The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

In The Mailbox: 11.14.23

Posted on | November 14, 2023 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 11.14.23

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda est.

Wouldn’t you?

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Shifty Schiff’s “Primary Home” is in Maryland, also, Joe Biden Calls David Axelrod a Prick 
Twitchy: Jon Lovitz Sets John Oliver Straight On America’s Relationship With Israel, Nicolle Wallace & Jonathan Karl Discuss Trump’s [Alleged] Affinity For Hitler, and Jamaal Bowman Goysplains The True Meaning Of What It Means To Be A Jew
Louder With Crowder: Female Pool Player Refuses To Play Trans Opponent, Takes A Brave Stand And Walks Off At Start Of Match, Kid Rock, Jason Aldean announce co-headlining music festival guaranteed to trigger the Left, and Miss Universe Files For Bankruptcy Just Days Before Two Trans Contestants Have Opportunity To Shatter Glass Ceiling
Vox Popoli: US Casualties in Middle East, Endgame Ukraine II, Mailvox: the Secret is Out, and Not So Fast, Skater Boy
Draw & Talk: Playing To Win v. Playing For Peace – We Did It!

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Car Lights, Kill Switches, and Daily Popcorn
American Conservative: Yes, Disruptive Students Can Be Deported
American Greatness: House GOP: Mass Migration Crisis has Cost Taxpayers $451 Billion
American Thinker: Nazi Revivalism in America
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Shoulder Brace News
Babalu Blog: Military ceremony in Havana exposes Russian official in charge of Kremlin spy operation in Cuba, Some blockade! Cuba imports $722,526 worth of cars, trucks, motorcycles from U.S. in September, and Cuban dictatorship signs agreement with French company to harvest coffee and export it all to France
BattleSwarm: Hamas’ Hospital Hideout
Behind The Black: Musk: Government approval for 2nd Starship/Superheavy launch expected before Friday, NASA “pauses” Mars Sample Return mission, The caldera wall of a Martian giant volcano, November 14, 2023 Quick space links, and Real pushback? 1600 Harvard alumni demand the university take action against campus anti-Semitism
Cafe Hayek: Protectionism Assaults Producers
CDR Salamander: Deindustrialization In The UK Is Almost Complete
Da Tech Guy: Pope Francis divides the Catholic Church, also, A Point Concerning Christianity, Truth and Culture (with an assist by Chesterton)
Don Surber: October 7 Revealed The New Nazis
First Street Journal: Couldn’t we build something like this in Kensington?
Gates Of Vienna: German Tax Dollars to Pay For Mosques? A Socialist Patriot, It’s Worse Than You Thought, Brown Border, and A Final Warning
The Geller Report: Children as Young as 10 Took Part in Hamas’s Oct. 7 Terror Attack, Survivors Say, also, LIVE FROM DC: Hundreds of Thousands March for Israel in Washington DC
Hogewash: Supernovae
Hollywood In Toto: Can’t-Miss Sports Drama Next Goal Wins Comes Up Empty, Top 10 ’80s Punk Movies, Is Hunger Games Prequel a Bust Already? and Patriot Awards Comic Jimmy Failla Salutes Real-Life Heroes
The Lid: Via TikTok, China Helps Spread Antisemitic Ignorance
Legal Insurrection: Gov. Hairgel Declares State of Emergency After Massive Fire Shuts Important LA Freeway, Cornell graduate student workers vote to join anti-Israel national union, Climate Cultists Get Roasted After Suggesting Climate Warning Labels Should be Slapped on Meat, “Racial doctrines such as ‘critical race theory’ and ‘intersectionality’ are the mother’s milk of antisemitism on campuses”, Rutgers University Disbands Student Bar Association for Targeting Jews and Anti-Semitism, MIT Declined to Expel Anti-Israel Students Because They Would Have Been Deported, and UNH Prof Likens Hamas to Polish Jewish Victims of Nazis in WWII
Nebraska Energy Observer: Now here’s a thought
Outkick: Micah Parsons Says Fans Should Be Patient With Bryce Young, Arizona Wildcats Have A $240 Million Deficit Due To Financial Modeling ‘Mistake,’ Could Mean Cutting Teams, Dana White Told Sponsor To Go “F-Yourself’ For Asking Him To Take Down Trump Video, Deion Sanders Shoots Down Texas A&M Coaching Speculation: ‘I’m Here’, San Diego Padres Owner Peter Seidler Dies At 63, and Michigan May Win 1,000th Game Saturday Without Jim Harbaugh, Who Could Be Feeding Chickens And Cutting Grass
Power Line: Corbyn for the many Hamasniks, Memo to the AP, and If Only the Conservative Party Were Conservative
Shark Tank: Wassermann-Schultz Rejects Government Services Bill
Shot In The Dark: Controlled Demolition, Multiculturalism in Action,  and A Certain Resonance
The Political Hat: Grooming Students Into Furry Fandom
This Ain’t Hell: People Dressed in Military Uniforms to Get Early Boarding, also, Crappy Tuesday posts
Transterrestrial Musings:  Bari Weiss, also, ULA
Victory Girls: Trust Fund Baby Big Hamas Supporter
Volokh Conspiracy: Supreme Court Adopts Ethics Code, also, Bari Weiss’s Olson Lecture: You Are the Last Line of Defense
Watts Up With That: Heat pumps ‘too noisy’ for millions of British homes, Government told, Hoboken Wisely Improved Water Management, Even Though the New York Times Got the Reason Wrong, and Coalition Files Notice of Intent to Sue Federal Agencies to Stop Whale-killing Virginia Wind Project
The Federalist: California Jeopardizes Pharmacists’ Livelihoods To Export Abortions Out Of State, WaPo, New York Times Make Dumb Fake News Out Of Very Perfect, Very True Trump Quote, How Obama And Biden’s America-Last Ethos Demoted The U.S. From World Leader To Loser, Margaret Sullivan Rewarded For Being On Wrong Side Of Every Major News Story With A Gig Teaching ‘Ethics’, The Conversion Of Ayaan Hirsi Ali To Christianity Is A Dire Warning To The West, The GOP Is A Fake Opposition Party With No Vision For The Country, and House Republicans Propose Gutting Pentagon Censorship Regime In Defense Reauthorization Bill
Mark Steyn: Onward, Christian Soldier!

