The Other McCain

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

In The Mailbox: 12.28.22

Posted on | December 29, 2022 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 12.28.22

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #1945
357 Magnum: Tesla Won’t Charge At 19 Degrees
EBL: Mastodon is apparently not about free speech, also, How to prevent young people falling prey to socialism?
Twitchy: Ia. State Auditor Stunned Some Are Celebrating School Vouchers As A Means Of Ending Public Schools, also, Taylor Lorenz Handling Shout-Out From @LibsofTikTok’s Chaya Raichik As Well As You’d Expect
Louder With Crowder: Waffle House (again) descends into AEW-style brawl, employee blocks thrown chair with ninja-like reflexes, Kim Kardashian whines about being ‘canceled’ over Balenciaga sexually exploiting children, and Twitter loves the fact Chaya Raichik bears a striking resemblance to archnemesis Taylor Lorenz
Vox Popoli: Globalization Taketh Away, The Nature of Truth, “Private” Companies, and The Only Effective Opposition
Stoic Observations: The Intelligence Problem

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: History Is Tragedy, Not Melodrama
American Greatness: The Coming Split, White House Attempts to Blame GOP for Border Crisis, and Florida Investigates Christmas-Themed Drag Show for ‘All Ages’
American Power: In Response to the Twitter Files, Establishment Media Rushes to Defend the FBI, How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate, and The Nihilism of the Ruling Class
American Thinker: The End of Free Elections?, also, Biden’s Unopposed Imposition of Stalinism
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: They write letters: Amb. Otto Reich corrects The New York Times on why Cubans flee the island, When you deny Cuban exiles are refugees, you deny the Castro dictatorship’s crimes against humanity, and Mexico buys another 119 Cuban slave doctors
BattleSwarm: Biden’s America: Buffalo Looters Sack Family Dollar, also, Twitter Lawsuit Against Ken Paxton Dismissed
Behind The Black: SpaceX launches 54 more Starlink satellites, Russian investigators conclude leak on Soyuz caused by external impact, A “What the heck?” glacier image on Mars, and Today’s blacklisted American: Computer maker Raspberry Pi boycotted because it hired a former policeman
Cafe Hayek: Judith Curry Counsels Calm About the Climate
CDR Salamander: Lanes, Lies, Power, and Politics – Biden’s NatSec Problem
Da Tech Guy: A Great Turning Point in The Chosen (Spoiler Alert), New Year’s resolution: Write your obit before you die, I Suspect it’s not just Mitch, and Santos the Pol vs Santos the Catholic
Don Surber: Looters do the government’s work, Make George Santos speaker, and A Christmas Story star speaks out
First Street Journal: Killadelphia, also, The American left go full neo-con!
Gates Of Vienna: Tear Down This Mosque!, Culture-Enriching Nightmare in Skellefteå, The Betrayal of Europe, and Germany Invites India to Come to the EU
The Geller Report: Drag Queen Performer: Time to “Kick Down Traditional Family Values,” “F**k Family”, also, Arizona Gov.-Elect Katie Hobbs Demands Legal Action Against Kari Lake
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of the Day, True But Inconvenient, Rings That Aren’t Saturns, and Moar Twitter Follies
Hollywood In Toto: ACLU Silent on McInnes’ Free Speech Lawsuit, Twitter Files, Russell Brand Shreds ‘Nepo Baby’ Pelosi Propaganda Doc, and Babylon Is a Future Classic … And Here’s Why
The Lid: Huge Gaps In El Paso Border Security-TX Busses 1000’s- DHS Chief Demands Amnesty
Legal Insurrection: #Twitterfiles Vindicate Dr. Andrew Bostom, Iranian Dissidents Charge Oberlin College with Whitewashing Professor’s Alleged Complicity in Crimes Against Humanity, Black Astrophysicist Targeted for Not Supporting Smears about NASA’s James Webb, and Democrats Get Reminded That Before George Santos, There Was Joe Biden
Nebraska Energy Observer: I can’t help it
Outkick: NFL Absolutely Demolishes NBA in Christmas Day Ratings, Rams Fan Is Pummeled On Christmas Day At SoFi Stadium By A Guy Wearing An Al Bundy Polk High Shirt, Luke Fickell Pulls Off Classy Move For Jim Leonhard’s Final Game With Wisconsin, Former Nebraska QB Tommy Armstrong Jr. Called A Hero After Saving Family From Burning House, Terrell Owens, 49 Years Young, Has Discussed Returning To Dallas Cowboys, and Shannon Sharpe Hates Russell Wilson And Wants His Parking Spots Removed
Power Line: A Twitter Files footnote, The Daily Chart: China’s Dependence?, and Root Cause of the Crime Problem
Shark Tank: Anna Paulina Luna Endorses Harmeet Dhillon For RNC Chair
Shot In The Dark: Two Plagues, , Paging Alan Dershowitz, and Good Riddance
The Political Hat: Blogroll Cleanup 2022
This Ain’t Hell: Culture Wars, Russians fled in panic, leaving lots of high value equipment behind, Army veteran improving shipyard competency, and Troops With Skills Walk
Transterrestrial Musings: A Wrap Up of 2022, Job Hunting For Ex-Twitter Employees, and Charlie Brown’s Inside Job
Victory Girls: Rachel Levine Demands Censorship, also, NY Times: Louisa May Alcott Was *Ackshually* A Trans Man
Volokh Conspiracy: Plagiarism and ChatGPT
Watts Up With That: Gas Power Saves Texas from Blackouts, As Wind Power Collapses Again!, US Grid Needs Fossil Fuels, Not Wind, and The Faux Urgency of The Climate Crisis Is Giving Us No Time or Space To Build A Secure Energy Future
Weasel Zippers: Feds Ban TikTok On All US Government Devices, MSNBC Claims Justice Jackson And Black Woman Harvard Prez Are Victims, DOJ Official Admits Targeting Pro-Lifers Is Response to Overturn of Roe, and Biden Heads To St. Croix For Another Vacation As Crises Ensue At Home
The Federalist: If Your Kids Are Unhappy, Take Them To Church, Harvesting Low-Effort Votes Is Working Great For Democrats, So They’re Going For More, and SEC Fakes Approval For New Climate Regulations From Activists, Foreign Investors While Ignoring American Companies’ Mass Opposition
Mark Steyn: The Post-Pandemic Order, also, An Ounce of Prevention

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Category: Linkagery

In The Mailbox: 12.27.22

Posted on | December 27, 2022 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 12.27.22

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

Naomi Wu has opinions about knives. And other things. 

