Just got home from Las Vegas, and my arms aren’t the only thing that’s tired…so I’m going to bed and will most likely wake up very early Saturday morning to do the last link dump of the week. It was an interesting morning at the dentist and an equally interesting afternoon at the credit union.
There’s a possibility that I may not be attending Balticon over Memorial Day weekend, since they have an absurd COVID policy in place and I’m not interested in putting up with that bullshit. Anyone up for a Smittypalooza Friday or Saturday somewhere in Northern Virginia or Frederick County? What say, honored Elder Sidekick?
One point I’ve not seen raised as we move toward a possible abortion of Roe/Casey is this pertains to the “If you don’t have a uterus, you cannot speak” argument. Whether one can speak has nothing to do with whether the plumbing is “indoor” or “outdoor”, because this is fundamentally a family, not an individual argument.
This is where the Left (credit where due) has expertly played the individual liberty card as a trump against conservatives. Because we do care about individual liberty. I, for one, am not here to boss anyone around. Bossing people around triggers that “Newton’s 3rd Law of Humans” rebellion. Perhaps you’ve noticed.
But.
Let me address my “team” directly here: if she’s not your wife, you’ve no business trading protein with her. And if God has joined you, let no man (to include you behaving like a boy) put that divine appointment asunder.
— I Came?I Saw?I Got Over Macho Grande (@smitty_one_each) April 23, 2022
Once a man is married (take your time, this is not a decision to be taken lightly), he needs to stay that way. We all look the same in the dark, and everyone’s feet stink. Don’t let the testosterone lead you to cheapen the sacrament. We can continue to prize our individual liberty as a political matter (I certainly do) but your spiritual growth as a man involves treating your marriage as a spiritual castle, just as your home is your physical castle.
Yet, political Libertarianism is orthogonal to your spiritual oath to the marriage and the ensuing family.
Thus, we are right, correct, and proper when we stomp this “no uterus, no voice” argument into the mud. It is a foul deceit intended to (and quite successful at) cratering our society and reducing us to thralls of a Socialist state controlled by globalists.
Therefore, it is my hope that the Pro Life movement morphs into a Pro Family movement, and we continue to reject the parade of follies that have plagued us since the Summer of Love.
Again, I’m not here to boss anyone around. I understand that there are plenty of people for whom “Form Follows Function” is too complex a concept to grasp, like the truth that a dog has four legs, no matter how we label the tail. Lord, have mercy.
But for those of us men who are not confused about manhood, it is time to step up to the plate, love our families as the Lord has loved us, and rebuild a collapsed culture.
The brother of the man arrested for the onstage assault of Dave Chappelle at the Hollywood Bowl says he’s stunned by the incident — and he wants people to know his younger sibling has struggled with mental health issues and being unhoused.
Police say Isaiah Lee, 23, stormed the stage Tuesday night at the Netflix Is a Joke festival and tackled the comedian before security intervened. Lee had a replica gun that could eject a knife blade in his possession when he was arrested and later booked on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon, authorities allege.
Lee’s brother Aaron Lee tells Rolling Stone that Isaiah has been in and out of shelters in Hollywood, California, for much of the last decade and has lots of friends in the transgender community. Still, Aaron doesn’t believe his brother would “lash out” as an act of activism against Chappelle, who recently drew ire from the LGBTQ community for jokes about trans people.
“I don’t have anything negative to say about Isaiah. He’s a performing artist who tries to stay as positive as possible. He does have a history of mental health issues. He does take medicine. Maybe he missed out on taking his prescription. But he’s not the type to just lash out. I don’t understand,” Aaron, 31, says.
The younger Lee has rapped under the name Noname Trapper and posted a song online two years ago titled “Dave Chappell.” His brother says Isaiah only picked that title to get search engine hits. Aaron says he never heard his brother express any ill will toward the comedian.
“That song wasn’t even about Dave Chappelle. It’s just that Dave Chappelle has a world-recognized name. People are searching Dave Chappelle all the time, so he hoped it would help him get more attention, more attraction, so people could find it,” Aaron says. “He doesn’t have any type of animosity toward him that I know about.”
