The Other McCain

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

In The Mailbox: 06.08.20

Posted on | June 8, 2020 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Hacking Isn’t Like It’s Portrayed In The Movies
EBL: The First Wave At Omaha Beach – 6 June 1944
Twitchy: Sean Spicier’s Tweets Mocking ANTIFA, Congessional Democrats, & The Riots Drive Leftists Insane
Louder With Crowder: Maximum Democratic Pandering, also, WHO Now Says Asymptomatic COVID-19 Infected May Not Spread The Virus As Much As They Thought
Vox Popoli: The Promethean Playbook, also, This Cult Is Not New
TruePundit:  Gov. Cuomo Tells Protesters “Assume You Are Infected” (h/t NeoWayland)

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – The Middle Class Imploding Edition, also, A Sunday Feast
American Conservative: What Is “Systemic Racism”, Really? also, Is Beijing Preparing For Backdoor Military Action Against Taiwan?
American Greatness: General Mattis Has Betrayed The Marines & America, also, Boycott The NFL
American Power: Defund The Police Movement Based On Lies, also, Dana Loesch, Grace Cancelled
American Thinker: Just Like That, Gun Control & Corona-Chan Died This Week, also, Desperate #FakeNews Media In Overdrive
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: Black Lives Matter Honors Fidel Castro, also, Promoting Leftist Ideas Is What Matters To BLM
BattleSwarm: The Sick Religion Of Social Justice, also, BidenWatch For June 8
Cafe Hayek: “Calif-Ornery”, also, Incentives & Motives
CDR Salamander: “Dunkirk & The Little Ships” With Dr. Paul Weir On Midrats
Da Tech Guy: The Jobs Report & The Coming “Well, Screw That” Moment For The Black Community, also, After The Riots, My Walk Down Chicago’s Magnificent Mile
Don Surber: Biden Happens When You Trust The Media, also, The Case Against Bailing Out The States
First Street Journal: Democrisy – More Idiotic Pandering To #BlackLivesMatter
Fred On Everything: Her Name Is Breonna Taylor
The Geller Report: BLM/Antifa Rioters Attack Houston Childrens’ Hospital, Terrorize Children, also, Mayor DiBlasio Defunds The NYPD
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, NGC 6441
Hollywood In Toto: Quiet Crossing Offers Timeless Tale Of Political Oppression, also, Meet The Godfather Of Faith-Based Films
JustOneMinute: Faster Pander More, also, WHO Has News; Who Cares?
Legal Insurrection: Minneapolis City Council President – “The Ability To Call Police Over Robbery Comes From A Place Of Privilege”, also, Alternative Suggestions Roll In For Celebrities & Politicians Who Want To Defund The Police
The PanAm Post: A Golden Ticket For Taiwan, also, Maduro’s Infiltrators Join Violent Protests In The U.S.
Power Line: Blacks Like Trump, also, Third Precinct Arsonist Charged
Shark Tank: Wassermann-Schultz Sounds Alarm About Nursing Home Safety Shortages
Shot In The Dark: These Are Our “Elites”
STUMP: Defund Police Pensions – Would That Really Save A Lot Of Money?
The Political Hat: News Of The Week
This Ain’t Hell: Marine Corps Bans Confederate Imagery, also, A Letter From Larry Correia
Victory Girls: Minneapolis City Council Goes For Woke
Volokh Conspiracy: Is The Future Of Free Speech In Jeopardy?
Weasel Zippers: White #BLM Protesters Attack Black Policeman In Austin, also, Black Georgia State Trooper Refuses To Kneel At Protest
Mark Steyn: Pontypool, also, One Giant College Campus

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Category: Linkagery

Police: Colorado Lawyer Shot Disabled Veteran Who Drove Through Protest

Posted on | June 8, 2020 | 2 Comments

 

I’m not a lawyer, so I might be mistaken, but I don’t the Colorado bar association approves of attempted murder:

