, I wonder how this nutjob got hired?

Following the incident, Secret Service agents and officers are privately questioning the hiring process and whether the agency had adequately screened Herczeg’s background. Some also wonder whether her hire was part of a diversity, equity, and inclusion push in response to years of staff shortages that may have required the agency to lower its once-strict employment standards and physical performance to reach quotas for female agents and officers. . . .
Ronald Kessler, a former investigative reporter for the Washington Post who has written several books on the Secret Service, said the agency would have traditionally viewed the dismissed discrimination lawsuit as disqualifying.
“Yes, that should have been enough to exclude her, because you really have to have a pristine record,” he told RCP Wednesday. “Certainly, this has been true in the past. There’s tremendous competition, and she never should have been hired.”
Kessler also pointed to a new initiative to increase the number of women in the Secret Service workforce. Guglielmi confirmed that the agency is one of numerous federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies that have signed onto the 30×30 initiative, an effort to increase the representation of women in all ranks of policing across the country to 30% of the workforce by 2030.

“Let’s hire this kooky woman who filed a bogus discrimination lawsuit against her former employers to guard the Vice President of the United States, because what could possibly go wrong?”

Have I mentioned lately that Crazy People Are Dangerous?

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Category: Crime

In The Mailbox: 04.26.24 (Evening Edition)

Posted on | April 27, 2024 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Usual weekend deadlines for the usual weekend posts.
An abbreviated post since I need to reload my magazines with practice ammo and be at the range by 0800.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

Why New Vegas is the best Fallout game.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Good Guys 2, Bad Guys 0
EBL: Kamala Harris’s Secret Service Agent Michelle Herczeg allegedly threw menstrual pads at other Secret Service Agent, The Insane Biology of Sunfish, Machete Kills, MAGA Supreme Court Immunity Arguments, and What Civil War Generals Thought of Each Other
Twitchy: Three Year Letterman Mocks Protester Tackle In Epic Takedown, Guy Learns The Hard Way After Asking X Users To Name A War Not Caused By Religion, and We Regret To Inform You The “Experts” Are At It Again
Louder With Crowder: Rep. Adam Schiff forced to give a speech in street clothes after California thieves steal his luggage
Vox Popoli: Every Critique is Correct, also, Klaus Schwab is Alive and Well
According To Hoyt: The Madness of the Marxists, The Quest for Motherhood, The Small Subtle Poisons, and The Great Breakdown
Draw & Talk: The Comic Creator Turned Crime Lord
Upstream Reviews: Marymae & The Nightmare Man
Stoic Observations: Artemis Pulls The Cart

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Baldilocks: Brazen Benzin Grifting
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Don Surber: FJB’s worst nightmare
Michele Catalano: looking so long at these pictures of you
The Political Hat: Quick Takes – All The Climate Things: Your Car’s Energy; Your Farm And Home; Your Cold Temperature

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Category: Linkagery

‘Selma Envy’ and the Left’s Increasing Embrace of ‘Eliminationist Rhetoric’

Posted on | April 26, 2024 | Comments Off on ‘Selma Envy’ and the Left’s Increasing Embrace of ‘Eliminationist Rhetoric’

For at least 30 years, going back to when I was covering local schools for the Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune, I’ve been worried about how history is taught in America’s education system. This problem was apparent to me by the time our oldest child was in kindergarten, and I didn’t at first fully understand until, working on an assignment from my editor, Pierre-Rene Noth (who, coincidentally, was a half-Jew whose family fled the Nazis in Europe), I undertook a study of Marxist philosophy. You see, while I’d always hated Communists — as every patriotic American should — I had never been aware of the philosophical roots of Marxism as a theory of history (e.g., Hegel and all that). “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” Marx and Engels declared. If you teach students to look at history from the Marxist perspective, it is predictable that they will develop a radical worldview, believing they have a duty to support those who claim to be victims of societal oppression.

As I became acquainted with how history was being taught — even in classrooms in rural Floyd County, Georgia — the pervasiveness of this Marxist influence was impossible to ignore. Just skimming through the textbooks commonly assigned in public schools, it was possible to show how the “class struggle” theme was reiterated, and how much the content of history classes had changed since my boyhood in the 1960s and ’70s. All of that is preamble to introducing you to Hans Fiene. He is a Lutheran pastor in his 40s and, by simple arithmetic, it can be deduced that he was a high school student at just about the time I was becoming alarmed about the Marxist influence in the teaching of history.