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Urutau 9mm Carbine
EBL: The Fix Was In, US ECONOMY HEADING FOR DISASTER, and Who Has The Higher Body Count?
Twitchy: Occasional Cortex Calls For People To Defend Drag Queen Story Hour From The Far Right, also, Oilfield Rando Takes A Deep, Disturbing Dive Into CDC’s “LGBTQ Self-Assessment” For Schools
Louder With Crowder: Watch: Elon Musk says the obvious part out loud about ‘almost every Twitter conspiracy theory’, Fed-up store owner locks thief in his store until she pays up for what she’s stealing, and Potential GOP presidential candidate shows off the flamethrower Santa Claus brought her for Christmas
Vox Popoli: A Vibrant Christmas, On the Cold Snap, When There is Nothing to Play For, and The Manufactured

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Christmas Listening, also, Just for laughs, some examples of recent blog bannings
American Conservative: Living in the X-Files, also, A Darkness Revealed
American Greatness: What Did Nancy Pelosi Know and When Did She Know It?, What Will the FBI Not Do?, and Wray’s FBI Is Rotting from the Head Down
American Power: The Obligatory Taylor Lorenz Suspended From Twitter Post, L.A.’s P-22 Has Been Put Down, A Diminished Trump Meets a Damning Narrative, and Gal Gadot Not ‘Booted’ From DC Cinematic Universe
American Thinker: There Certainly Was an Insurrection, But Not by Trump, Take This Potentially Deadly Vaccine, Or We Will Deny You Lifesaving Care, Even in War, Good Will toward Men, and Omnibus Fraud
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday, also, Animal’s Daily Census News
Babalu Blog: Cuban activist prohibited from boarding flight back home to Cuba from U.S. for a fourth time, Cuban opposition leader and Sakharov Prize winner: ‘We have been betrayed by the democratic world’, Reports from Cuba: Waiting in line in Havana behind 600 others to buy pork, and Vietnamese entrepreneurs will renovate and build apartheid hotels in Cuba
Baldilocks: Fear Not! also, Life Cycle
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm for December 23, LinkSwarm for December 24, and Has Russia Blown Its Wad In Bakhmut?
Behind The Black: Finding Martian glaciers from orbit, SpaceX has about 100 Starlink terminals working in Iran, Red China launches Earth observation satellite, December 26, 2022 Quick space links, and Today’s blacklisted American: Black scientist blacklisted for doing good research
Cafe Hayek: Some People Have A Comparative Disadvantage at Understanding Comparative Advantage, also, Jonathan Sumption on Risks, Risk Aversion, and the (Further) Rise of the Authoritarian State
CDR Salamander: When you Raise a Monster, You Most Own the Consequences, also, No Sense of Urgency to Act on What is Waiting West of Wake
Chicago Boyz: All Hat and No Cattle – Section 25C Tax Credits, also, Christmas 2022
Da Tech Guy: The Three Dangers of the Frank Pavone Case – Danger #3, The Idolatry of the Masses, Navy Community Outreach 2023…fail or success?, Progress Report, and Christmas musings from an alienated “bah humbug” conservative in a Blue State
Don Surber: The Most American Christmas Ever, The gift of free speech, They got covid 100% wrong, and Netflix may prosecute customers
First Street Journal: It’s 0º F outside, and Kentucky Utilities is employing “brief service interruptions”, Our Betters are so very much smarter than we are that I’m certain, certain! that they have a plan for all of this, and Adeste Fideles
Gates Of Vienna: Culture-Enriching Terror Arrests in Limburg, Excess Mortality in Germany, Part Five, Gypsies vs. Gypsies, and Joyeux Noël
The Geller Report: A Very Merry Christmas To All, Victims of Palestinian Terrorism Sue Biden Admin for Sending Taxpayer Aid to Palestinian Authority, Top School Principal Hides Students’ Academic Awards in Name of ‘Equity’, CATASTROPHIC: Twitter COVID FILES: US Govt Censored Content, Suspended Users, Targeted “Anti-Vaxxers”, Promoted Fear, Celeb-Funded Bail Group Closed After Helping Criminal Who Went On Crime and Shooting Spree, and January 6 Was A ‘Fed-Surrection’
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of the Day, Intergalactic Homelessness, I’m Not Making This Up, You Know (1), and I’m Not Making This Up, You Know (2)
Hollywood In Toto: Bad Omen – L.A.’s Hollywood Sign Will Be Dark in 2023, 6 Celebrities Who Torched Their Legacies in 2022, Margot Robbie … Box Office Poison?, and Dueling Pinocchios: Why del Toro Trumps Zemeckis
The Lid: More Illegals Dropped Near VP Harris’ DC Home on Christmas Eve
Legal Insurrection: Signs that the “Tripledemic” is Winding Down, Habitual Election Denier Rep. Jamie Raskin Calls Electoral College a ‘Danger’, Conflict of Interest Issues Arise as Sec. of Interior’s Daughter Lobbies for Moratorium on Oil and Gas Leasing, Texas and Virginia Commissions: BDS Plays Key Role In Fomenting Antisemitism, and WaPo Uses Picture of NYC Orthodox Jews for Story About Ohio Measles Outbreak
Nebraska Energy Observer: Change is good, Christmas Notes, and Boxing Day
Outkick: Ole Miss Players Go Bananas For Teammate’s Surprise Rendition Of Chris Stapleton Song ‘Tennessee Whiskey’, JJ Watt Announces Retirement With Heartfelt Message To His Son, Top 10 Biggest ESPN Fails Of 2022, Kyler Murray’s Attitude Reportedly A Problem For The Cardinals, and Indiana Hooper Anthony Leal Uses His NIL Money To Pay Off Sister’s Student Loan Debt On Christmas
Power Line: Blackouts Today, Blackouts Tomorrow, Blackouts Forever!, Guess What: Electricity Isn’t Free, Notes on the Twitter Files (10), and A Twitter Files footnote
Protein Wisdom Reborn: Matt Walsh & The Textualists Are Wrong About Language, But…
Shark Tank: DeSantis Investigating “Drag Queen Christmas” That Exposed Children To Sexualized Acts
Shot In The Dark: In The Abstract, Pony Up, Tradition, and Christmas Morning Special
STUMP: Twitter Files Hits COVID Stats: Good Luck with Rebuilding Trust, CDC
The Political Hat: 12 Posts of Christmas, 2022 (Day 12)
This Ain’t Hell: National Guard Soldiers paid late due to expired continuing resolution, Christmas Eve Short takes – Navy up or out, new SMA, new Infantry 2LT, March awards, China conducts military incursion exercises around Taiwan, and Skeet, With Prizes
Transterrestrial Musings: The Ideological Capture Of Our Scientific Institutions, A Good Start, New Linux Problem, and Climate Alarmism
Victory Girls: Principal Chooses Feelings Over Merit Awards, also, Power Substations Sabotaged On Christmas
Volokh Conspiracy: Hamline University Lecturer “Is Fired Over a Medieval Painting of the Prophet Muhammad”, also, Hamline Student Newspaper (the Oracle) Removed Published Defense of Lecturer Who Showed Painting of Muhammad
Watts Up With That: The Great Travel Reset, The Eco-Dictatorship Coming Your Way, and The Great Buffalo Christmas Blizzard Of 2022!
Weasel Zippers: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Sends Busloads of Illegal Immigrants To Kamala Harris’ Home On Christmas Eve, Pelosi Wishes Everyone A “Happy Shwanza”, WZ QUARTERLY DONATION DRIVE, List Crowns 2022’s “Worst of The Woke” Companies, and California Lost More Residents Than Any Other State In 2022, More Than 300K Fled Socialist Nightmare
The Federalist: Five Real Things More Appalling Than George Santos’ Fake Resume, It’s Been 10 Months Since Russia Invaded Ukraine. Where Do Things Go From Here?, New Year’s Resolution: Ignore The Anti-Fun Woke Babies, and From A SCOTUS Assassination Attempt To Threat Of Nuclear War, Here’s 2022 In 6 Minutes
Mark Steyn: Santa, I Don’t Care: Robert Mitchum, Howard Hughes and Holiday Affair, Christmas Eve Lessons and Carols, Christmas Day with Mark and Friends, and Tal Bachman: New Year’s Day, part one