A lawyer who was reportedly participating in a small George Floyd-related street protest allegedly shot a driver in the head on Thursday evening in downtown Alamosa, Colo. The driver is reportedly on life support.
The victim is identified by several news outlets as Danny Pruitt, 49, reportedly a disabled military veteran and single father.
Cops arrested defense attorney James Marshall, 27, on a slew of charges about three hours later in connection with the shooting.
Although an investigation is ongoing into this extremely disturbing incident, Alamosa cops say there is no evidence thus far that Pruitt tried to drive his vehicle into or through the group, despite what some of the demonstrators apparently claimed.
In the incident in the southern Colorado municipality about 230 miles from Denver, the driver arrived at an intersection when sign-holding protesters were conducting their demonstration, KRDO, NewsChannel 13, explained about the surveillance footage it obtained.
“The video shows about a dozen protesters were lining Main Street with signs in hand. A black truck pulls up and as the driver goes through the crosswalk. That’s when a protester reaches in their pocket and pulls out what police say is a gun. The surveillance video shows the protester aim the object at the passenger side window of the truck. Within 11 seconds of nearing the crosswalk, the trucks comes to a halt in the middle of the intersection. Protesters immediately scatter…” . . .

 

Pruitt is reportedly in critical condition with a bullet in his brain. His niece has set up a GoFundMe page for the benefit of her uncle and his young daughter.
According to the page, “Danny was on his way to get dinner, when his vehicle was swarmed by protesters. One protester decided to make a calculated decision, shooting through Danny’s driver side window, the bullet hitting Danny in the back of the head.”

On his website, Marshall describes himself as a native of the suburbs of Cincinnati who graduated magna cum laude from Ohio State in 2015, then attended the University of Colorado Law School. After getting his law degree in 2018, Marshall worked for the Colorado public defender’s office in Durango before opening a private practice in Alamosa. What could have motivated him to shoot Pruitt is a mystery, but there’s a lot of craziness going around lately, and Crazy People Are Dangerous.


 

 

Category: Colorado, Crime

‘Protester’ Who Made Terroristic Threats on Live TV Is a Brooklyn Lawyer

Posted on | June 8, 2020 | 3 Comments

 

New York’s legal profession attracts top-quality people:

A George Floyd protester was arrested after he made a threat on live television to burn down Manhattan’s ritzy Diamond District, cops said Sunday.
Israel Burns, 34, of Bath Beach, Brooklyn, was arrested about 8 p.m. on Saturday after he was interviewed on Fox News earlier in the day and threatened to burn down the Diamond District if the mayor and governor didn’t come to speak to a crowd gathered at Barclays Center, video shows.
“Today, I’m giving a demonstration from Barclays Center at 6 p.m. to City Hall, and that’s the first stop and we’re hoping de Blasio and Cuomo come out and talk to us and give the youth some direction,” he told the reporter.
“But if they don’t, then [the] next stop is the Diamond District,” he said. “And gasoline, thanks to Trump, is awfully cheap. So we’re giving them a chance right now to do the right thing.”
Cops arrested the man, who identified himself on the video as “Ace Burns,” after identifying him by his distinctive face mask, authorities said.
Burns was charged with making terroristic threats and aggravated harassment.

In case you don’t know, New York’s “Diamond District” — the neighborhood of 47th Street between 5th and 6th Avenue — is largely Jewish, so that this threat was implicitly anti-Semitic.

 

Gateway Pundit broke the news today that Israel Adam “Ace” Burns is a Brooklyn attorney, who graduated from Rutgers Law School and appears to have many influential friends:

 

After graduating from Rutgers Law School with honors, he was hired as an Associate at the prestigious New York office of Seyfarth Shaw LLP, an international law firm with well over 800 attorneys around the world. He practiced in the Litigation and Employment Law departments and personally handled some of the largest clients in the world including Prudential, Deloitte, and T-Mobile.

Recall last week that two Brooklyn lawyers, one of them a Princeton alumnus, were charged with attempting to firebomb a police car.


