Rule 5 Monday: St. Stephen’s Day Edition

Posted on | December 27, 2022 | 1 Comment

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?

pic.twitter.com/w3kwslQ8sE

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) December 24, 2022

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

In The Mailbox: 12.23.22

Posted on | December 24, 2022 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 12.23.22

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Since Christmas is on Sunday but everything’s closed on Monday, Rule 5 Sunday will therefore be on Monday this weekend. Deadlines for tomorrow’s FMJRA remain the same.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

Your Santa this year is…Attila the Hun?

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Tom Cotton, you disappoint us.
Twitchy: Rachael Ray Admonishing Americans That It’s Their Moral Imperative To Stand With Ukraine Goes Wrong, also, Occasional Cortex Complains About Chip Roy’s Earmark Criticism, Gets Served
Louder With Crowder: Little girl gets stuck in a claw machine when her sister dared her to climb in and it’s hard not to laugh, also, UFC fighter Jake Shields shows what happens when you call someone a Nazi IRL as opposed to on Twitter
Vox Popoli: The Null Factory, also, The Evil of this World
According To Hoyt: On Christmas Day In The Morning, Everything Is Broken – Riding the Catastrophic Change Wave, Part I, and The Christmas Cat
Monster Hunter Nation: WriterDojo S3 E23: How to Approach an Author
Stoic Observations: The Sand Pit Story
Gab News: Gab’s 2022 Accomplishments & Plans For 2023

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – The Christmas 2022 edition
American Conservative: The Gift Of Margit, A Servant Of God, also, Once More, Neocons, Into The Breach!
American Greatness: Biden’s Christmas Address Fails to Mention Jesus, Instead Turns Political
American Thinker: It Must Always Be ‘Merry Christmas’
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five War on Cars Friday
Babalu Blog: Video of the Day: Communist Cuban doctor lectures colleagues to be like the Nazis, Cuba’s socialist elites party on ‘as God requires’ while starving Cuban children slaughter cats for food, and Tourism dropped by 65% in Cuba this year; the worst loss sustained by any country in the Americas
Baldilocks: How To Defend Yourself, also, The World Is A Ghetto
Behind The Black: Perseverance experiment generates new record of breathable oxygen on Mars, NASA requesting proposals for raising Hubble’s orbit, Newly passed Senate bill requires consultation between industry and government on space junk, and Today’s blacklisted American: Professor fired by a North Carolina school for having opinions
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Da Tech Guy: Under the Fedora Thoughts
Don Surber: Just do what Trump did, 20 people attend Brittney Griner’s homecoming!, and The war on the middle class is old
First Street Journal: As bitterly cold weather hits the United States, we’re not totally dependent upon electricity
Gates Of Vienna: The Closing of the Imanskolan, also, Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?
The Geller Report: 13 US States Warn that Giant Climate Activists Funds Are Buying Up Public Utilities, also, Democrats’ Obscene $1.7 Trillion Spending Orgy Includes Extra Funds for DOJ to Pursue More Illegal Jan. 6 Political Prosecutions
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of the Day, NGC 7469, A Busy Day, and Blognet
Hollywood In Toto: Guess What NY Times’ Late Night Year in Review Left Out?
The Lid: Kwanzaa- A Fake Holiday With A Racist Goal, Created By A Criminal Madman
Legal Insurrection: Dem Mega Donor Crypto King Released From Jail On Personal Recognizance Bond, The Ideological Capture of Our Scientific Institutions Accelerates, UNC-Chapel Hill Drops Criteria Excluding White People for a Fellowship After Civil Rights Complaint, NBC “Historian” Michael Beschloss Demands to Know Why Some Lawmakers Didn’t Applaud for Zelenskyy, and Victor Davis Hanson Wonders if Universities Are Doomed
Nebraska Energy Observer: It’s beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas
Outkick: Utah-Penn State Will Be The Last Traditional Rose Bowl Matchup Ever, You Don’t Say?! Anthony Davis Is Out Indefinitely For The Lakers, College Football Hall Of Fame Considering Exception For Mike Leach On Induction Requirements, Rams, Broncos Pranked With Ugly Christmas Uniforms, and Tennessee QB Joe Milton Unleashes A Howitzer, Throws An Orange 100 Yards
Power Line: Jack Clifford: Lake v. Hobbs, day 2, The Other Blue State, The Daily Chart: Long COVID Labor Market?, and Thoughts from the ammo line
Protein Wisdom Reborn: Patrick J. Carroll truly IS a sad, embittered psychopath
Shark Tank: Another Win For DeSantis – Fla. Supremes Empanel Grand Jury On The Jab
Shot In The Dark: Merry Christmas!
STUMP: Merry Christmas! Have Some Finalized 2021 U.S. Mortality Stats!
The Political Hat: 12 Posts of Christmas, 2022 (Day 11)
This Ain’t Hell: Russians warn on increasing aid to Ukraine, Digital evidence points to Russian Military as being behind the Bucha killings, Valor Friday, Russia’s only aircraft carrier experiences fire, and Paraphrasing the Bible is “hate speech”?
Transterrestrial Musings: The FBI’s Response, What A Shame, Just What We Needed, and Linux Problem
Victory Girls: Jan 6 Report: Liz Cheney’s Lecture
Volokh Conspiracy: Marines Must Exempt Sikhs from Boot Camp Shaving Requirements
Watts Up With That: BOOK REVIEW: The Unpopular Truth about Electricity and the Future of Energy, also, Japan Embraces Nuclear Power, Cancels Phase Out Plans
Weasel Zippers: Biden EPA Chief Claims “Racism” In Environmental Laws, Pelosi Praises Media As “Guardians of Democracy” In Final Press Conference, Biden Chief of Staff Fumes: Americans More Concerned About Gas Prices Than Having “Free Pre-K”, and Complete Lack of Self-Awareness: Biden Complains, “Our Politics Has Gotten So Angry”
The Federalist: It’s Time To Tell The Truth About Colonialism In Africa, As Christians Face Death Sentences, Nigerian Court Can And Should Overturn Its Dangerous Blasphemy Law, South Dakota University Regents To Protect Kids, But Not Adults, From Explicit Shows On Public Property, and 50 Years Later, We Still Remember The ‘Immaculate Reception’ And The Great Roberto Clemente
Mark Steyn: Live Around the Planet: Friday December 23rd

Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Linkagery

The Shame of Adam Kinzinger

Posted on | December 23, 2022 | 1 Comment

Last week, Tucker Carlson bid a mocking farewell to Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger who, like Liz Cheney and many others, wrecked his career by succumbing to Trump Derangement Syndrome. As much as I enjoyed Carlson’s mockery — and as much as Kinzinger deserved to be mocked as a “male menopause” sufferer — it does not fully explain what happened to Kinzinger, and mockery will not prevent others from emulating such errors in the future. A “teachable moment” was missed.

Begin with this: You and I are different from those who harbor political ambitions. For most of us, political parties are a matter of choosing between two different policy agendas; we may not like everything that our party does, but in general we think our party represents our interests and ideals better than the other party does. In point of fact, most conservatives are more or less permanently exasperated with Republican politicians, who seem like a gang of bumbling clowns, cowards and knaves. But then we look at the Democrats, who are even worse, and figure we’ve got no other choice. Republican voters are like fans of a lousy NFL franchise — the Cleveland Browns or Detroit Lions, for example — who suffer endless disappointment, but nevertheless continue showing up at the stadium and rooting for the home team.

Most of my readers have been voting Republican all your adult lives, and don’t ever expect to stop voting Republican, no matter how futile and frustrating your experience may be. You are a loyalist, and consider it a duty to vote for the GOP, and that’s why people like Adam Kinzinger piss you off so much. If you can be loyal to the team, despite so many years of disappointment and frustration, why can’t Republicans like Kinzinger reciprocate your loyalty? Why can’t they be “team players”?