Pastor Hans Fiene

In 2015, surveying the widespread enthusiasm for same-sex marriage among his age cohort, Pastor Fiene coined the term “Selma Envy” to explain this otherwise inexplicable phenomenon:

Why do so many people, Gen Xers and younger, invent a monster of anti-gay bigotry and keep screaming the monster is real despite a mountain of contrary facts standing before them?
The answer is “social studies.” My generation engages in straw men, misinformation, and lies because, in every year of social studies class, we studied the civil-rights movement not as history, but as hagiography. We didn’t just learn what events happened on American soil, we were encouraged to mimic the segregation-defeating holy ones and merit for ourselves a place alongside them in glory. . . . [W]e concluded that the only thing necessary to be as righteous as the saints who fought racial injustice was to decry an injustice that no one else was. And we became so desperate to find that injustice, we lost our minds in the process.
Once upon a time, my generation learned in first-grade social studies, everyone thought it was good to hate African-Americans. But then a group of saintly figures arose who were better human beings than the rednecks from the South, and they changed the world for the better. This story captivated us, and we wanted to change the world, too. . . .
More than we wanted to find the perfect prom date, we wanted to find our own bigotry to eradicate. After years of hearing those saints sing “We Shall Overcome,” we were overcome with jealousy. We coveted Selma. We envied that march. We looked at that footage and hungered for our own cause to devour.

You can read the whole thing, but the point I wish to make is that my concerns about how history was being taught — as a moralistic “class struggle” melodrama — were not paranoid. All the left-wing “social justice” crusades of recent years are consequences of the crypto-Marxist pedagogy that has suffused America’s classrooms since the 1990s.

Now consider the pro-Hamas protests on university campuses:

National Review senior editor Charles C. W. Cooke said Tuesday that the escalating anti-Israel protests at Columbia University appear to reflect a desire on the part of the contemporary Left to “contrive” a kind of “great clarifying Manichaean moment,” even if they’re not living through one.
“I think that we are once again witnessing what is generally termed ‘Selma envy,’” Cooke said on The Editors podcast, “but I think that there is an attendant wrinkle to it.
“They have managed to deploy the logic and rhetoric of Selma in all circumstances in a manner that always, invariably, helps them,” Cooke said. He brought up something National Review Online editor Phil Klein pointed out, that “it’s not just that there is a double standard when it comes to Jews. It’s that there is a double standard when it comes to who is protesting Jews.”
Cooke recalled the Charlottesville riots, where “right-wingers were protesting Jews. They are therefore the bad guy who are making the world less safe. . . . but if the Left is protesting Jews, then they [i.e., the anti-Jewish protesters] are the downtrodden.
“You can’t win. You cannot win in this framework. It’s extremely clever.”

You see how this works: Because history is about “class struggles,” then certain groups must be the victim class (analogous to the role of the proletariat in 19th-century Europe) while others must be the oppressor class (playing the role of the capitalist bourgeoisie), and this Marxist formula of victims and oppressors is applied to different situations with little consideration to exactly how the alleged “oppression” has occurred, or whether it even exists as a meaningful phenomenon.

“Selma Envy” — a desire to “mimic the segregation-defeating holy ones” in a crusade against injustice, an attitude Hans Fiene testifies that children have been encouraged to adopt since he was a first-grader growing up in Indiana — fuels this irrational radicalism. Ivy League students, who certainly should be intelligent enough to read the actual history of Israel, instead mindlessly devour Hamas propaganda about a (wholly imaginary) “genocide” of the so-called “Palestinian” people (who are just Arabs, including people who might more properly called Lebanese, Syrian, Egyptian, or Jordanian). The idea that the “Palestinians” are the historical victims of an outrageous oppression perpetrated by Jews — well, any reasonably skeptical researcher can find plenty of evidence to rebut that propaganda narrative. But skepticism is in short supply among Ivy League students these days, who have been so indoctrinated with the “class struggle” mentality that they consider any dissent from their belief system to be wicked. They literally fantasize about murdering anyone who disagrees with them.

“Be glad — be grateful — that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists. I’ve never murdered anyone in my life, and I *hope* to keep it that way.” This is a top leader of @Columbia’s encampment, with whom the school is “negotiating,” expanding on his thoughts about how Israel… pic.twitter.com/ugodO4O7M5

— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) April 25, 2024

A ringleader of Columbia University’s anti-Israel encampment is under fire after newly resurfaced video showed the student publicly raging that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”
Khymani James, who says they go by “he/she/they” pronouns, made the disturbing remarks during a meeting with university officials back in January, which the student livestreamed and then blasted out on social media.
“Zionists don’t deserve to live comfortably, let alone Zionists don’t deserve to live,” the student filmed themselves saying.
“The same way we are very comfortable accepting Nazis don’t deserve to live, fascists don’t deserve to live, racists don’t deserve to live, Zionists, they shouldn’t live in this world.”
“Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists,” James added. “I’ve never hurt anyone in my life, and I hope to keep it that way.”

Notice the equivalence: “Nazi” = “fascist” = “racist” = “Zionist.”

Let’s not pretend that such ranting fanatics are scrupulously careful in how they define these categories. If you disagree with the Left, if you are a member (or supporter) of a group the Left accuses of oppression, they angrily declare you “don’t deserve to live.” And this is an entirely logical conclusion, if you accept the premises of the Marxist-influenced “class struggle” curriculum with which they’ve been indoctrinated.