Aaron says he hasn’t seen his brother recently and thought he was staying with another family member, “getting better.”
“He does take psych medicine, and that probably was a factor. And then maybe something triggered him acting like that. I don’t know,” he says. “He’s not the type of person to attack you for no reason. But if he’s not on his medication, and if he feels everyone is against him, maybe that’s it.”
As for speculation that the assault caught on video may have been tied to Chappelle’s controversial comments about the transgender community, Aaron was unsure. “He does have a connection with the transgender community,” Aaron tells Rolling Stone. “He used to stay at a shelter that helps transgender people. He’s been homeless since 11. He came out to California [from New York] after our grandmother died, and basically was in the streets getting help from different programs in Hollywood, like My Friend’s Place. He went to a lot of different organizations out there that help transgender people. Yeah, it could have definitely been a factor, but I really don’t know.”
You will perhaps not be surprised to learn that, because this happened in George Gascón’s district, the attacker will not be charged with a felony. Basically nothing is a felony in L.A. anymore, except voting Republican.
Making light of a scary situation. After an audience member recently attacked Dave Chappelle on stage, the comedian claimed that a few of his celebrity friends broke the man’s arm — but the quip was just part of his routine. “I felt good my friends broke his arm. I felt good,” the Chappelle’s Show alum, 48, said at the afterparty for the “Netflix Is A Joke” event on Tuesday, May 3, per an audio recording obtained by TMZ. He also quipped — in addition to his claims that Jamie Foxx and Busta Rhymes assisted with beating up the attacker — “How bad does a [N-word] have to be that Jon Stewart would stomp him?”
Honestly, this was a rabbit hole I never intended to go down. Like, why should I spend more than an hour scrolling through Google search results to try to assemble a biographical sketch of an obscure journalist? But today I glanced at Memeorandum and spotted this headline:
My first thought was, “What? Somebody’s trying to out-do Amanda Duarte in the ‘Worst Hot Take’ competition?” You see this is Charlie Warzel’s spin on the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion that’s caused such an uproar this week that Justice Samuel Alito had to cancel a scheduled appearance at a judicial conference because of death threats.
The obtuseness of Warzel’s spin, we’ll get to in a minute, but first, exactly who is this guy? He is from the suburbs of Philadelphia. In fact, I think Warzel and Jack Posobiec grew up in the same town in Montgomery County, which is kind of weird if you think about it. Like, what are the odds that two people so diametrically opposed would both be from the same suburb of Philly? At any rate, while Posobiec was attending a Catholic school, Warzel attended an elite prep school founded by Quakers. Annual tuition at The Shipley School in Bryn Mawr is about $43,000, which strikes me as lunacy. Warzel’s parents paid $160,000+ just for his high school education? My efforts to locate the source of the Warzel family fortune failed, so I don’t know if one Charlie’s ancestors was an Astor, a Fisk or some other 19th-century robber baron, but you’ve got to figure his folks must be loaded to send their kid to such a posh prep school, and his choice of college also screams “Trust Fund Baby.”
Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., is one of those pricey little sub-Ivy liberal arts schools where rich parents send their kids whose SATs weren’t quite good enough for Princeton or Dartmouth. Admission is somewhat selective (18% of applicants are admitted), but only the scions of wealthy families would bother applying, because the annual cost of attending Hamilton is $75,200 including room and board. So having spent more than $40,000 a year to send young Charlie to The Shipley School, the Warzels then spent roughly $300,000 for their boy to get his diploma from Hamilton. Privilege, with a capital “P.”
Damn, I’ll never understand rich liberals. If I had that kind of money, my politics would be somewhere to the right of Pinochet, and yet America’s affluent elite are apparently so burdened with guilt it’s a wonder they haven’t committed mass suicide and willed their fortunes to UNICEF.
I want to take a moment and share a few observations about the GOP reaction to the leaked draft opinion of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade (with the obvious caveat that scope of the decision could still change before it becomes public next month).