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Category: Linkagery

‘I Don’t Talk to the Police, Sir’

Posted on | December 27, 2022 | 1 Comment

One of the difficulties of trying to get Americans to understand our nation’s crime problem is that most people don’t acknowledge the existence of the category “criminals.” That is to say, because of the way crime is portrayed in entertainment and news media, there seems to be a widespread belief that criminal behavior is more or less randomly distributed throughout the population, so that practically everybody is equally at risk of being a crime victim or, perhaps, perpetrating a crime. However, anyone who actually researches crime will discover that a majority of serious criminal offenses are committed by a comparatively small group of repeat offenders — career criminals, the kind with the proverbial “record as long as your arm.” You could reduce the crime rate by more than 50% simply by identifying these offenders and locking them up and, in such cases, prosecutors should treat these repeat offenders according to what I’ll dub “The Al Capone Principle.”

Al Capone was the most notorious Mafia boss of the 1920 and ’30s, whose gang committed innumerable robberies, hijackings and murders, along with many other lesser crimes — bootlegging, pimping, extortion, you name it. Getting witnesses to testify to Capone’s crimes was problematic, because any witness was likely to be killed or terrorized into silence before the case went to trial. This led to the ironic consequence that, when Capone was finally sent to federal prison, it wasn’t for any of the many acts of brutal violence he had committed, but instead for evading federal income taxes. And this, I say, is the secret to reducing crime: Once you figure out who the criminals are, it doesn’t matter what offense you convict them for, so long as they’re put behind bars for a long, long time.

Well, “mass incarceration,” say the Social Justice Warriors — America is racist and too many black men were in prison, and so activists demanded policies to change this. The problem is that, from a public-safety perspective, “mass incarceration” worked. Prior to the Ferguson riots, the U.S. homicide rate had declined drastically for more than 20 years, from a peak of 9.71 per 100,000 in 1991 to 4.44 in 2014 — a 57% reduction. Several factors were involved in this remarkable public-safety success story, among them mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines that sent drug dealers to prison for many years. Cry all you want about the “War on Drugs” leading to racial injustice, the fact is that a lot of violence was being perpetrated by urban gangs involved in drug trafficking, so that putting gang-bangers behind bars on drug charges had a correlated effect of reducing violent crime — “The Al Capone Principle” in action.

Mandatory sentences for drug crimes weren’t the only factor involved in this two-decade-long reduction of criminal violence, however. A lot of it had to do with how technology made it easier to apprehend and convict criminals. Surveillance video, DNA analysis, computerized fingerprint databases — beginning in the 1990s, cops and prosecutors began to acquire more and more tools to help them identify perpetrators and prove their guilt. Consider one of the biggest stories about public safety in the 1990s, the application of so-called “Broken Windows” theory in New York City. Social scientists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling are credited with popularizing the idea that by enforcing laws against “quality of life” offenses (e.g., vandalism, public intoxication, loitering), police send a signal to the community that has the effect of reducing more serious crimes. Which is no doubt true, but what really made this approach effective in New York City was NYPD’s use of CompStat:

On a weekly basis, personnel from each of the NYPD’s 77 precincts, nine police service areas and 12 transit districts compile a statistical summary of the week’s crime complaints, arrests and summons activity, as well as a written report of significant cases, crime patterns and police activities. This data, with specific crime and enforcement locations and times, is forwarded to the chief of the department’s CompStat Unit, where information is collated and loaded into a citywide database.
The unit runs computer analysis on the data and generates a weekly CompStat report. The report captures crime complaints and arrest activity at the precinct, patrol borough and citywide levels, presenting a summary of these and other important performance indicators.
The data is presented on a week-to-date, prior 28 days and year-to-date basis, with comparisons to previous years’ activity. Precinct commanders and members of the department’s senior officers can easily discern emerging and established crime trends, as well as deviations and anomalies. With the report, department leadership can easily make comparisons between commands. Each precinct is also ranked in each complaint and arrest category.

By compiling crime reports in a database, CompStat gives cops knowledge of what crimes are happening and where on a weekly basis — a computerized roadmap that helps them target enforcement in areas where crime is most common. Many cities across America adopted the approach pioneered by NYPD and, not surprisingly, it turns out that putting more cops where the most crime is happening has a remarkable deterrent effect on criminal activity. If this also results in more black people going to prison, well, “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.”

Crime is not just a statistic, however. Or, rather, statistics are just a compilation of separate events, and if you spend enough time watching police activity videos on YouTube, you begin to see distinct patterns of criminal behavior, which brings us to the case of Teronnie Austin Wade.

Wade is a lifelong career criminal. In 2014, when he was sentenced to a year in prison after pleading guilty to grand theft auto. In 2017, he was sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to having a gun as a convicted felon. In 2020 — that is to say, almost immediately after his release from prison — Wade was a passenger in a car that was pulled over for a traffic violation. He was found in possession of a handgun, 22 bags of cocaine and the synthetic drug Flakka. At this point, it should have been apparent that Wade was at all times a member of the category “criminal.” At no time since he reached adulthood had Teronnie Wade attempted to make a legal living, but was instead constantly either (a) committing crimes or (b) serving time in prison.