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Category: Linkagery

Secret Service Agents Open Fire on D.C. ‘Youth’ Breaking Into Their Car

Posted on | November 14, 2023 | 1 Comment

Washington Free Beacon nails it here:

The national mainstream media pounced, finally noticing the crime wave wreaking havoc on the vast majority of D.C. residents who aren’t related to the president of the United States and don’t have Secret Service protection. . . .
There have been 863 carjacking incidents in Washington, D.C., this year. That’s a 106 percent increase compared with last year and a 600 percent increase compared with 2019. Nearly three in four carjacking incidents in 2023 involved a firearm, and the majority of individuals arrested were juveniles.

Of course, no one is permitted to mention the ethnicity of these juvenile car thieves. Let’s just say they’re not Amish. When the media try to explain this crime wave, they generally try to blame it on the COVID-19 pandemic. OK, it’s possible there’s also been a 600 percent increase in carjacking in Pennsylvania Dutch country since 2019, but I rather doubt it. The real explanation isn’t the COVID-19 virus or the lockdowns in reaction to the pandemic. No, the real explanation is the anti-law-enforcement crusade by Democrats in the wake of the race riots caused by the death of Saint George of the Blessed Fentanyl.

Democrat-run cities and states have acted upon the belief that it’s racist — “RAAAAACIST!” — to put criminals in prison, if the criminals happen to be black. And anyone who has actually paid attention to crime rates (and who isn’t afflicted with “social justice” delusions) knows that the Democrats’ turn-’em-loose policy is a formula for mayhem.

Democrats make excuses for criminals, minimizing the harm done by these “urban youth.” Democrats say car theft is just a “property crime,” as if having your car stolen was a minor inconvenience. Then Democrats will say, “Oh, they have insurance,” but insurance costs money and when you have a 600% increase in carjacking — SIX HUNDRED PERCENT! — what do you think happens to car insurance rates? The increased cost of insurance is, in effect, a crime tax imposed by Democrats.