I’d like to be very clear up front: The reaction to this opinion and the political jockeying is a second-order story compared to the actual, dire consequences for real people once states begin to criminalize abortion (and this is, in fact, the reason why the right is obsessing over it). And yet this reaction is important to understand as a tool in the broader right-wing culture war. What we’ve seen over the last day or so is a tried-and-true example of their sore-winners complex. . . .
(Notice he begins with the first-person singular “I,” which my teachers taught me to avoid, but perhaps the instructors at The Shipley School taught Charlie otherwise. At any rate, Charlie doesn’t want to talk about the Supreme Court’s decision, nor about the unprecedented leaking of a draft opinion, but rather “the GOP reaction,” which he insists his readers must “understand as a tool in the broader right-wing culture war.” By the way, to any journalism students who might happen to be reading this, permit me to advise avoiding trite phrases like “tried-and-true.”)
It is absolutely no secret that ending Roe has been the right’s political project for decades. As the writer Lyz Lenz said on Monday, “It’s always been the plan. And it’s never been a secret. The plan has been shouted at rallies. Held up on signs. It’s been plotted and spoken of and written about over and over.” The leaked opinion is that plan coming to fruition—the success of a long game of often-shameless political maneuvering. Republican reaction to the leak was, of course, faux outrage. . . .
(True, opposition to abortion — and specifically overturning Roe v. Wade — has been on the conservative agenda “for decades,” in quite the same way that imposing same-sex marriage nationwide was on the liberal agenda “for decades” before the Obergefell decision. However, the leaking of a draft opinion, weeks ahead of when the Supreme Court was expected to issue its ruling on the Mississippi case, was self-evidently calculated to bring pressure on the justices, an attempt to use protest mobs to intimidate the court. It is not unusual for there to be rumors of which way the Supreme Court is leaning on a decision, but this business of leaking a draft opinion is unprecedented, as far as I’m aware. Whatever you say about Republican reaction, their outrage about this leak is certainly not “faux.”)
But the focus on the leak over the substance is telling.
First, it is an act of deflection geared toward minimizing the sweeping and radical nature of this ruling. Not only is a majority of the American public in support of abortion rights and against the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but, as my colleague Adam Serwer argued, “in the U.S., the rights of many marginalized groups are tied to the legal precedents established in the fight for abortion rights. This opinion, if adopted, provides a path to nullifying those rights one by one.” . . .
(Wow, way to line up those dominoes and tip them all over at once. After declaring the draft opinion to be of a “sweeping and radical nature” — hint, not really — Warzel invites his reader to go flying down the slippery slope as all “the rights of many marginalized groups” are wiped out in the blink of an eye. Some of us, who would be to the right of Pinochet if we could afford it, might wish it were so, except that a careful reading of Alito’s draft discloses no such radicalism. All the ruling would do is to return us to the pre-Roe situation, in which laws regulating abortion were decided by state legislatures. The Burger court had no business arrogating to itself the authority to void the laws of 49 states, which is what Roe did, and if it took nearly 50 years to end that usurpation of authority, that’s only because the liberals were so firmly entrenched in the judiciary that even many Republicans didn’t know how they could ever be uprooted. So while we might, in our Pinochet-loving fantasies, dream of the oppression to be inflicted on “marginalized groups” as a consequence of Alito’s ruling, no such result is likely, no matter what that hysterical idiot Adam Serwer says.)
It is in the best interest of the right to obfuscate and downplay the monumental implications of such a ruling — especially until it is officially enshrined by the court. And the best way to do that is by ginning up a political scandal. Leak obsession and speculation happens to be a favorite topic in the political press especially — this is a media story, but it is also a story about power struggles inside a famously opaque institution.
It is, in other words, a story that mainstream news organizations find impossible to resist covering and prioritizing. . . .
(Speaking of obfuscation, notice how easily Warzel slides over that phrase “until it is officially enshrined by the court,” which would seem to be a tacit admission that the purpose of the leak was to prevent such an enshrinement. Such an admission, however, would give away the game — i.e., the outrage over the leak is legitimate, if such was the leaker’s intent — and so Warzel doesn’t want his readers to think too much about this attempt to apply external pressure on the court, but rather to focus on the nefarious tactics of Republicans.)