A judge ordered Wade held on a bond of nearly $130,000, but for some reason, that was later lowered to $50,000, and the career felon was released from jail in Jacksonville, Florida. He failed to show up for an October 2021 court hearing, and a warrant was issued for the fugitive’s arrest. So it was that Teronnie Austin Wade next encountered law enforcement at 1 a.m. on Saturday, Jan. 8, 2022. Five people were inside a sedan that made an illegal U-turn at a red light on Lem Turner Road in Jacksonville. When police pulled the car over, Wade was sitting in the front passenger seat. Officers noticed the smell of marijuana and began questioning the occupants:

Officer B then asks the passenger in the front seat to roll the window down.
“I don’t talk to the police, sir. I’m a passenger,” the man replies.
“OK,” the officer replies. “Can you just roll the window down for me? You don’t need to talk to me.”
“I’m a passenger, sir,” the man replies.
“No, hey, don’t go reaching in your pockets, alright?” Officer B said.
“I’m a passenger, sir,” the man repeats.
The officer tells the man it’s OK if he doesn’t want to talk to him, he just wants him to roll the window down.
“Got to talk to the driver, sir,” the man responds.
Officer A then walks back over to the white car to talk to the front seat passenger, who was wearing a bulletproof vest. The officer asks the man if he has a medical marijuana card.
The passenger replies, “Sir, I don’t answer any questions, sir.”

Now, when a police officer notices that a civilian is wearing a bulletproof vest, this naturally arouses suspicion. But before we get to that, let’s examine Wade’s claim that, because he is only a passenger in the vehicle, and not the driver, he doesn’t have to answer the officer’s question. Maybe this is true, in a narrow legal sense, but when you get pulled over in a vehicle that reeks of marijuana, you are then a suspect in a crime unrelated to mere traffic violations. And because these cops weren’t born yesterday — because they are experienced enough to recognize patterns of criminal behavior — there was a good reason why they wanted Teronnie Wade to roll down his window, namely to improve their ability to see inside the car, to see if there were any weapons present.

Criminal activity follows certain patterns, and while the driver of the car claimed that he and his friends had been on their way to Walmart — intending to get supplies to fix another car, only to discover that Walmart was closed — the police suspected there might have been another motive for this trip. Because why were there five guys in this one car, including a passenger who’s wearing a bulletproof vest? None of the officers recognized Wade as a convicted felon, but experienced cops tend to acquire a sixth sense, and so he was taken out of the vehicle, at which point the cop saw the extended magazine of a pistol sticking out of the back of Wade’s pants. Bulletproof vest + pistol = trouble.

What resulted was an “officer involved shooting” (OIS) incident. When officers attempted to handcuff Wade, he broke free and ran, then turned and fired at officers, who returned fire. More than 40 shots were fired in the gun battle, which ended with Wade seriously wounded. He survived, and was charged with two counts of attempted murder of a law enforcement officer, plus possession of a weapon by a felon and resisting arrest. This time, he was held without bail.

 

This incident is an example of a pattern we have seen repeatedly in recent years — suspects with extensive criminal records, out on bail, committing crimes that cause people to ask, “Why wasn’t this guy behind bars?” Wade’s multiple previous convictions, including being a felon in possession of a firearm, should have been sufficient to convince any judge that this guy was too dangerous to be released after he was busted with drugs and a gun yet again in 2020. Yet there he was, riding around after midnight, wearing body armor and carrying a pistol with an extended magazine, a fugitive who had (predictably) violated terms of his bail.

How is it that the same liberals who bemoan “mass incarceration” also want to lecture us about “gun violence”? As if a policy of turning loose criminals has no impact on the crime rate? As if the gun itself — an inanimate object — were the cause of violence, rather than the criminals that liberals want to turn loose? It is difficult for me to believe that in Florida, which is certainly not a haven of liberalism, a guy who just got out of prison for a weapons charge could have gotten busted with a gun again, and then turned loose on bail. Where is “mass incarceration” when we really need it? This shootout in Jacksonville is, in a way, a microcosm of what’s gone wrong in our criminal justice system in recent years.

“I don’t talk to the police, sir,” says the career criminal, a fugitive with a warrant for his arrest, carrying a pistol with an extended magazine and wearing body armor while he’s riding around at 1 a.m.

This is what “social justice” looks like — armed criminals ready, willing and able to murder the police, because Black Lives Matter, you see.



 

Category: Crime, Florida

Rule 5 Monday: St. Stephen’s Day Edition

Posted on | December 27, 2022 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

For a minute I considered having Ingrid Pitt as an appetizer again, since St. Stephen is the patron of casketmakers and Ms. Pitt spent a lot of Hammer movies in caskets, but I thought it was a bit of a stretch…so you get Cikita Pechova, a Czech model I spotted on Reddit. Hope everyone had an enjoyable Christmas.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

NINETY MILES FROM TYRANNY: Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #1939, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns. 

ANIMAL MAGNETISM: Rule Five War On Cars Friday, and the Saturday Gingermageddon. 

EBL: MAGA Mike Lindell Threatens To Snuff Out DeSantis, “Fairytale Of New York”, Jack Ryan Season 3, Extraordinary Attorney Woo, It’s A Wonderful Life, The Bishop’s Wife, “Joy To The World”, 1923 – A Yellowstone Origin Story, So How’s The Avatar Sequel Doing?, Die Hard – Both A Christmas AND A Hanukkah Movie!, and Black Adam.

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Laura Haddock is No Ordinary Fish, The Christmas Song, Fish Pic Friday – Christmas is Coming, River, Bring on the Beavers!, Thursday Tanlines, Christmas Wrapping, A Hazy Shade of Winter, Wednesday Wetness, Blue Christmas, Tattoo Tuesday, The Monday Morning Stimulus, Carols by Candlelight, Palm Sunday and I’ll Be Home for Christmas

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Category: Rule 5

Long Season for the ’Bama Boys

Posted on | December 26, 2022 | Comments Off on Long Season for the ’Bama Boys

L-R: Jalen Hurts, Tua Tagovailoa, Mac Jones

The NFL season is too long. The league’s decision to extend the season from 16 games to 17 was a mistake, as was the decision to expand the postseason playoffs from 12 teams (six in each conference) to 14 (seven in each conference). Under the previous playoff format, the two division champions in each conference with the best records (i.e., the #1 and #2 seeds) got “byes” in the wild-card round, but now only one team in each conference gets that precious bye. And an extra week’s rest really matters because, after playing a 17-game regular-season schedule, every team in the league has its share of injuries, major or minor.

Until last year, when the New England Patriots drafted Alabama quarterback Mac Jones in the first round, I hadn’t paid much attention to the NFL. But the idea of a ’Bama boy being tapped to fill the gigantic shoes of all-time great Tom Brady fascinated me, and having seen Jones lead the Crimson Tide to an undefeated National Championship season, I felt he was up to the challenge. The fact that he beat out former MVP Cam Newton for the starting QB job in New England, and led the Patriots to the playoffs as a rookie, seemed to confirm my judgment. Of course, the Patriots were “one and done” in the playoffs last season, and they have suffered all sorts of struggles this year — Mac Jones missing four games with an ankle injury, amid a misguided revamp of the team’s offensive scheme — but I still believe Mac is destined for NFL greatness.