What are the secondary and tertiary consequences of Democrats enabling criminality? Isn’t it likely that more people will simply avoid cities? Won’t this in turn cause economic harm to the residents of cities? But thinking in terms of long-term consequences isn’t something Democrats do. It’s much easier for them to point fingers at Republicans and yell nonsense about “systemic racism,” as if somehow those evil white people in the suburbs were forcing black teenagers to steal cars.

By the way, why do you think those Secret Service agents decided to shoot at these thieves who were “breaking a window on a parked and unoccupied government vehicle”? Isn’t it likely that the intent of the thieves was to steal what was inside the vehicle, rather than stealing the vehicle itself? And what do you think Secret Service agents might have kept locked up in their vehicle? Oh, yes — GUNS!

How do you think criminals get guns, anyway? There are laws against selling guns to convicted felons, and this creates an incentive for criminals to steal guns. A lot of people (not just Secret Service agents) keep a gun in their car, and criminals know that if they break into enough cars, they’ll find some guns to steal, not to mention whatever other valuables they might obtain by their crimes. God only knows what kind of weapons the Secret Service may have had in that “unoccupied government vehicle,” but I’m glad the smash-and-grab got foiled. Just too bad the Secret Service agents didn’t aim well enough to send them to an early grave. Death is the most effective form of crime prevention.



 

Category: Crime

In The Mailbox: 11.13.23

Posted on | November 14, 2023 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 11.13.23

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda est.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Eventually You Run Out Of Other Peoples’ Money – NYC Edition
EBL: Palestinian Pro-Hamas Protesters Suck, Shrinking, and Secret Service Agent Shoots To Protect Biden’s Granddaughter’s SUV?
Twitchy: Seattle PD Does Nothing As Antifa’s “Bike Brigade” Blocks Traffic, DHS Head Mayorkas Escapes Impeachment Thanks To Eight GOP Reps, and Students Flip Out Over Truck Displaying “Columbia’s Biggest Anti-Semites”
Louder With Crowder: Megan Rapinoe lashes out at God, who, in His infinite wisdom, caused her to get injured in her last soccer match, Jury Awards $1.2 Million To Robert De Niro’s Former Assistant In Bullying, Gender Discrimination Suit, and DC wants to mandate “kill switches” so they can disable your car, and one Republican is speaking out
Vox Popoli: The Descent of Marvel, A Rainbow Flag Over Rome, Ukraine Endgame, They Respectfully Decline, and Arktoons 14 Million
Stoic Observations: The Black Endgame
Gab News: Lessons From The Barren Fig Tree