Second, the sore-winners tactic is also an example of the sheer relentlessness of the far-right’s culture warring. Political wins are celebrated internally, but externally each victory is treated as an opportunity to double down on a victimization narrative and politics of grievance. . . .
(Projection much, Charlie? The entire stock in trade of the liberal movement is about victimhood — everybody’s “oppressed” and deprived of their “rights,” and the only way to remedy this is to vote Democrat! The liberal narrative features a rotating cast of “marginalized” victims — one week, it’s criminals shot by cops, the next week, it’s college graduates who can’t pay back their student loans — and if you want to talk about “sheer relentlessness,” nobody could hope to exceed the LGBTQ movement in inventing new grievances. Anyway, after a lot of blah, blah, blah about Orange Man Bad, Warzel finally reaches his conclusion.)
The sore-winner complex highlights a fundamental asymmetry between the style of culture warring employed by the left and right. The right’s vision is ahistorical and logically confused, but more importantly, it is relentless. There is no appeasing this type of politics. It is a politics that will manage to use its victories to stoke additional fears inside its voters. For the media, there is no amount of evenhanded or both-sides coverage that will get the right to back down from calling the press illegitimate, biased, and corrupt. For non-Republican politicians, there is no amount of bipartisan language or good faith attempts at dialogue or engagement that will inspire bipartisanship, compromise, and a desire for majority rule. For the right, even in victory, there is only grievance and fear.
What this prep-school alumnus is actually telling us is that conservatives have learned to play the same game that Democrats have been playing forever. Whose vision is “ahistorical,” Mr. Warzel? You seem to have forgotten all the fear-stoking and grievance-mongering that Democrats have done over the years. How about this one?
“Romney wants to — he said in the first hundred days
he’s going to let the big banks once again
write their own rules. Unchain Wall Street!
They’re going to put y’all back in chains.”
Really? You forgot that one? You know who the “y’all” Biden was referencing during that 2012 campaign speech in Virginia? As if Mitt Romney, of all people, was some kind of closet segregationist? Oh, spare me your lectures about “faux outrage” and imaginary “grievance,” Mr. Wurzel. What really bothers you is that, in the post-Trump era, some Republicans have finally wised up to the way Democrats have been playing this game, and are now playing it even better. Speaking of this leaked draft, by the way, it’s had the unexpected effect of causing some Democrats to declare their enthusiasm for late-term abortion, a stance which isn’t likely to play well in swing states like Ohio. Hit it, J.D.!
Here’s Kamala Harris stooge Tim Ryan defending abortion through 40 weeks. This is a barbaric position anywhere in the world (even European nations typically don’t allow abortion after 12 weeks). But it’s an especially radical position in Ohio. https://t.co/ObtePxlUHH
Yeah, that’s gonna leave a mark. Reckon Democrats can kiss their Senate majority good-bye and it’s only a matter of time before the Republican regime is dropping liberals out of helicopters.
Augusto Pinochet could not be reached for comment.
Last week, I mentioned Brianna Wu, a/k/a John Walker Flynt, the psychotranny drama queen who inserted herself into the #GamerGate controversy in 2014 and simply won’t let go of her 15 minutes of “fame” (such as it was). In the comments of that post, Wombat remarked: “Literally Who is crying again? We’ll give her something to cry about!” In case you don’t get that reference, the #GamerGate crew dubbed the three self-anointed “victims” as Literally Who (Zoe Quinn), Literally Who 2 (Anita Sarkeesian) and Literally Who 3 (Wu), the point of these sobriquets being that practically nobody in the videogame development community had ever heard of these people until #GamerGate happened. Quinn (a/k/a the Tattoo-Covered, Mentally Ill Ex-Stripper Whose Real Name Is Chelsea Van Valkenburg) had done one really crappy, primitive game called Depression Quest, Sarkeesian had done nothing except some YouTube videos applying critical theory to games, and Wu had done a boring game called Revolution 60 that almost nobody ever played. But then the Great #GamerGate Victimhood Derby of 2014 got underway and by October 2015 there were literally hearings at the United Nations (!!!) with Zoe and Anita testifying about “harassment.”