Jones isn’t the only former Alabama quarterback in the league, however. At one time, Mac was the third-string QB for the Crimson Tide, when Jalen Hurts was the starter and Tua Tagovailoa was the No. 2 QB. Hurts had been the starter for the 2016 team that made it all the way to the National Championship game before losing to Clemson, and returned for the 2017 season, with Tagovailoa, a freshman recruit from Hawaii, beating out Jones for the No. 2 spot. That year, Alabama lost to Auburn, which cost them an appearance in the SEC title game, but the Tide made it into the national playoffs as the No. 4 seed, then upset top-seeded Clemson to make it to the championship against Georgia. That was one of the greatest games in Alabama’s long and glorious football history. At halftime, the Bulldogs led 13-0 and Coach Nick Saban made a shocking choice — the true freshman Tua Tagovailoa would start the second half. Tua did not disappoint, throwing for 166 yards and three touchdowns, leading the Crimson Tide to an exciting 26-23 overtime victory.

Tagovailoa remained the starter for ’Bama the next season and, although Hurts continued to see significant playing time as a backup, after 2018 he transferred to Oklahoma, where he passed for 3,851 yards, ran for another 1,298 yards and led the Sooners to the Big 12 conference championship. In 2020, both Hurts and Tagovailoa entered the NFL draft, where Tua was a first-round pick (fifth overall) for the Miami Dolphins and Hurts was a second-round pick (53rd overall) for the Philadelphia Eagles. Both Tua and Jalen had their struggles during their first two NFL seasons, but this year Hurts emerged as one of the most dynamic QBs in the league, passing for 3,472 yards and 22 touchdowns, adding 747 yards and another 13 TDs rushing. At 13-2, the Eagles have the best record in the NFL and are one win away from clinching the NFC East title, although Hurts has been sidelined after spraining his left (i.e., non-throwing) shoulder against Chicago in Week 15.

Meanwhile in Miami, after starting the season 8-3, the Dolphins have hit a four-game losing streak, including a Christmas Day defeat at home against Green Bay, when Tua threw three interceptions as Aaron Rodgers led the Packers to a 26-20 comeback win. Before the streak, the Dolphins looked like they might displace the Buffalo Bills as AFC East champions; now the Bills have clinched, and Miami is fighting for a wild-card playoff spot, a competition that will be highlighted on New Year’s Day, when Tua and the Dolphins play Mac and the Patriots in Foxborough. Both Miami (8-7) and New England (7-8) have lost four of their last five games — the Patriots haven’t won since beating the Arizona Cardinals on Dec. 12 — and, regardless of how the outcome affects the playoff scenario, there will be a definite factor of self-respect at stake for both teams.

Every team in the league is now banged up and had their lineup reshuffled since the season began. For example, look at the San Francisco 49ers, who have clinched the NFC West title with an 11-4 record. The Niners began the season with Trey Lance, a 2021 first-round pick, at quarterback. In the second game of the season, however, Lance suffered a broken ankle, and veteran Jimmy Garoppolo stepped in at QB. Jimmy G was good enough that San Francisco took a 7-4 record into their Dec. 4 road game at Miami, where Garoppolo suffered a broken foot on the opening drive. That left the 49ers to bring in rookie Brock Purdy at QB. Purdy was the very last player chosen (7th round, 262nd overall) in this year’s draft, and the idea that this low-rated prospect out of Iowa State would become the starter his rookie year was a million miles away from anything San Francisco coach Kyle Shanahan had in mind.

Wow, a late-round draft pick stepping in at quarterback because of injuries — doesn’t that story seem kind of familiar?

With Purdy at QB, the Niners are undefeated, having won five in a row, and they’re unlikely to lose their last two games, against the Raiders and Cardinals, so that this long-shot obscurity — a kid that almost nobody thought had a chance to make it in the NFL — now appears ready to lead a division champion in the playoffs. And the toll that injuries have taken during this long season can be seen in the rosters of all the playoff teams, several of which will go into the postseason with players in their starting lineups who began the season on the practice squad.

The season is just too damned long, and any player who makes it through 17 games without a significant injury is just lucky. All three of the former Alabama QBs starting in the NFL this season have missed games with injuries, and the fortunes of the Philadelphia Eagles — the team with the best record in the league — hinge on whether Jalen Hurts can come back from his shoulder injury at full strength for the playoffs. As my brother Kirby has pointed out, the new rules surrounding concussions guarantee that many top players, including quarterbacks, will be forced to sit out at least one game during the year. Should the team owners and the players union try to make a new agreement to increase roster sizes, to ensure that teams have enough depth to be able to make it through the season? And wouldn’t it make sense to admit that the 17-game schedule was a mistake? Go back to 16 games and, while you’re at it, go back to the 12-team postseason playoffs. As much as we hate to admit it, we have learned that there is such a thing as too much football.



 

Category: Football

Have a Holly Jolly (Commie) Christmas

Posted on | December 25, 2022 | Comments Off on Have a Holly Jolly (Commie) Christmas

“Are you now, or have you ever been …?”

Perhaps some of you kids you don’t recognize this dangerous subversive, because Burl Ives died in 1995, and even if you’re old enough to remember him, the only time he crosses your mind is when you hear “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas” playing in the background music at the shopping mall or wherever. And our tale begins three weeks ago, when John Hoge and I were out to dinner at Cracker Barrel after doing another episode of The Other Podcast. Because it’s December, the background music at Cracker Barrel was a series of Christmas songs and among them was a version of “Holly Jolly Christmas” by some singer who was not Burl Ives, which triggered me to go off on a rant.

“Who is this singer? Why aren’t they playing the Burl Ives version? That Commie bastard had exactly one great achievement in his career, and it’s ‘Holly Jolly Christmas.’ Why rob him of that?”

At this point, Hoge interrupted to inform me that Burl Ives had a few career achievements that may have been more important than this silly Christmas song, including playing “Big Daddy” Pollitt in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1958, the same year he won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor as Rufus Hannassey in The Big Country. Well, OK, but as usual, Hoge’s interruption didn’t address my point, which in this case is that certain Christmas songs have a definitive version, which deserve a permanent place on the holiday playlist for the sake of cultural continuity.

To be a conservative is to believe in the value of tradition, and among other things, that means when I hear about chestnuts roasting on an open fire, it had damned well better be Nat King Cole singing it.

Let us stipulate that many other artists have recorded versions of “The Christmas Song” that have some musical merit. But while I have no personal beef against, e.g., Michael Bublé, when it’s chestnut-roasting time, only Nat King Cole can get the job done right.

Having a hit Christmas song guarantees a performer a sort of musical immortality. A singer’s entire catalog of recordings may be forgotten, but if he had a big Christmas song, kids will still be listening to it long after he’s dead. Like, Nat King Cole was one of the most successful singers of his time, with a long string of hit records, but does any kid ever listen to “Mona Lisa” anymore? No, but every Christmas, those chestnuts are still roasting, baby, and it’s the same with Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.”