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Can Strickland become a Lightning Rod?
American Conservative: The Travesty at Arlington National Cemetery
American Greatness: Terrorism Abroad Means Terrorism at Home, Karl Misinterprets Polls – Voters Do Want Trump, Federal Judge in Georgia Orders Trial for Case Against Dominion Voting Machines, Trump Plans Massive Deportations, Detention Camps for Illegals if Re-Elected in 2024, and The Damage of the ‘White Privilege’ Smear
American Thinker: Islam is Not a Religion, Biden is ‘Fighting’ Hamas for Biden’s Interests, The West Gelds Itself, and If You Oppose Tyranny, You’re on the FBI’s AGAAVE List
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: Video of the Day: What was once one of Cuba’s most productive sugar mills has been reduced to ruins, Reports from Cuba: Little remains of the bright screens that celebrated Havana’s 500th anniversary, Sen. Marco Rubio rips into yo-yo ‘refugees’ on welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid who constantly travel back to Cuba, and Parasitic Cuban dictatorship says it needs massive investments from ‘diaspora’ Cubans
Baldilocks: Silence of the Gentiles, also, Goodbye & Hello
BattleSwarm: Veterans Day: Living Celebrities Who Served In World War II, Surviving World War II Fighters And Bombers, and The NRA Is Going Broke And Moving To Texas
Behind The Black: SpaceX launches 90 payloads on its ninth smallsat Transporter mission, Spanish court indicts two high-altitude balloon companies for stealing from third, Curiosity looks back at Gale Crater one last time before month-long communications break, SpaceX successfully launches two communications satellites, and Real Pushback: Conservative family sues Biden Justice Department for “‘Malicious and Retaliatory Prosecution”
Cafe Hayek: Protectionism Is An Unjust Assault On Fellow Citizens
CDR Salamander: Measuring & Modeling The Naval Presence Mission, also, Red China’s New Cambodian Naval Base, Rev. 1
Chicago Boyz: The Vonnegut-Lewis Theory of Modern Art, also, Who Are the Commissioners?
Da Tech Guy: Pinball Machine or Heat? Thanks Joe Biden! Someone else’s kid, Something that Just Hit Me Concerning Colonization and Mass Migration, National media ignores big Chicago anti-migrant march, and Walking Before You Run Christianity , Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Rosalind Picard, Sc.D
Dana Loesch: Hamas Is Killing People At Its Hospital HQ
Don Surber: What Have Republicans Done For Us?
First Street Journal: Money talks
Gates Of Vienna: Ho Ho Ho! Salafist Agitators in Basel and Zurich, Bring in All the Cousins! Jihad in Spain, and Masquerade in Berlin
The Geller Report: HAMASURRECTION: On Veterans Day, Pro-Terror Mobs Tear Down American Flags in NYC, Replace Them With Jihad Flags, “We Will Not Stop Until Islam Enters Every Home!”, London: Jihad Terror Marchers Scream ‘Khaybar’ Death Cry Vowing New Genocide of Jews, and COVID-19 Vaccine Reckoning is Coming
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of the Day, A Dust Devil on Mars, JWST Tours the Crab Nebula, and NGC 941
Hollywood In Toto: Fincher’s Killer Finds Auteur Back Where He Belongs, What Matthew Lillard Could Teach Rachel Zegler, Albert Brooks: Defending My Life Offers Mash Note to Comedy Legend, and Woke Stephen King Mocked for Marvels Defense
The Lid: FDR’s Warning About Raising Kids To Kill
Legal Insurrection: IDF Reaches Heart of Gaza City, Hunt Begins for Hamas Chief Yahya Sinwar and Other Terror Commanders, House Approves Bill Slashing Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s Salary to $1, Biden Administration Doubles Down on Green Energy Insanity, Democrat Media Arm Scrambles As It Becomes Clear They Knew About Hamas Invasion Of Israel Before It Happened, Sen. John Fetterman Surprises the Left and Right With Unapologetic Support for Israel, ‘No Climate Justice on Occupied Land’, and Harvard Divinity Student Evicted From Housing After Being Identified in Anti-Israel Mob on Campus
Nebraska Energy Observer: Saturday – just for you, Remembrance Sunday, and Veteran’s Day
Outkick: Michigan Coach Sherrone Moore Cries & Cusses After Emotional Win Over Penn State Without Jim Harbaugh, Former NFL First-Round Pick DJ Hayden Dies In Car Crash At Age 33, Iowa Score Goes Under The Lowest Over/Under Total In History For Second Consecutive Week, Atlanta Braves Release Financial Disclosures, Pulling Back Curtain On Business Of Baseball, Texas A&M Moves On From Jimbo Fisher, Urban Meyer Calls Jim Harbaugh Punishment ‘Insanity’, and MMA Fighter King Bau Calls Out Gov’t For Indicting Trump Before Epstein’s Clients
Power Line: The Mob Takes Midtown, Two Scenes From Yesterday’s Protests, and Why Didn’t MIT Expel Violent Students?
Shark Tank: Mast Questions Robert Malley’s Shady Past, also, FL Legislature Pushes For County Commissioner Term Limits
Shot In The Dark: Remodeling With A Smaller Overton Window, Experience vs. Idealism – 15 Rounds, Veterans, and Happy Birthday, Poland!
The Political Hat: Photos From The Front
This Ain’t Hell: Oldest Living Woman Marine Honored, A U.S. military helicopter crashed in the eastern Mediterranean, and Execution, Alabama-style
Transterrestrial Musings: The Department Of Education, also, Violent Students
Victory Girls: Veterans Day 2023 – For All Who Serve, Ron DeSantis Defies Ronna McDaniel, and D.C. Criminals Tried To Carjack Unmarked Secret Service Vehicle
Volokh Conspiracy: Court Strikes Down Ban on Town Employees Displaying “Thin Blue Line” Flag While on Town Property
Watts Up With That: Awkward – Canada creates a brand-new fossil fuel subsidy just in time for COP28, a reminder that sticks hurt and carrots are healthy, Sahara Expert Says Desert Shrinking, Calls Alarmist Tipping Points “Complete Nonsense”, and A Nuclear Renaissance Is the Best Path Forward
The Federalist: Veterans Day Is A Call To Sacrifice, And Americans Who Love Liberty Must Answer, No Serious Country Would Allow Terrorist Sympathizers To Run Its Government, The Anti-White Racism Governing The Democrat Party Inevitably Spawns Violence, U.S. Government Gave $1 Million To AI Startup That Helped Blacklist Companies Spreading ‘Disinformation’, Clean For Xi But Not For Thee, and It’s Time For Pro-Lifers To Scrap Their Losing Electoral Strategy And Adopt The Lincoln Method
Mark Steyn: We Were Soldiers, If You Were the Only Girl in the World, and The Future Shows Up

