The Other McCain

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

Nashville Shooter Left ‘Manifesto,’ Was ‘High-Functioning’ Autistic

Posted on | March 28, 2023 | 2 Comments

In an afternoon press conference, police confirmed that Audrey Hale — the transgender shooter who killed three 9-year-old kids and three adult staffers at a Christian school in Nashville before being shot by cops — left behind a “manifesto” that we may expect will explain her motives. Meanwhile, the Daily Beast interviewed several people who were neighbors or acquaintances of Audrey Hale and her family:

A source close to the Hale family told The Daily Beast on Monday night that Hale was autistic, but high-functioning.
“And relatively recently announced she was transgender, identifying as he/him,” the source said, asking to remain unnamed so as to avoid additional family strife.
Nashville Police Chief John Drake said at a press conference Monday afternoon that Hale was transgender.
A search of Hale’s home turned up “maps drawn of the school, in detail, so, surveillance, entry points, et cetera,” Drake said, as well as a “manifesto” and “some writings that pertain to this date, the actual incident… of how this was all going to take place.” Inside a Honda Fit that Hale drove and parked at the school campus Friday morning, cops found “additional material written by Hale,” police said in a tweet.
Drake said investigators have a working theory on a possible motive, but that it’s not confirmed. Covenant was “the only school that was targeted,” according to Drake, who added, “[t]here was another location that was mentioned.”
“But because of a threat assessment by the suspect, too much security, they decided not to,” Drake said. . . .
A LinkedIn profile says Hale started a freelance illustration and graphic design business last year after attending, and working for, Nossi College of Art in Madison, Tennessee. At Nossi, Hale won an award for “most improved” in 2015, according to the school’s site.
Hours after the shooting, police searched a home just three miles away from the school. A neighbor, Sandy Durham, who is also a family friend of the Hales, said the ATF told her they were there “to see what was going on next door [at the Hale house].”
“I do know Audrey, I’ve known her since she was a baby. I had just gotten out of the shower when all of this started happening. I didn’t really know anything more than that. Something was going on next door. It’s just tragic for everybody. The sweet children that were hurt, killed, the adults. All of it,” she told The Daily Beast.
Asked if there were any warning signs about Hale, Durham responded, “Never. She was very sweet. I don’t know what happened. It’s very scary.”

Until police release the manifesto (or at least, describe its contents), we don’t have a lot to go on, in terms of piecing together a motive, and I think conservative commentators should be cautious about using connect-the-dots guesswork. We know that Tennessee recently passed a state law outlawing transgender treatment of minors, and that there has been a lot of angry rhetoric from transgender activists around this issue, so it seems logical that this atrocity was somehow connected to or motivated by that public controversy. Yet a logical deduction is still merely speculation, absent some clear evidence — social media posts or whatever — showing that Hale was acting on such a motive.



 

 

Category: Crime, Tennessee, The Transgender Cult

BREAKING NEWS: Nashville School Shooter Is Probably Not a Trump Voter

Posted on | March 27, 2023 | 1 Comment

While I always strive to avoid speculation in situations like this, the (allegedly) transgender person known as Audrey (or “Aiden”) Hale does not seem to fit the MAGA profile. It is not yet known if Hale’s motive was political, or if she/“he” was just crazy. Therefore I must withhold judgment on whether this shooting — which killed three children and three adults at a Christian school in the Green Hills neighborhood of Nashville — could be described as transgender terrorism.

Given what we know about media bias, expect this story to disappear with astonishing rapidity. Doesn’t fit the narrative, you see.



 

 

Category: Crime, Media Bias, Tennessee, The Transgender Cult

Inheriting a Legacy of Liberty

Posted on | March 27, 2023 | 2 Comments

The Queen of Bohemia

In his monumental Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke goes to some length to demonstrate how the principle of inheritance operated in English law. The young person to whom he addresses his lecture — which began as a correspondence — seemed to have been deceived by those who contended that the English constitution included a “right” of the people to choose their own king. This contention, as Burke shows, was based on a misunderstanding of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which had the effect of bringing William and Mary to the throne. Yet in the very document establishing this succession, the signatories declare the fealty of “ourselves and our posterity” to their new sovereigns — and their posterity: How could the principle of inherited authority be voided, asked Burke, if the English people could by solemn compact bind their descendants as subjects of the descendants of their sovereign? So the imagined “right” to choose their own king was not proven by the Glorious Revolution; rather, it was explicitly denied.

Most people have never actually read Burke’s Reflections. If they have studied it at all, they’ve done so as college students under the supervision of a professor who includes excerpts from it as part of a syllabus on political philosophy, and thus absorb only a limited conception of Burke’s argument, one that overlooks such details as his emphasis on the importance of the principle of inheritance in English law.