Bing Crosby was quite simply the biggest singing star of the 1930s and it was not until Frank Sinatra burst on the scene in the 1940s that Crosby had any rival at all. Crosby was also a major motion picture star, famously teaming up with Bob Hope in Road to Singapore (1940), Road to Zanzibar (1941), Road to Morocco (1942), etc. Bing was an entertainer of world-historic proportions, with a lengthy catalog of hit records, but nowadays the only time anybody hears his voice is in December, when “White Christmas” gets played on the Muzak for a few weeks.

It’s fine by me if other singers want to record their own versions of “White Christmas,” but I don’t want to hear those other versions piped into the grocery store. Give me Bing, thank you very much.

There are other Christmas songs which have their own definitive versions. Like, I’m sure every pop singer wants to put “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” on their Christmas album, and that’s fine with me, but the only version I want to hear is Brenda Lee’s. And when it comes to “Rudolph the Red Nosed Raindeer,” it’s got to be Gene Autry. How many people nowadays even know who Gene Autry was? He was the most famous example of a genre, “the singing cowboy,” which lasted about 20 years beginning in the mid-1930s but has long since been forgotten. Gene Autry’s only rival for the crown as King of the Singing Cowboys was Roy Rogers, but unlike Gene, Roy never had the luck of recording a popular Christmas song, and so every December we get the Gene Autry resurrection, thanks to Rudolph and his “nose so bright.”

You see the point I was making, before Hoge interrupted me with that trivia about Burl Ives, was about the evanescence of popular culture. Most of the “hits” of our youth — whether in music, movies or TV shows — will only be widely remembered during our lifetimes. Nostalgia for a bygone past requires us to have some familiarity with whatever it is we’re nostalgic for, and popular entertainment is one of those “here today, gone tomorrow” things that doesn’t translate well across generations.

Born in 1959, my memories of various TV shows, movies and songs that were popular in the 1960s and ’70s are shared by a large cohort of Baby Boomers, so that there is nowadays a certain market demand for nostalgia about that era. Because of the way the era has sometimes been depicted in more recent entertainment — “That ’70s Show” or Dazed and Confused — there are younger people, born much later than me, who think fondly of those years. In the same way, movies like The Godfather gave my generation a fondness for the era of gangsters in wide-lapel suits riding around in Packard sedans. The Godfather was set in the immediate aftermath of World War II, less than 30 years before the film came out — 1972 was almost as close to VJ Day as 2022 is to the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But where is the boom of nostalgia movies about the 1980s and ’90s to parallel the 1970s nostalgia boom about Depression-era America?

Anyway, as I get older and my kids have grown up, the subject of cultural continuity sometimes strikes me in different ways, such as hearing “Holly Jolly Christmas” and getting ticked off because they’re not playing the Burl Ives version which is, of course, they only version that should be played. And did I mention he was a Commie?

Beginning in the late 1930s, Burl Ives was associated with a number of Communist “front” groups, which is why his name turned up among those entertainers listed in the 1950 publication Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. This publication is infamous to soi-disant “progressives” who think of the anti-Communist “Hollywood blacklist” as one of the great injustices of American history. These progressives want us to forgot that America was, at the time, locked into an eyeball-to-eyeball nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union, which had just exploded its first hydrogen bomb with the help of U.S. military secrets stolen by Soviet spies like the Rosenbergs and their associates. Soviet agents in high places (e.g., Alger Hiss) had been exposed, Mao’s Communists had just taken over China and in June 1950, the Communists in North Korea had invaded South Korea.

Those who describe anti-Communism in the 1950s with words like “paranoid” and “hysteria” expect us to ignore the reality of the Red Menace that faced America at that time. When they use phrases like “witch hunt,” I insist on pointing out that these particular witches were quite real — there were actual Communists, who actually were agents of Soviet influence, and exposing these subversives was a very urgent national security priority at the time. If it seems crazy to suggest that Burl Ives was ever a national security threat, I’d suggest reading Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley’s book Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s. Billingsley (whose mom played June Cleaver on Leave It Beaver) chronicles the conflict that erupted in Hollywood in 1945, culminating in “a bloody riot at the gates of Warner Bros.’ studios in Burbank, California.” What had happened was that Communists — not imaginary “witches,” but real-life, self-avowed, card-carrying members of the Communist Party USA — had gained control of a number of craft unions in the movie business and had fomented a conflict to try to force the industry to recognize these unions, rather than other (non-Communist-controlled) unions, as representing the workers in those trades. It was in this conflict that Ronald Reagan, as president of the Screen Actors Guild, came face-to-face with how Communists operated, a confrontation that forever altered Reagan’s point of view and, in doing so, ultimately changed history.

Ronald Reagan testifies to Congress, 1947

What was the effect of Communist influence in Hollywood? I asked that question of Billingsley when I interviewed him years ago and he said that while Communists didn’t succeed in getting much pro-Communist propaganda into movies, they were more successful in keeping anti-Communist messages out of movies. If you think about this a bit, you realize that there is a reason why, to most Americans, totalitarianism is always associated with Hitler and the Nazis, rather than with Lenin, Stalin and the Communists. There have been very few movies and TV shows that accurately portrayed Communism as a deadly menace, and certainly the pro-Communist attitude of many people in Hollywood had some influence in this tendency of popular entertainment to downplay the danger of Communism. Or, for example, think of Ronald Reagan’s career. He had been a very successful actor and popular among his peers, which is why he was elected SAG president. But once he emerged as an outspoken opponent of Communism, his movie career evaporated and it became common for the media to label him a “B-movie actor” (which is a damned lie, because he had previously starred in plenty of A-list movies).

Rather ironically, Reagan himself had been associated with a few Communist front groups in the 1930s and early 40s. The Communists were very clever at organizing such groups on an ad hoc basis, for example the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee (JAFRC), whose stated purpose originally was to aid those fleeing France. The JAFRC was a successor to other Communist front groups that had solicited aid for refugees from the Spanish Civil War. Exactly how much assistance was ever delivered to refugees is unknown, but the idea was that by organizing groups dedicated to currently popular causes, the Communists could expand their influence by getting help from liberals who didn’t realize that such groups (and the money they raised) were controlled by the Communist Party. So the fact that Reagan’s name turned up as sponsor of a JAFRC event in Los Angeles could not be construed as proof that he ever was a Communist or even sympathetic to Communism, but he was asked about this particular group when he was called to testify in 1947 to the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), by which time he was already a well-known opponent of Communism.