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Category: Linkagery

The Strange Return of ‘Radical Chic’

Posted on | November 13, 2023 | 2 Comments

When I was a college student, Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers was one of the assigned texts in our feature writing class — studying the “New Journalism” as it was then called. The slim volume combined two articles Wolfe wrote for New York magazine, a publication that has since become just another mouthpiece of the Democrat-Media Complex. Politics in the early 1970s were in a state of flux — the old New Deal liberalism had been discredited by LBJ’s various bungles, but no one knew which way things would go in the future. Cynicism about all things political was the prevalent mood as I recall in hindsight, and you can see this attitude in Wolfe’s dissection of the absurd scene in which composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein hosted a fundraiser for the Black Panther Party at his posh Manhattan pad.

That came to mind today when I saw Brendan O’Neill’s reference to our “cultural elite” whose “indoctrination into the politics of identity . . . leads them to view Israel as the culpable adult in this relationship and the Palestinians as blameless children” (hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.) This simplistic reduction of Mideast geopolitics to a formula of victims (Palestinians) and their oppressors (Israel) is very reminiscent of Lenny Bernstein’s belief that raising money for the Panthers was the height of enlightenment in 1970. The Panthers were a gang of dangerous criminals using Marxist rhetoric as a masquerade for what was, in fact, a racketeering operation. (If you haven’t read the chapter about Huey Newton in Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties by David Horowitz and Peter Collier, now would be a good time to do so.)

How is it that our so-called “elite” can’t see through the propaganda claims of oppression that lead them to their pro-Hamas posture, which is every bit as ridiculous as Lenny Bernstein’s support of the Panthers? Today with my office TV tuned to CNN (I watch, so you don’t have to), I see them promoting the idea that the biggest news in Gaza is that Palestinian children are suffering. To which any reasonably well-informed person must reply, “Yeah? Well, whose fault is that?”

Isn’t this suffering a predictable consequence of Hamas launching its bloody October 7 terrorist massacre of Israeli civilians? And is it not a fact that the Palestinians elected Hamas as rulers of Gaza?

The “official” count of Palestinian casualties is supplied by the Gaza Health Ministry, which is run by Hamas. But surely these genocidal Jew-haters wouldn’t lie about how many people have been killed, would they? And it’s not as if Hamas would locate their command headquarters underneath a hospital, would they? Why, the Palestinians are innocent “blameless children,” and only a racist — “RAAAAACIST!” — would suspect them of dishonesty or malice. Sympathy toward these alleged victims of oppression is the motor that drives the latest strange revival of “radical chic,” and what we need is a latter-day Tom Wolfe to expose it for the absurdity it is. Too bad New York magazine these days only publishes “Democratic operatives with bylines,” so we can’t get what we need.