Consider the Queen of Bohemia, a relative of William and Mary. The Queen of Bohemia was the daughter of King James I, and was allegedly a target of the conspirators (including Guy Fawkes) in the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. While her English cousins were going through their ordeals in the 1600s — Cromwell and all that — she was the wife of Frederick V of the Palatinate, who became King of Bohemia, a title he held for only one year before being exiled because of a defeat in the Thirty Years War. Despite their misfortune, Frederick and his English-born Queen had numerous children, the 12th of whom was Sophia, who in 1658 married Ernest Augustus, Elector of Hanover. In the meantime, the English throne had passed from William and Mary to Queen Anne. None of them left any surviving children, which precipitated a succession crisis:

Anne was the only person remaining in the line of succession established by the Bill of Rights 1689 [which excluded Catholics from the English throne]. To address the succession crisis and preclude a Catholic restoration, the Parliament of England enacted the Act of Settlement 1701, which provided that, failing the issue of Anne and of William III by any future marriage, the Crown of England and Ireland would go to Sophia, Electress of Hanover, and her Protestant descendants. Sophia was the granddaughter of James VI and I through his daughter Elizabeth, who was the sister of Anne’s grandfather Charles I. Over 50 Catholics with stronger claims were excluded from the line of succession.

As a Protestant nation, the English refused to be ruled by Catholics, which is how Sophia’s son, the grandson of the Queen of Bohemia, became King George I, establishing the Hanoverian dynasty in England. Was the exclusion of Catholic claimants to the crown a violation of the principle of inheritance in English law? On the contrary, it was confirmation of that principle. Going back to Henry VIII, the English had rejected papal supremacy, and the fundamental point of “Cromwell and all that” was the continuation of England’s Protestant legacy, even if they had to behead King Charles to accomplish it.

All of this may seem irrelevant to Americans today, but ask yourself why our forefathers fought the War of Independence and why, in agreeing to the ratification of the Constitution, they insisted that it immediately be amended with the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, establishing freedom of religion? Our nation was founded by men who understood the rights for which their English ancestors had fought during all those decades from James to Charles to Cromwell and onward. The legitimacy of colonial assemblies as instruments of governing authority in America had been recognized by the Crown and upheld by Parliaments, so that when George III started infringing on this long-established arrangement, the American colonists resisted. They saw the King as seeking to deprive them of their inherited rights — a legacy of liberty that Englishmen could trace back to Magna Carta.

American patriots love to speak of their “God-given rights,” adopting the rhetoric of the Declaration about the “self-evident” truth that “all men” are “endowed by their Creator” with these rights — which is fine, except when you ponder why these truths were not proclaimed at some other time in some other place by some other people, but rather by English-speaking Americans gathered at Philadelphia in 1776. And when they leave off quoting the Declaration, well-meaning American patriots are fond of quoting the Preamble of the Constitution without making much of the phrase wherein the Framers declared their intent to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” extending to the infinite future the principle of inheritance.

My emphasis on the English origins of our conception of rights, as a legacy inherited from our ancestors, is not intended to exclude those Americans whose ancestors were not English and thus had nothing to do with this particular history. As Americans, all of us are rightful beneficiaries of this legacy, no matter where our ancestors came from, or how recently they may have arrived. Readers will recall my praise for Vivek Ramaswamy as “an enthusiastic proponent of American exceptionalism,” notwithstanding the fact that Vivek is a Hindu whose parents immigrated from India. Vivek gets it, in terms of the importance of “the Blessings of Liberty” which we seek to preserve under the Constitution. My ancestor fought in the Revolution as a teenager in the South Carolina militia, and I would hope that all his descendants — probably thousands of us by now — share the same sensibility expressed by Vivek Ramaswamy. Meanwhile, in Colorado, we have this adamant declaration from Jeff Goldstein:

Be it so understood:
I refuse to “unpack white violence.” I reject the idea that my existence “perpetuates white power structures.” I will not — and in fact cannot — “examine my implicit biases.” I’m an individual. I refuse to grant determined interpretive communities authority over my being. My meaning is mine. It is what makes me me.
I’m not taking any “journey” to “discover” the impact of my “privilege” on “black and brown peoples.” I will not become “anti-racist” or “anti-fascist” to satisfy your demands. I reject Cultural Marxism. I am an individual. I’m not defined by my color, my religion, my sex. I’m Jeff.
I will not “respect your pronouns” or “celebrate” your “queerness.” I am hostile to your sexualizing of children. I reject your neologisms, your “triggers,” and your desire to control my speech. I know who and what you are: you are my presumptive master, or else the Useful Idiot who empowers him. But I will grant you and your ideology no power over me.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.) Jeff is definitely an individual, as he says — and if you’ve ever met him, you certainly wouldn’t argue the point — but he is recognizably American in his individualism, as he understands the “Blessings of Liberty” as the Framers intended it, as belonging to him by inheritance as an American. While I suppose that Jeff would bemoan the lack of liberty and the violation of rights in distant places — Quebec or Kabul, Kinshasa or Kathmandu — it is the preservation of freedom in America that concerns him.