Never in history had such previously obscure nobodies become “famous,” except perhaps Gavrilo Princip, Lee Harvey Oswald, et al.
Zoe, Anita and Briann’s claims of victimhood were dubious; the FBI investigated and, except for a juvenile in the Midwest who’d made harassing phone calls, found no crimes against these high-profile victims. When the noise died down, the headlines faded and the media spotlight turned elsewhere, most of us forgot about the “Literally Who?” gang.
Alas, grifters gotta grift, and while I have no idea how Zoe and Anita are paying their bills nowadays, Wu has decided that progressive politics is her bag, which she promotes constantly on Twitter.
Notice that Wu talks about fundraising for “our congressional runs” as the foundation of the PAC formed with Cenk Uygur. How did those campaigns turn out? In 2018, Wu challenged Massachusetts Rep. Stephen Lynch in the Democratic primary and lost by 48 points, 71%-23%. After announcing another primary challenge to Lynch in 2020, Wu quit the race in April 2020, citing COVID-19 concerns. Uygur, meanwhile, jumped into the 2020 special election for California’s 25th District, which was vacated by disgraced Rep. Katie Hill’s resignation. In the so-called “jungle primary,” Uygur placed fourth, with 10,699 votes (6.6%), and in the subsequent runoff, Republican Mike Garcia won the seat. Uygur ran again in the regular election, again placing fourth in the primary, with 9,246 votes (5.9%) and, again, Garcia went on to win the seat. Such is the electoral record of the co-founders of Rebellion PAC.
Compare and contrast Wu’s self review (“I am a great project manager.”) vs what James Tison had to say:
Mainly though, I found the executive director’s management style to be chaotic, aggressive, and not great with boundaries (for myself and in the way she treated various freelancers). Instructions that made no sense, constantly changing deadlines and expectations, and a general aura of overt bossiness.
Who is this James Tison?
According to his LinkedIn profile, for six months (August 2020 to January 2021), Tison was Production Coordinator for Rebellion PAC:
** Multi-million dollar Clean Progressive PAC ran by Cenk Uygur (The Young Turks) and Executive Director Brianna Wu
** Right-hand person to the Executive Director
** Produced, wrote, researched, and story edited 30+ political ads that ran throughout the 2020 cycle, working closely with editors to meet deadlines
** Participated in endorsement interview process for 10+ congressional candidates
** Opposition research on numerous conservative candidates
** Produced and organized digital events (talkbacks, fundraisers), managing communications with congressional candidates and The Young Turks network.
** Managed social media, helped quadruple the following on all platforms
** Researched, authorized, and executed ad buys in local tv and radio markets throughout country
** Aided Cenk Uygur directly with interview prep for his YouTube channel (1 Million subscribers)
This was Tison’s experience with the “chaotic” Brianna Wu, who exhibited “a general aura of overt bossiness” — allegedly, I hasten to add, as I don’t have the original source for that Tison quote on KiwiFarms. Even if we stipulate that the quote is authentic, it must be added that Tison is not himself exactly a pillar of emotional stability.
So much, then, for the former Production Coordinator for Wu’s PAC. What have they been up to lately at Rebellion PAC? While I don’t know how much money they’ve raised, Wu made a lot of noise on Twitter about the bang-up job they were doing in support of left-wing kook Nina Turner in her Democratic primary challenge against Rep. Shontel Brown in Ohio’s 11th District (Cleveland). Care to guess how that turned out?
Yes! A 32-point blowout victory for Brown! A completely humiliating defeat for Turner and her Rebellion PAC supporters. Just a wild guess here, but maybe Brianna Wu a/k/a John Walker Flynt doesn’t exactly have his/her finger on the pulse of voters in Cuyahoga County, Ohio.