 

 

Category: Crime, New York, Racism

Seven Killed in ‘Cold-Blooded’ Murder

Posted on | June 8, 2020 | Comments Off on Seven Killed in ‘Cold-Blooded’ Murder

 

Valhermoso Springs is an Alabama town in Morgan County about 20 miles south of Hunstsville. Last week, this quiet rural community was the scene of a horrific murder in which seven people were shot to death:

Seven people were killed in a mass shooting at a residence in Morgan County late Thursday.
The shooting took place at a home on the 500 block of Talucah Road in Valhermoso Springs close to Somerville at a little before 11:30 p.m., according to the Morgan County Sheriff’s office. . . .
The Morgan County Sheriff’s Office identified six of the victims: Tammy England Muzzey, 45, and 21-year-old Emily Brooke Payne, both of Valhermoso Springs; Roger Lee Jones Jr., 19, of Decatur; a 17-year-old juvenile girl; 31-year-old Jeramy Wade Roberts of Athens; and 18-year-old William Zane Hodgin of Somerville. A black male victim has yet to be identified.
Deputies said there are two white men, two black men and three white women. . . .
Upon arrival at the residence Thursday night, at 11:23, deputies saw part of the home was on fire and later discovered seven bodies inside after the fire was extinguished.
“It is a horrific scene and to be able to process it will take some time,” MCSO’s public information officer Mike Swafford told a local TV news station. . . .
Swafford told AL.com that investigators believe the suspect went to the residence with the intention of shooting everyone there.
Some victims had multiple gunshot wounds, Swafford said. Authorities are still working to identify all of the victims, but Swafford said some lived at the house where the shootings occurred.
“Incredibly heinous, talking cold-blooded,” Swafford said in describing the homicides.

The seventh victim was later identified as James Wayne Benford, 22, and the Daily Mail reported that the 17-year-old female was Dakota Green. It appears that this mass murder was drug-related:

Authorities and neighbors say the shooting deaths in a Valhermoso Springs house could be drug-related, but authorities have been tight-lipped about specific details because of the ongoing investigation. . . .
Payne’s mother, Vanessa Hipp of Madison, fought back tears at the crime scene Friday morning.
“I can’t put how I feel in words,” she said. “We suffered a great loss today.”
Wanda Thompson of Somerville, the mother of Muzzey, said she was in shock.
“I’m lost. I can’t even cry,” she said. . . .
Swafford said sheriff’s deputies are familiar with the residence. He said deputies have responded to six calls at the location during 2020, including three drug overdoses.
He said in past years, calls to the residence have involved drugs, robbery, trespassing and disturbances.
“It’s incredibly heinous (as a crime scene),” he said. “Our theory right now is whoever did this, came in here for a reason, did it and left.”
He said investigators are not ruling out that more than one shooter committed the crime. . . .
Some neighbors said they hear gunshots along the street on a regular basis.
“A barn behind that house burned down a few years ago because somebody was cooking meth there,” said Lawrence Lang, who has lived a few houses to the south of the crime scene for the past 21 years. “I don’t associate with those people.”
Thompson said she was having “problems with the people” at her daughter’s house, which was where the shooting occurred.
“People we didn’t even know were hanging around,” Thompson said. “I ran people off several weeks in a row. … Somebody was angry when they killed them.”
Another neighbor, Dennis Romback, said he observed traffic to and from the house at all hours. “(The shootings) are most likely drug-related. Overall, this is a quiet neighborhood. If authorities come around here, it’s usually to that house.”

Seven people dead and nothing on national news. You’re not going to see coverage on CNN. It’s as if the only time they consider murder to be newsworthy is when they can exploit it for politics.


 

 

Category: Alabama, Crime

Rule 5 Sunday: Blast From The Past – Bettie Page

Posted on | June 8, 2020 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

She really needs no introduction, does she?

The Queen of Pinups

Ninety Miles From Tyranny leads off with Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #1007, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns. At Animal Magnetism, it’s Rule Five Line Up for Guns Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL’s thundering herd this week includes Mirielle Mathieu, Louis Vuitton, Salome, I Puritani, Orfeo Et Euridice, Lulu, Tosca, The Exterminating Angel, Mia Sara, Juliana Hatfield, and Otello.

A View From The Beach reels in Like Pepper to Salt – Devin Brugman, You Can’t Fix Stupid, Fish Pic Friday, “Diamonds and Rust”, More Wednesday Wetness, Tuesday Tanlines, Motorcycles for Monday and Still Too Rich For My Blood.

Proof Positive’s Vintage Babe is Yvonne Craig, Bacon Time has a Random Chick In Red, and Red Pilled Jew has Women and Cars.

Thanks to everyone for the luscious linkagery!