Intelligent people understand what Ronald Reagan once pointed out, in his famous 1964 speech “A Time for Choosing,” about our nation:

Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, “We don’t know how lucky we are.” And the Cuban stopped and said, “How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to.” And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.

Our freedom as Americans — our nation’s proud claim to be liberty’s “last stand on earth” — has a history, and if we don’t teach that history to our children, how can they possibly understand how precious this legacy is?

The Queen of Bohemia could not be reached for comment.



 

 

Category: Constitution, Great Britain, History

Late Night With Rule 5 Sunday: Riley Gaines

Posted on | March 27, 2023 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Swimmer Riley Gaines, who competed for the University of Kentucky in the NCAA finals against infamous troon “Lia” Thomas, has had some harsh words for the NCAA and also for elite athletes who thanked her privately for coming out against “transgender” men in women’s sports.

Now I realize these private thanks make them responsible for this continuing and advancing as it has. -Riley Gaines on Twitter, 2/7/2023

She’s having an impact – eighteen states now have laws banning biological men from participating in women’s sports.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

Built for speed.

NINETY MILES FROM TYRANNY: Hot Pick of the Late night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #2028, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns. 

ANIMAL MAGNETISM: Rule 5 Once-Golden State Friday, and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL: MAGA Bat Boy, The Wrong Man, Daisy Jones & The Six, Kleo, Quo Vadis?, Luther: Fallen Sun, Dragged Across Concrete, Barbie, and Suisse Cheese.

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: By Request – Hanna Kim, Beware of the Super Pigs!, Fish Pic Friday – Sage Scrimale, Tattoo Thursday, Is Today the Day?, The Wednesday Wetness, 25, The Monday Morning Stimulus, Palm Sunday, Florida Proposes Constitutional Right to Hunt and Fish, and Twitter File #19 Out, NY Plans to Arrest DJT

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious links!

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Category: Rule 5

NOT a Babylon Bee Headline

Posted on | March 26, 2023 | 1 Comment

Just a few days ago, I was talking about how satire is rapidly becoming impossible because reality has gotten so weird. The person using the name “Mara” has locked his/“her” @massofclay Twitter account, after deleting the series of posts complaining about a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent at New York’s JFK International Airport who allegedly injured him/“her”:

A transgender woman was left in tears at JFK Airport after she claimed a TSA agent punched her in the testicles while going through security, The Daily Mail reported.
The unidentified flyer took to social media to vent about the incident, in which she said the agent “humiliated” her in front of everyone in a series of posts that have since been deleted, according to the outlet.
“hi so a tsa agent at jfk airport punched me in the genitalia, yelled at me for having a penis (?) and humiliated me in front of everyone after i told her to please stop,” she captioned over photo of her crying in the airport bathroom, according to a screenshot of the post.
But the embarrassment didn’t stop there, according to the woman.
“[The TSA agent] followed me into the women’s bathroom and began talking about me to a coworker while I sobbed in a stall,” she wrote, asking friends on the internet for advice as to what she should do.
In a follow-up post, she said she was left crying for over an hour and said “my balls still hurt so bad,” according to a screenshot from the Daily Mail.
She does not want the TSA agent to be fired, she said in a separate post but wanted “her educated and the entirety of tsa abolished altogether.”
In response to the woman’s posts, JFK airport apologized for the incident.
“We apologize again for your experience,’ the airport tweeted in response, according to the Daily Mail. “Your comments have been noted and shared.”

“Your comments have been noted and shared” — and don’t you know they were laughing out loud while they typed that sentence?



 

 

Category: The Transgender Cult

Fear And Loathing On The Intertubes

Posted on | March 26, 2023 | 1 Comment

— by Wombat-socho


Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.


I don’t follow VTubers because my attention span these days is short enough I have a hard time making it through a lot of YouTube videos, much less a three-hour stream, and I’m not in the target demographic anyway. However, when #1 Son threw me a RedState link on Telegram a few weeks ago, I sat up and took notice. As Brandon Morse noted*, what’s significant here is not that somebody got bullied off the internet, but the massive backlash that bullying inspired in not just VTuber fandom, but a lot of people who had just had it up to here with the (alleged) minority of trans activists going around making other peoples’ lives miserable over video games. A lot of trans activists online got jumped on with both boots for not policing their own bad actors, and then 4chan got into the act. Every one of the “activists’ who had bullied Pikamee got doxxed, and quite a few of them shut down their Twitter accounts – but not before 4chan and others brought the receipts and exposed them as the lying bullies they were. Pikamee is still graduating, but the LGBTWTFBBQ crowd has been put on notice that people are tired of their shit and not willing to put up with it any more.