Way to go, Madame Executive Director — wasting donor money on doomed kook candidates who get stomped in Democratic primaries. Please, offer more strategic help to “progressives”!
2/ I think it would help if people understood where their donations go. We've failed to be as transparent as we should with that.
But, if you want victory – and you're not willing to volunteer – you need to donate what you can.
2/ For me, being a progressive is straightforward. I want other people in that situation to have more resources. Higher minimum wage, guaranteed health care without the specter of homelessness hanging over their head.
4/ But I’m also proud to have stood by @ninaturner when other progressives didn’t show up for her.
In the long term, the progressive vision for the Democratic Party is where we’re going. Not centrism. Every poll about younger people’s politics backs me up.
Translation: “Grifters gotta grift.” The entirety of her message can be summarized as, “Give us more money, because ‘progressive’!” And the truly sad thing is that there are plenty of “progressives” who will keep donating, because only extremely gullible people believe that “progressive” crap, and if nothing else, Brianna Wu knows how to get these chumps to fork over money for “the progressive vision.”
In one night, he staged a home invasion and carjacked two vehicles at gunpoint, shooting one person in the arm, WHNT reports.
At the home, he fired multiple rounds and killed a dog.
The crimes were followed by a chase where speeds reached more than 100 miles per hour.
It ended with a stolen car stuck in a field south of Huntsville, and officers — who were evidently well known to him — pleading with him to put down his gun and give himself up.
He was charged with attempted murder, two counts of kidnapping, first-degree robbery, first-degree burglary, third-degree burglary, breaking and entering a vehicle, animal cruelty for shooting a dog and attempting to elude.
White was sentenced to 75 years in prison where, in 2020, he sent a letter to authorities in Lauderdale County, Alabama, to whom he confessed the October 2015 murder of 59-year-old Connie Ridgeway, who was killed in her apartment in the tiny town of Rogersville, about midway between Florence and Athens, Alabama. Despite his confession, White pleaded not guilty at his arraignment, and was in jail awaiting trial for Ridgeway’s murder when he somehow struck up a romantic relationship with a female jail guard named Vicky Sue White. She helped her new boyfriend escape, and both of them are now wanted fugitives.
She had worked nearly 20 years at the Lauderdale Detention Center and authorities were stunned to discover that she’d been in a relationship with an accused murderer for nearly two years. But Vicky Sue White, 57, had been dealing with an invalid husband who died in January after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease. Her late husband’s mother speculated that Vickey Sue had been “brainwashed” by Casey White: “Maybe he’s got her brainwashed. But I don’t know how he’d have had a chance to get her brainwashed, because he was in prison.” However, there is a word for what likely happened:
Hybristophilia is a sexual interest in and attraction to those who commit crimes, a paraphilia in which sexual arousal, facilitation, and attainment of orgasm are responsive to and contingent upon being with a partner known to have committed a crime. . . . In popular culture, this phenomenon is also known as “Bonnie and Clyde syndrome”.
Many high-profile criminals, particularly those who have committed atrocious crimes, receive “fan mail” in prison that is sometimes amorous or sexual, presumably as a result of this phenomenon. In some cases, admirers of these criminals have gone on to marry the object of their affections in prison.
Some women just can’t resist “bad boys” and a murder suspect like Casey White might seem a strange choice of partners, but he is 6-foot-9, 260 pounds — almost any man that tall would have a strong appeal to many women (who always go for the tall guys, as if such attraction were hardwired into their DNA). But this is likely to be a fatal attraction, given his history of violence toward women, including the ex-girlfriend he attempted to murder during his 2015 crime spree:
Casey Cole White, the murder suspect who escaped from an Alabama jail Friday morning with the alleged help of a prison official, warned cops in 2015 that he’d kill his ex-girlfriend if he got the chance, according to court documents.
“He stated that he wanted to kill her and have the police kill him,” a police report from December of that year concludes. “His only regret was that neither was successful. He stated that if he was released he would kill the victim.”
This love story is unlikely to have a happy ending.