 

 

Category: Journalism

Rule 5 Sunday: One Last Glimpse Of Bikini

Posted on | November 13, 2023 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

It was slightly tempting to post a pic of the Crossroads Baker test, but I (for once) decided against it on the grounds of bad taste…instead, this week’s appetizer is courtesy of kbdabear on X, who posts a generous serving of swimsuit beauties every Sunday, whether appropriate for the season or not. 
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas esse delendam.

ANIMAL MAGNETISM: Rule Five Business Tax Climate Friday, and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL: Saturday Night Girls With Guns, Ann Margret & Motorcycles, Sadie Hawkins Day, [EBL discovers] Neanderthal Erotic Fiction, The Last Sentinel, MAGA Megaphone at the Trump Show Trial, Women & Hockey, and Five Nights At Freddy’s.

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Nata Lee, Fish Pic Friday – Mellow Adventuress, Tattoo Thursday, Ships Killing Bay Sturgeon, Off Year Elections, Tlaib Censured, The Wednesday Wetness, Tuesday Tanlines, Hunter Paid for Joe’s Secret Phone, The Monday Morning Stimulus, Palm Sunday, and “Follow the Bouncing Bribe”

AVERAGE BUBBA: Rule Five Friday – American Edition

FLAPPR: T.I.T.S. for November 10

STICKS, STORIES, & SCOTCH: Rule Five Warships – Mary Celeste

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious links!

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Category: Rule 5

FMJRA 2.0: Electric Eye

Posted on | November 12, 2023 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: Electric Eye

— compiled by Wombat-socho

My Senators played Pete’s Brewers last Saturday, so we had a break in the action until last night, when it was time to travel to Anaheim and face the Angels. We took two out of three games, with Dobson & Kaat notching their 12th wins; we’ll be fortunate to do as well against the New York Daytraders, who are next up on Tuesday.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas esse delendam.

Fly the Curly W flag!

Rule Five Sunday: O, Canada
Animal Magnetism
Average Bubba
Flappr
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum





‘Kill All You Little Crackers’
The Daley Gator
First Street Journal
Flappr
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

Despite Big Night for Virginia Democrats, “HotWifeExperience’ Loses Election
The Daley Gator
Flappr
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

Rolling Stone Has Become the SPLC?
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

FMJRA 2.0: Miracle on East Capitol Street
A View From The Beach
EBL

Seems Kind of…Insurrection-y
First Street Journal
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 11.07.23 (Morning Edition)
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

Election Results HQ: The Check Engine Light Is Flashing for ‘Bidenomics’ UPDATE: Dem Reelected Ky. Governor UPDATE: Dems Hold Virginia Senate
A View From The Beach
EBL

Crazy People Are Dangerous
The Daley Gator
EBL

NBC ‘News’ Hosts ‘Republican’ ‘Debate’
The Daley Gator
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 11.09.23 (Abbreviated Punditocracy Edition)
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 11.09.23
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 11.10.23
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 11.10.23 (Late Night Edition)
EBL
357 Magnum

Top linkers for the week ending November 10:

  1.  EBL (14)
  2.  357 Magnum (11)
  3.  A View From The Beach (9)

Thanks to everyone for all the links!

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Category: FMJRA Award

The High Price of Forgetting

Posted on | November 11, 2023 | 3 Comments

“The dullards and malcontents among us are always anxious to acquire by coercion and bullying what they cannot gain by merit. Because of this, their simple-minded doctrine is attractive for a certain type of disaffected bureaucrat.”
— Stanley K. Ridgley

When I was young (says the Baby Boomer, because you callow punks don’t know this stuff) everybody knew Communism was bad. And when I say “everybody,” I mean everybody I knew growing up, as opposed to some freaky radicals in Berkeley or wherever. Stopping the spread of Communism was the primary focus of America’s national policy for at least 10 years before I was born, going back to when Winston Churchill gave his famous “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri. The evil of Communism was so widely recognized that it was usually taken for granted and, in hindsight, this was a mistake. I was never taught anything in school (or college) about the ideology of Communism. There was no critical analysis of the writings of Marx and Engels and Lenin and Trotsky. Nor, for that matter, did we learn anything about the Bolshevik Revolution, the failed Communist revolution attempt in Germany, the short-lived Communist regime in Hungary, etc. Keep in mind that, until I was 14 years old, our troops were fighting Communists in Vietnam. So why weren’t our teachers tasked to explain to us exactly what it was we were fighting? The closest thing we got to it was in fifth grade, when our English teacher, Tom Dowd, read Animal Farm aloud to us, over the course of a couple of weeks, explaining it as a parable of the Russian revolution: “Some animals are more equal than others.”