Ah, but politicians are different from you and me. For them, a political party is a machine by which to advance their own ambitions. And while they speak with apparent sincerity of their “principles,” it should be observed that these are difficult to distinguish from their career interests. Once upon a time, in the earliest era of our Republic, political careers were not particularly lucrative, and our legislatures were not occupied by careerists without any other employment opportunities. Being a state legislator or even a congressman or U.S. Senator, was not a full-time job, and these seats tended to be filled by wealthy landowners or prosperous lawyers, for whom serving a few years as a legislator was a sort of social obligation, as leading citizens of their communities.

As politics has become a full-time career, however, the character of our legislative representatives has changed, and thus we have such personalities as Adam Kinzinger, a former wunderkind who first got elected to Congress during the Tea Party year of 2010 and thus instantly became part of the governing GOP majority in the House of Representatives, when he was still just 32 years old. Republicans won a landslide in 2010, gaining a net 63 seats for a 242-193 majority, with John Boehner replacing Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House. Kinzinger had first won office as a county commissioner while a 20-year-old college student and then amid the patriotic fervor of the “War on Terror” in 2003, joined the Air Force, becoming a pilot flying aerial refueling planes. Endorsed by Tea Party darling Sarah Palin, Kinzinger easily won the 2010 GOP primary in the 11th District of Illinois, then won the general election by a 15-point margin. He was a young superstar.

Alas, things immediately started going downhill for the GOP, as Mitt Romney won the 2012 Republican presidential nomination and thus helped reelect Barack Obama. Meanwhile, Kinzinger got redistricted. As recently as 1990, Illinois had 22 House seats, but they lost two seats after the 1990 Census, and have lost one seat in every subsequent census, so that when Congress convenes next January, Illinois will have only 17 representatives in the House. When Kinzinger was first elected in 2010, Illinois had 19 congressional districts, but in the next election, that number shrunk to 18 and, in the ensuing game of “musical chairs,” Kinzinger ran in the 16th District, defeating fellow Republican Rep. Don Mazullo in the 2012 primary, then cruising to a 62%-38% win in November. So far, so good for Kinzinger, but in the aftermath of Obama’s reelection, Boehner went sideways in budget negotiations with the White House, pissing off the fiscal conservative Club for Growth.

Kinzinger had supported Boehner’s deal with Obama and, subsequently was faced with a Club for Growth-backed challenger in the 2014 GOP primary. Kinzinger had no trouble fighting off that challenge and was reelected, but this seems to have been the pivotal episode that turned Kinzinger — originally elected amid a populist Tea Party surge — into an enemy of conservatives. After all, self-declared conservatives had tried to prevent his reelection and this threat to his personal ambition was intolerable to Kinzinger: How dare they oppose him?

Things then went bad to worse. As the Republican field began assembling for the 2016 presidential campaign, Adam Kinzinger endorsed . . .

Go ahead, take a wild guess.

Betcha can’t guess, but give it a try.

I’ll wait.

If you guessed Jeb Bush, you’re a winner!

Was there ever any campaign more obviously doomed from the outset than the 2016 Jeb Bush campaign? America had gotten thoroughly sick of Bushism, and Jeb’s performance in the GOP primary campaign was a sort of asterisk in the final result. Jeb got less than 3% of the vote in the Iowa caucuses, getting exactly one delegate of the 30 chosen. In New Hampshire, Jeb got a whopping 11% and three delegates out of 23. Then came South Carolina, a winner-take-all primary where Jeb got less than 8% of the vote and then quit the race, at which point Kinzinger jumped ship to endorse Marco Rubio, but it was already too late to stop the Trump juggernaut. With the benefit of hindsight, everyone has since realized what I foresaw from the beginning: There were too many candidates vying to be the anti-Trump in that crowded primary field. If you go back to the New Hampshire primary, you see that the combined votes of the three “moderates” — Jeb (11%), John Kasich (16%) and Chris Christie (7%) — were nearly equal to the 35% that Trump got in New Hampshire. If the RINO Caucus had been able to coalesce behind one candidate, they might have stopped Trump, but the selfish ambition of these three candidates prevented that from happening. Likewise with the two “Conservative But Not Trump” candidates, Rubio and Ted Cruz. If one or the other had been willing to drop out early, perhaps their combined support would have exceeded Trump’s, but individual ambition prevented that, too. And, in that crisis of the Republican Party, you see, Kinzinger was always endorsing the wrong candidates.