This background helps understand how it was that Burl Ives got called to testify to Congress in 1950, disavowed Communism and “named names,” as they say, when asked about his past Communist involvement. Ives had been much more active in Communist-influenced groups than Reagan ever was. For example, Ives had supported the Communist-backed presidential campaign of “progressive” Henry Wallace in 1948, and some of Ives’ former associates included actual Soviet spies, one of whom informed the FBI that Ives was “100% left.” His subsequent disavowal of Communism caused one former comrade, Pete Seeger, to denounce Ives as a “stool pigeon.” But this is an insult to Ives only if you consider loyalty to Communism a good thing. At any rate, by cooperating with the congressional investigation, Ives avoided being blacklisted and, within a few years, was a beloved avuncular figure with a wholesome reputation.

The tale of post-Communist redemption explains why, in 1964, the producers of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer chose Burl Ives to narrate the tale as the character “Sam the Snowman.” And because Johnny Marks, the guy who wrote the titular song, was also the writer of “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” Ives got to sing that one, too:

 

In subsequent years, the Burl Ives version of “A Holly Jolly Christmas” has ensconced itself among the top five songs of the holiday season. And as I say, it is the definitive version of this holiday classic, so that I don’t want to hear any other version of it on the piped-in music at stores. Burl Ives may not be remembered for anything else, but he deserves to be remembered for this, even if he was a Commie.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!



 

Category: Christmas, Culture, History, Music

FMJRA 2.0: Christmas Eve Edition

Posted on | December 25, 2022 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: Christmas Eve Edition

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Staring out the window, waiting for Dynasty Baseball to bring the 1971 season online – or spring, whichever comes first. In the meantime, tomorrow is Our Lord’s birthday, shared by (among others) Komi Shouko. I hope you all are having a happy one.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

Shuuko: “Shouko was born at 2:38 AM on December 25, and weighed 3.2 kilos!”
Shouko: “Not so much detail, Mom!”

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Category: FMJRA Award

Elliot Rodger and Nick Fuentes: The Satanic Politics of Self-Destruction

Posted on | December 24, 2022 | Comments Off on Elliot Rodger and Nick Fuentes: The Satanic Politics of Self-Destruction

The first I remember hearing of Nick Fuentes was when Michelle Malkin tried to retrieve him from the trash dump of Jew-hating nihilism. That must have been 2019, and I don’t know if Malkin (whom I greatly admire) has expressed regret over the evident failure of that effort.

Malkin has been a stalwart opponent of our de facto open borders policy for as long as I’ve known her, and I suppose she must have seen some potential in Fuentes and his following of “Groypers.” Try to steer these misguided young fellows back onto the path of sanity, she probably figured in her maternal way, but three years later there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of reform, as Fuentes continues to play the role of Holocaust-denying Pied Piper, a sort of 21st-century Willis Carto.

Those who take the turn down the Jew-hating road never arrive at any good destination, and surely this is no coincidence. Clearly, God intends to keep the promise quoted in Genesis 12:3, and no wise man would deliberately choose to get on the wrong side of that issue.

Having always been a philo-Semite, and somewhere to the right of Bibi Netanyahu in terms of my ultra-Zionist tendencies, I have long contemplated the cosmic significance of such things, but realize that “now we see through a glass, darkly,” and must patiently await the workings of divine providence. But I digress . . .

Hate Leader Nick Fuentes
Is Recruiting Incels
The racist troll who dined with Trump is courting
a new online following: raging misogynists.

That’s the headline on a 2,500-word story in Mother Jones, where the editors apparently believe it is newsworthy that guys who can’t get laid could be an important political constituency. Am I the only one who wonders about the correlation between (a) conspiratorial hatred of Jews and (b) inability to get laid? It’s sort of like the connection between feminism and obesity, I suspect. Ordinarily, I would pay no attention to Nick Fuentes, but the editors of Mother Jones want me to do so, and for some reason the comparison that springs to mind is Elliot Rodger.

Humanity… All of my suffering on this world has been at the hands of humanity, particularly women. It has made me realize just how brutal and twisted humanity is as a species. All I ever wanted was to fit in and live a happy life amongst humanity, but I was cast out and rejected, forced to endure an existence of loneliness and insignificance, all because the females of the human species were incapable of seeing the value in me.
This is the story of how I, Elliot Rodger, came to be. This is the story of my entire life. It is a dark story of sadness, anger, and hatred. It is a story of a war against cruel injustice . . .

So begins “My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger,” the 100,000-word “manifesto” he published online to announce the motive for his 2014 murder spree — the Mein Kampf of Beta male losers.

How does this happen? What kind of person decides that the ideal solution to his personal problems is mass murder? A telltale clue came from Rodger’s manifesto, where he mentions Monette Moio, “a pretty blonde girl” who was the younger sister of one of his middle-school classmates. According to Rodger, she was part of “a group of popular Seventh Grade girls [who] started teasing me. . . . I started to hate all girls because of this. I saw them as mean, cruel, and heartless creatures that took pleasure from my suffering.” This enraged the girl’s father:

‘She was ten years old for God’s sake — she can barely remember the guy. He’s a sociopath. She hasn’t seen him since school.’
‘She’s devastated over the whole thing. . . . It’s like she’s being implicated in this terrible tragedy for something she hasn’t done and can’t remember.’ . . .
Mr Moio added that he and his daughter only remembers Rodger as a ‘strange kid’.
‘He was weird then and he’s weird now,’ he said. ‘He had a secret crush on her, but she was completely unaware of him. She had no idea… If you think about it, he could have killed her, he could have come after her.
‘I was hands on at that school and I don’t remember him. She just remembers that he was a strange kid, she knew he wasn’t a normal type person, but there are a lot of people like that at that age.’

In other words, it was all in Elliot Rodger’s mind — the “teasing” was imaginary, his “suffering” the product of his silent obsession with a cute girl who “was completely unaware of him.” And as for his “war against cruel injustice” — what he described in a YouTube video as his “day of retribution” — it was nothing but a violent gesture to dramatize and call attention to his ultimate choice of suicide. Rodger scapegoated innocent people, blaming them for his personal problems, but his “day of retribution” ended with the tacit admission that only way to end his “suffering” was to kill himself. He was the problem.

Nick Fuentes doing his “America First” podcast

The 24-year-old hosts a nightly broadcast with a cult-like following among young white men who believe they have lost their rightful place in the United States. For the last five years, Fuentes has pushed a vision for an “America First” movement that fuses white nationalism, antisemitism, and authoritarianism in calling for a nation dominated by white Christian men. . . .
Fuentes is advancing one of his latest strategies for cultivating followers: making overtures to men who feel aggrieved by women.
Over the past year, Fuentes has made a point of speaking directly to these men — many of whom identify as “incels” — in numerous appearances on his nightly livestream, far-right podcasts, and Telegram. Historically, incels defined themselves as “involuntary celibate,” but the term has become inextricably associated with misogynist incels, men who blame women for their problems and believe women owe them sex.
Fuentes claims to understand them because he is one of them. “I’m an incel, I’m a proud incel,” he claimed on his nightly America First podcast in January. He’d never had sex, he explained, because, “I’m choosing instead to lead a historical right-wing movement.”