It was not until I was in my 30s — after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union — that I began studying the history of Communism on my own and, as I’ve often said, I’ve read more Marx than most Marxists. I’ve also read Lenin and Trotsky, for that matter, and everything I’ve learned in this autodidactic education has only reinforced what everybody knew when I was a kid: Communism is bad.

All of this is by way of introduction to Stanley K. Ridgley, a business professor at Drexel University and author of Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities. (Hint: Amazon pays me a small commission when you purchase products through my affiliate links, because capitalism!) From the book description:

Much of university life is controlled by subsidized paranoiacs, amateur psychotherapists, neo-Marxist totalitarians, “student affairs professionals” imbued with authoritarian mentality, and racialist thought reformers who run workshops that destroy family ties and traditional beliefs to clear the way for new relationships grounded in racialist ideology. These are the brutal minds who threaten and abuse students in the name of an academic fraud called “antiracist pedagogy.” . . .
An educational charade masks activities and ideology as dangerous as those that inspired Communist China’s tragic Cultural Revolution. This book strips away the façade of the modern American university to reveal the malignant bureaucratic viscera inside the institution. It is a dark world, an anti-intellectualist sanctuary where brutal minds find purpose, protection, camaraderie, subsidy, and power.

This sounds intriguing, but the reference to the Cultural Revolution in China will have zero resonance in the minds of most Americans, who know little or nothing about the history of Communist regimes in power. The only totalitarian regime that most Americans do know about is Nazi Germany, but their knowledge even of that is superficial, and the main lesson they take from the Third Reich is as simple as, “Hate is bad.”

Professor Ridgley writes about the parallels between Nazi Germany and the 21st-century “antiracist” education regime:

In the Third Reich, anti-Semitism infected every aspect of German society, even the domain of science. This was most memorable in the anti-Semitism that corrupted the discipline of physics. In accord with the Nazi authorities, the work of Jewish scientists was delegitimized by declaration. The Nazis dismissed the theories of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr as “Jewish Physics,” “Jewish Science,” “Jewish World-Bluff,” and the product of “Jewish Spirit.” Something called Aryan Physics was erected as the authentic alternative.
The major characteristic of such a primitive patois is that it attracts and works for only two types of people—those stupid enough to actually believe it (the storm-trooper class) and those who don’t believe it but see it as a useful tool to achieve their vision (vanguard puppeteers). . . .

You can read the whole thing (hat-tip: Robert Shibley at Instapundit).

What the Nazis did in demonizing “Jewish Science” was mirrored by the Soviets using “bourgeois” or “capitalist” as an epithet to demonize anything they opposed, whereas the bogus “science” of Lysenkoism was promoted as truth because it was seen as compatible with Stalinist ideology. Ridgeway’s point is that very similar coercive methods are being used to impose equally dubious beliefs about “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” etc., which conform to the Left’s radical ideology.

Certainly, it is not a coincidence that the Left is now supporting protests (or rather pogroms) to terrorize Jewish students on university campuses.



 

 

Category: Books, History

Still Living Rent-Free in Their Heads

Posted on | November 11, 2023 | Comments Off on Still Living Rent-Free in Their Heads

Just scrolling around and saw this headline:

A lot of Americans embrace
Trump’s authoritarianism

What is this? “Authoritarianism”? Words have meanings, but to liberals in the throes of Trump Derangement Syndrome, definitions are distorted to such an extent that words like “authoritarianism” and “fascism” get tossed around haphazardly, reflecting the emotional trauma of people who still haven’t recovered from that night in November 2016 when the unthinkable happened: Hillary Clinton lost the election!