Me, I’m a team player.

From the moment Trump came down that escalator, I realized he was going to be hard to beat and, a few weeks later, I got a call from my buddy Pete the Tech Guy, who was covering Trump’s first big rally in New Hampshire: “Stacy, this Trump thing is for real.” It was a genuine grassroots phenomenon, and when National Review subsequently published its “Never Trump” issue, I became concerned about a potential nightmare scenario: If the GOP Establishment somehow contrived a way to prevent Trump from getting the nomination, Trump might go third-party, and thus ensure Hillary’s election. We were, in a way, caught between the Devil and the deep blue sea. Trump was able to energize a segment of the electorate that had long felt neglected, and with this energized grassroots base, he ultimately overcame every obstacle, including the opposition of GOP Establishment types like Kinzinger, and thus saved America from the worst of all evils, President Hillary Clinton.

Being a team player, it was easy to see it this way, and the problem for Kinzinger and so many others is that they let their own ambitions blind them to the reality of what this choice meant. Whatever you think of Trump, there could be nothing worse for America than putting Hillary Clinton in the White House. We just barely avoided that apocalyptic catastrophe and, as bad as the subsequent imposition of Joe Biden has been, I’m sure it would have been much worse if Hillary had won in 2016 — but Kinzinger doesn’t seem to grasp this.

Something else Kinzinger doesn’t get: Congressmen are supposed to represent their constituents. In 2016, Donald Trump won the 16th District of Illinois by 17 points, with 55% to Hillary Clinton’s 38%. In 2020, the voters of the 16th District chose Trump by a 16-point margin, 56% to Biden’s 40%. In other words, the district that sent Adam Kinzinger to Congress voted for Donald Trump twice, by overwhelming margins, and you might think this would oblige Kinzinger to defend the man his constituents embraced, rather than to constantly attack Trump.

Who is it, really, that is the threat to democracy?

Why do Republicans like Kinzinger hate their own constituents?

This is what’s really wrong with the Republican Party, that so many politicians elected by the party apparently don’t feel any obligation to reciprocate the loyalty of GOP voters. If you are elected as a Republican, you ought to be enough of a team player that you don’t do what Adam Kinzinger has done, directly insulting his own party’s voters.

Fortunately for Republicans — not just in Illinois, but everywhere — the Census took care of our Adam Kinzinger problem. After the 2020 Census, Illinois again lost another House seat, and after the subsequent redistricting, Kinzinger would have had to face off against another Republican, Rep. Darin LaHood, in a very conservative district. Kinzinger decided to retire instead, and nobody — absolutely nobody — in the Republican Party will miss that selfish bastard. Good riddance.

Let this be a warning to all Republican politicians. Never forget that you are a representative of the people who elected you. If you had not first won a Republican primary, you never would have been a candidate in the general election, so that party loyalty is a prerequisite to success in politics. While philosophers may speculate on the existence and nature of a generalized public interest in political affairs, no speculative theory is necessary to understand the symbiotic connection between a politician’s success and the strength of his party in the community that elects him. That is to say, while a congressman or senator indeed is elected to represent all his constituents, he must always keep in mind what his own party’s grassroots voters want, in terms of his policy agenda. You may be able to fool voters to some extent for a while, but in the long run, politicians who don’t understand the reciprocal nature of party loyalty are doomed to destruction. If you cannot in good conscience represent your own party’s grassroots voters, honor requires you either to quit your office or to switch parties. What Adam Kinzinger has done is dishonorable, and he can posture all he wants as a Courageous Man of Principle, but he’ll have to do so somewhere else besides Congress, because the voters of his district rightly hate him.

Kinzinger betrayed the people who elected him, and ought to be ashamed of himself, but if he had any capacity for shame, I guess he never would have endorsed that loser Jeb Bush, would he?