This “eliminationist rhetoric” from the Left, their relentless demonization of anyone who opposes them, is a product of how the teaching of history has been hijacked for political purposes, and the bad news is, there’s no way to put the crypto-Marxist genie back in the bottle. While some small number of these student radicals will repent of their youthful folly, the vast majority of them are irredeemable. Their minds have been destroyed by the poisonous beliefs with which they have been indoctrinated since childhood, and there’s no point even trying to reason with them.

The Ivy League Is Decadent and Depraved, as I’ve been saying for years, because of a phenomenon most conservatives have never contemplated: If the curriculum taught in our schools is corrupted, then the “best” students — those who most diligently study the lessons they’re taught — will be the most corrupt of all. There’s little danger that the lazy student, happy to coast along with a “C” average, will grow up to be the kind of radical who chants pro-Hamas slogans at Columbia University. No, it’s the apple-polishing honor student, the kid with the perfect GPA, who is most likely to become a left-wing fanatic. Their minds have been utterly ruined, for the very reason that they are such “good students.”

Defund the Ivy League. Cut all ties, all loans, all support. Shut it down. Seize the endowments. https://t.co/NxsdbKE2sV

— Dan Gainor (@dangainor) April 22, 2024

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Category: History, The Ivy League Is Depraved and Decadent

In The Mailbox: 04.26.24 (Morning Edition)

Posted on | April 26, 2024 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 04.26.24 (Morning Edition)

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Probably not going to get caught up on everything, since I have a CHP class tonight, but I’ll see what I can do.
Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

Can’t believe it took somebody this long to come up with this.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Concealed Carry Permit Holder Defends Himself In Chicago
EBL: Thomas Sowell on Activism, Machete, Joe Biden: How Many Times Does Trump Have To Prove We Can’t Be Trusted? One of Kamala Harris’s Secret Service Agents Acted “Erratically”, and New York Court of Appeals Overturns Harvey Weinstein Conviction
Twitchy: It was The Russians, Adam! Anita Dunn Tries To Oust Special K, The Worst Press Secretary Ever, and WaPoo Columnist’s Big GOTCHA Defending Pro-Hamas Protesters Terrorizing Jewish Students Backfires Bigly
Louder With Crowder: Dollar General employee illustrates perfect way to respond to angry customers claiming you “misgendered” them, Expert explains why TikTok is the most significant threat to your privacy your smartphone, US Military Service Members Who Refuse To Use Someone “Preferred Pronoun” Could Face Court Martial, and Australian Senator calls for Elon Musk to be ARRESTED over his support of free speech, “and the key be thrown away”
Vox Popoli: The Seventh Tribe, The Midwit Science, And Here…We…Go, and Another Fake Election
Upstream Reviews: The Road To Damascus, The Black Hole,
Postcards From Barsoom: The Hollow Gods Of Wires & Sand,
Ammo.com: Ohio 2A Grades & Endorsements
Defending The Wood Perilous: Is Reading Misleading?

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
CDR Salamander: What Happened To Our Ship Repair Infrastructure? also, Diversity Thursday
Don Surber: NATO revived Russia, also, Goldberg should have listened to Trump
Glenn Reynolds: Education Apocalypse Now?
STUMP: Revisiting Death By Falls, Around The Pension-o-Sphere,

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The Black Hole
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Category: Linkagery

TikTok Inluencer Hangs Herself

Posted on | April 24, 2024 | 1 Comment

Eva Evans had over 300,000 followers on TikTok and more than 30,000 on Instagram. She killed herself last weekend at age 29:

The cause of death has been announced for Eva Evans, a TikTok influencer and director of the Prime Video series Club Rat, who died at the weekend aged 29.
TMZ reports Evans appears to have died by suicide.
Law enforcement sources told the outlet a friend found Eva’s body late Saturday night after having seen her alive Friday morning, going on to relate, “We’re told the friend had a key to Eva’s NYC apartment and when they went to check on her … they found her hanging inside.”
Sources told TMZ “there were no unusual injuries … and there was no sign of a struggle.”
A note was left behind, the contents of which have not been made public.

While hanging yourself is bad, it beats lighting yourself on fire, I suppose. Unless and until the contents of Eva’s suicide note are made public, we have no idea what motivated her suicide, but probably a lot of social-media “influencers” are desperately depressed. Engaging in online exhibitionism in a competitive quest for “clout” isn’t the sort of occupation that emotionally stable people are apt to pursue — really, have you seen the kind of kooks that LibsOfTikTok finds? — and you could see how such a career might lead to feelings of hopeless despair. But why hang yourself? Just log off and delete your account. A recent study found 74% of teenagers feel happier without their smartphones. As the song says, “If it makes you happy, then why the hell are you so sad?”