Does the name Kevin Allred ring a bell? Not long after Hillary lost the election, NYPD had to take Allred to Bellevue Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation after he went on a bizarre Twitter rant.

 

At the time, Allred was employed as an adjunct lecturer at Rutgers University. A few months later, in August 2017, Allred was teaching at Montclair State University, when he got fired for a Twitter rant suggesting that Trump should be assassinated.

The problem with people like this — I mean, other than the fact that they’re crazy — is that they take politics too seriously.

For some people, politics is a sort of religion, and the defeat of their favorite candidate is an unbearable blow to their sense of identity. They actually believe all the overblown rhetoric of political campaigns, so that when you tell someone like Kevin Allred that the Republican candidate is “literally Hitler,” they behave as if this were really true.

During the recent election campaign in Virginia, the local TV airwaves were saturated with ads accusing Republicans — “MAGA extremists”! — of conspiring to deprive women of their rights. As I watched these commercials, I couldn’t help but wonder, “Does anyone really believe this stuff?” But here’s the thing: It doesn’t matter whether the well-informed citizen is deceived by such rhetoric. It’s not aimed at us. Instead, such wild-eyed claims are intended (a) to alarm the party’s “base,” thus motivating them to turn out to vote, and (b) to persuade just enough clueless dimwits to make a marginal difference in close races. If a state Senate race is a 50-50 tossup, and a scary TV ad convinces 5% of women to vote Democrat instead of Republican (or ote Democrat when they might otherwise have not bothered to vote), this could prove decisive. And this is as good an explanation as any of happened in Virginia.

What happens, however, when the candidate demonized as a dangerous extremist actually wins the election? Such is the story of the past seven years, when many hundreds of thousands of Democratic voters believed their party’s campaign rhetoric: “TRUMP IS HITLER! DEMOCRACY IS IMPERILED! RUSSIAN COLLUSION! JOIN THE ‘RESISTANCE’!”

Well, some Trump supporters are now in federal prison because they got a little overwrought about the 2020 election. How many anti-Trump protesters got thrown in federal prison? Can you name even one? Explain to me again, please, how it is that Republicans are the party of “authoritianism,” when it’s Democrats who are sending their political opponents to prison. But here’s how Philip Bump begins his column in The Washington Post:

With every hour that passes, Donald Trump’s grip on the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination grows tighter. Every day in which his opponents aren’t gaining ground on his position is a day in which he gets nearer to appearing on the ballot next November and nearer to possibly being inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2025.
To many observers, there’s an incongruity to this. After all, recent days have also brought new awareness of Trump’s plans should he be inaugurated on that day, plans that are often unvarnished embraces of an authoritarian use of power. Trump plans to root out disloyal bureaucrats and install ideologically sympathetic ones. He’s speaking openly of using the Justice Department to target his opponents, including to hobble possible political opponents. . . .

Does this man have any self-awareness at all? Is he inside some kind of cocoon that insulates him from any information about, e.g., everything the Justice Department (and the FBI in particular) has done since 2016?

But this kind of bizarre counterfactual rhetoric is everywhere now, e.g., Noah Berlatsky warning of “The Christofascism of Mike Johnson,” at a time when violent Hamas supporters are endangering Jews everywhere.

What part of “calm the fuck down” do I need to explain here? These campus Hamas mobs are the crazy tip of a vast iceberg of people who have lost their minds because they’re tuned into too closely to the 24/7 Political Noise Machine that is our national media establishment. Somebody needs to tell these people: “Put down your phones! Stop reading the messages on your social media! And for God’s sake, don’t watch cable news! You obviously can’t deal with it!”

Who’s threatening Jews on campus at MIT? (Hint: Not Trump voters.) Anyone in the media promoting the message that the great danger to America is Republicans — “MAGA extremists” like Mike Johnson and his “Christofascism” — is being grossly irresponsible. But no responsible person would ever write for the Washington Post, a discredited organization that employs Taylor Lorenz.



 

Category: Donald Trump, Media Bias
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