Let’s talk about this “cult-like following.” Prior to the publicity he got for meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the audience for Fuentes’ videos was pathetically small, reaching somewhere between 1,800 and 6,000 viewers for each episode. In October, as the nation was preparing for the midterm elections, some of his videos got fewer than 1,000 views. So if you’re using “cult-like” as a synonym for tiny, then, yeah, Nick Fuentes has got a “cult-like following.” And probably a “cult-like” penis, too.

Since the Mar-a-Lago meeting, the size of Fuentes’ audience has grown to the tens of thousands, but that’s still an insignificant number in comparison to, say, Tim Pool, who has 1.3 million YouTube subscribers and routinely gets more than 200,000 views on his videos.

It should be obvious that the reason Mother Jones (and other liberal media) are giving a fringe figure like Fuentes free publicity is as a way to smear all conservatives as implicated in his craziness. And let there be no doubt about this — it is unmitigated lunacy:

Fuentes launched into what sounded like a political stump speech in which he outlined the world he would create with his followers’ help. “Why don’t we take the message to the men and say, ‘Hey men, hey men, vote for me, I’ll destroy feminism,” he said, vowing to “make it harder for women to become whores,” and “to incentivize women to be in monogamous marriages for the long term and to have and raise kids.”
The dark fantasy he was selling would not only fulfill his Christian nationalist agenda, it would give incels the unfettered access to women that they’ve long sought. That alignment is part of what makes Fuentes’ pro-misogyny marketing strategy so effective, says Right Wing Watch researcher Kyle Mantyla. “If they can impose Christian nationalism on this country, that will also solve their incel problem by making women second-class citizens who have no right to refuse to marry them, have sex with them, and bear their children.”

Can you even imagine being Kyle Mantyla, who has been on the payroll of People for the American Way since 1999, and it’s your job to pay attention to people like Nick Fuentes? Talk about “suffering” . . .

You cannot solve self-inflicted problems by scapegoating, and what the “incel” delusion has in common with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories is that both offer explanations for personal failure that focus on blaming others. Anti-Semitism is not really political at all. It’s not about U.S. policy in the Mideast or about Israel’s policy toward its neighbors, it’s about losers (both foreign and domestic) who view Israel and the Jews the same way Elliot Rodger viewed Monette Moio, as “mean, cruel, and heartless creatures that took pleasure from my suffering.” Even as we recognize the appeal of scapegoating by “right-wing” figures like Nick Fuentes, however, we must avoid the temptation to buy into the Left’s identity-politics victimhood mentality, which is the same damned thing.

Telling black people they’re oppressed by “systemic racism” is no more helpful that telling people that they’re victims of an international Zionist conspiracy, and the fact that Kanye West has apparently been sucked into the vortex of anti-Semitism shows how similar these beliefs really are. And both of these persecution fantasies are similar to the “incel” thinking his problems in life are the fault of the cute girl who (at least in his mind) was mean to him in seventh grade. It does not matter, in the grand scheme of things, that some cute girls actually are cruel, or that some white people really are racists, because these facts are inadequate as explanations of individual unhappiness. That is to say, there are black people who are happy and successful despite the reality of racism and, on a personal note, I have managed to have a pretty good life despite the fact that Vicky Jones never reciprocated my interest in seventh grade.

Likewise, the existence of bad Jews (e.g., George Soros) does not prove the existence of an all-powerful Jewish conspiracy, especially when we realize that some of Soros’ most vocal critics are themselves Jewish. But the Left wants you to believe that everyone who criticizes Soros is an ideological soulmate of Nick Fuentes and the danger is that people will start believing this: “If they’re going to call me an anti-Semite no matter what I do, why not just go all-in on this Jew-hating thing?”

The Left’s incessant name-calling — “racist! sexist! homophobe!” — can have a demoralizing effect on conservatives, and when you find yourself on their target list, it’s a test of character, requiring strength to resist their attempt to define you as evil. The Left is satanic in this way.

Satan is a liar (John 8:44), and a false accuser (Revelation 12:10) who “deceiveth the whole world” by his slanders against God, and against God’s people. When the Left aims its slander machine at you, the experience should give you some sense of what Jesus felt when he was falsely accused by the envious Pharisees, and when you reflect that Jesus was entirely blameless — whereas you are unquestionably a sinner — then you must realize that, however unjust the accusations against you may be, you cannot lash out at the enemies who chastise you.

“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”
— Romans 8:28 (KJV)

Exult in your chastisement! Take pride in your scars! If you love God and are truly seeking His will, then your suffering is proof that you are among “them who are called.” How you conduct yourself in the moment of crisis will be the test of your faith, and the proof of God’s favor.

It is not God’s will that we should be miserable and hopeless, tempted to self-destructive despair. Jesus said: “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:8). So who is it that’s pointing people down the road to destruction? Who is it that tells us we must surrender to hate? Could it be . . . Satan?

Knowing myself to be nothing but a wretched sinner, my Calvinistic belief can be summarized simply: If God means to destroy a man, no one can save him, but if God means to save a man, no one can destroy him.

However vain it may be to think of myself as indestructible, it is nonetheless a fact that I have not yet been destroyed by my enemies, who have never ceased to plot my destruction. God keeps His promises, and we must remember that it is not by our virtue that we deserve His favor, but rather that we are beneficiaries of His grace.

We are “sinners in the hands of an angry God,” as Jonathan Edwards said, and are entirely dependent on God’s mercy for our preservation. We have no ground to complain for whatever misfortunes may befall us, since our sinfulness means we deserve nothing but death.

It was not my intention, when I began writing this, to preach a sermon, but here I am 2,000 words later, at the point a preacher would issue the altar call, with the choir singing “Softly and Tenderly.” Occasionally this blog is a mission and a ministry, I reckon, and perhaps a comfort to our Internet congregation, a source of hope amid the prevailing gloom. Earlier this month, the radical mayor of Richmond ordered that the remains of A.P. Hill be exhumed and his monument be removed from the intersection of Laburnum Road and Hermitage venue. When my great-grandfather, a private in the 13th Alabama Infantry, was captured at Gettysburg, he was serving under A.P. Hill; thus I have a personal reason to resent the insult to that general’s memory. Yet I can endure even this without complaint, as I recall the words of a man far wiser than myself:

My experience of men has neither disposed me to think worse of them nor indisposed me to serve them; nor in spite in spite of failures which I lament, of errors which I now see and acknowledge, or of the present aspect of affairs, do I despair of the future.
The truth is this: The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.

Yes, sir. We shall carry on. Merry Christmas, and Deo vindice.



 

Category: History, Religion
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