*RTWT, seriously.

Now, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Winston S. Churchill, Their Finest Hour

By itself, this could be dismissed as a tempest in a teapot. But the revenge taken by VTuber fans and 4chan isn’t happening in a vacuum. States are passing laws banning sexually explicit drag shows in public venues, especially where children may be exposed to these “queens”. Parents across the country are demanding explanations from school boards when they find porn in their school libraries and troons making elementary school kids discuss sexual acts instead of teaching the three R’s. The same parents are bringing down the hellfire on schools that think it’s okay to hide the fact that Little Johnny is transitioning to Little Janey from Johnny’s parents. We have a long way to go before all these shifty genderqueer groomers are rooted out of the public schools, but as Churchill said after El Alamein, it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Never forget. Never forgive. Never surrender.

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Category: Fear. Loathing., Zeitgeist

FMJRA 2.0: Die Macht Der Bilder

Posted on | March 25, 2023 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: Die Macht Der Bilder

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Sorry about last week, loyal members of the Commentariat.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

It’s a miracle!

The COVID-19 Fetish Community
The DaleyGator
Okrahead
A View From The Beach
Flappr
EBL
357 Magnum

The Answer Is ‘Yes’
Okrahead
The DaleyGator
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

 

Hiding In Plain Sight: Jeanette Jennings and Transgender Munchausen by Proxy
The DaleyGator
The First Street Journal
Flappr
EBL
357 Magnum

What Did China Get for Its Money?
The Pirate’s Cove
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

‘Stockholm Syndrome’? SVB, BLM and the Toxic Plague of Liberal White Guilt
The Pirate’s Cove
The Political Hat
EBL
357 Magnum

What Happened to Charlie Sykes?
The DaleyGator
EBL

Late Night With Rule 5 Sunday: Olga Kurylenko
Animal Magnetism
A View From The Beach
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
EBL

In The Mailbox: 03.21.23 (Morning Edition)
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.21.23 (Evening Edition)
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.22.23
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

Violence Against Women Update: Some Cases Are Just So…Unpredictable
The DaleyGator
EBL
357 Magnum

Best Headline Ever?
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.23.23
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

The Ignorance of Professor Paul Campos
EBL

Cue the ‘Paw Patrol’ Theme
EBL

In The Mailbox: 03.24.23
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

Top linkers for the week ending March 24:

  1.  EBL (15)
  2.  357 Magnum (12)
  3.  A View From The Beach (10)
  4.  The DaleyGator (5)

Thanks to everyone for all the links!

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Category: FMJRA Award

‘Limited Scientific Evidence’

Posted on | March 25, 2023 | 1 Comment

Are you kidding me with this? What kind of “journalism” is being practiced at NPR? Perhaps the kind in which ordinary common sense is prohibited. You don’t need an advanced degree in biology to know that the average man is 5-foot-10 and the average woman is 5-foot-5. And these average differences have a profound effect when considering the tail ends of the bell curve distributions. A man who is 5-foot-5 (the average height of a woman) is at the eight percentile (bottom 8%) of the male distribution; in other words, 92% of men are taller than the average woman. A man who is 6 feet tall is at the 84th percentile of the male distribution, whereas a 6-foot-tall woman is at the 99th percentile of the female distribution. So in a randomly selected group of 100 men, you’ll find 16 guys who are 6 feet tall. To find 16 women who are 6 feet tall, you’ll need to be choosing from a group of more than 1,500 women.

This is just basic statistics, using a single metric, based on information anybody can find with Google. There are other metrics we could consult. The world record for the 100-meter sprint is 9.58 seconds, set by Usain Bolt in 2009; the women’s world record, 10.45, was set by Florence Griffith-Joyner in 1988. The women’s record has stood for 35 years, which should suffice to suggest that it represents pretty much the maximum feasible speed by a female runner. Last year in the Southeastern Conference men’s 100-meter finals, how many of the male finalists ran faster than Griffith-Joyner’s world-record 10.45 seconds? The answer: All of them. And this is routine — that is to say, all competitive male sprinters outrun Flo Jo’s female world-record time, in every college track meet in America. “Limited scientific evidence”?

Being a traditionalist, I can’t resist an ironic smile at the strange fruit now being produced by the feminist tree of Equality. For decades, feminists have assaulted any all-male institution as inherently unfair, but now you have men pretending to be women in order to access all-female institutions and suddenly the absurdity of Equality is apparent to everyone. The fact that militant feminists like Meghan Murphy now find themselves siding with conservatives vindicates what I’ve been saying for years: Never bet against the Gods of the Copybook Headings.

(Hat-tip: John Hoge.)



 

 

Category: Science, Sports
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