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Category: Rule 5

Mamelukes, Marines, & A Wizard

Posted on | June 7, 2020 | Comments Off on Mamelukes, Marines, & A Wizard

— by Wombat-socho

I became a fan of Jerry Pournelle’s SF back in 1972, when I read “The Mercenary” in Analog, and for the next 40+ years I snapped up pretty much everything he wrote in the way of SF, and quite a few of the anthologies he edited as well. One of those books, in the summer of 1979, was Janissaries, in which Rick Galloway and a handful of mercenaries are saved from certain death in Africa…by aliens. The aliens take them to the planet Tran, where they find several groups of humans from different ages of human history, and things begin to go sideways for Galloway at that point as most of his men desert him in favor of the more experienced Andre Parsons. Things eventually work out for Galloway, who consistently chooses the hard right over the easy wrong, and over the next two novels (co-written with Roland Green) he makes considerable headway toward raising the tech level on Tran, maneuvering in the lethal local politics, and getting started on growing the madweed the aliens want. Unfortunately, the third novel in the series came out in 1987, and while Pournelle announced periodic progress, Mamelukes never made it into print until after his death. I have to say that I wouldn’t have minded seeing it finished sooner, but David Weber and Philip Pournelle did a good job of wrapping the story up seamlessly. I for one can’t tell where Jerry’s writing left off and David & Philip picked up, and if they choose to let the series lay at this point, I’d be okay with it. On the other hand, there are a few plot threads that could be followed into a fifth (and, perhaps, concluding) novel, and we shall see what the Pournelle kids want to do with it. We know Jennifer has the chops for it, and perhaps Philip could do the fifth novel justice as well. Very much worth your time.

Rick Partlow’s Contact Front is an interesting mil-SF novel. Instead of the usual wholesome hero, we get a Marine who chooses to join the Confederation Marines to avoid facing trial for murder, and while Cam Alvarez proves to be really good at mastering the powered armor suits, he’s pretty awful at being a leader, and his struggles with the concept of taking responsibility for his Marines take up a good part of the novel in between a couple of furious combat actions. This was a good read, and I’m looking forward to checking the rest of the series out. Available on Kindle Unlimited.

I’m probably one of the last people in the world to get around to reading Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files novels, about Chicago’s only wizard for hire and his uneasy relationship with both the Chicago PD, local crimelord Johnny Marcone, and his nominal superiors in the White Council – to say nothing of all manner of supernatural critters, demons, vampires, and just plain Bad People. Right now I have some extra cash and plenty of free time, so I’m starting from the beginning and digging into what may be the most entertaining urban fantasy since I discovered Larry Correia’s Monster Hunters International series. So far I’m only up to book 3, Grave Peril, and Butcher does not disappoint. Looking forward to getting caught up on the other…fourteen books? Well, after moving out to the middle of nowhere (a/k/a Tonopah, NV) I’ll have nothing to do but eat, sleep, and work on my continuing education for next tax season, so I should have plenty of time to work on finishing the series.

So far nobody has taken me up on my offer regarding Uncle Bob’s Pursuit of the Pankera, and that’s all right with me, to be honest. Life is too short to be reading crappy books, unless you’re getting paid well for the effort.

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Category: Books

FMJRA 2.0: Heat In The Street

Posted on | June 7, 2020 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Arson, Looting, Aggravated Assault and Attempted Murder Are Not ‘Protests’
Pushing Rubber Downhill
The Rabbit Hole
357 Magnum
Catallaxy Files
A View From The Beach
EBL

Rule 5 Sunday: Carol Alt
Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes
357 Magnum
Bacon Time
Dark Brightness
Pushing Rubber Downhill
EBL

FMJRA 2.0: In The Heat Of The Night
Dark Brightness
A View From The Beach
EBL

Ivy League Terrorist
357 Magnum
EBL

Rioter vs. FedEx Truck: Guess Who Won?
EBL

‘Young Philadelphians’
EBL

In The Mailbox: 06.02.20 (Morning Edition)
357 Magnum
Proof Positive
EBL

In The Mailbox: 06.02.20 (Evening Edition)
Proof Positive
EBL

In The Mailbox: 06.03.20
357 Magnum
Proof Positive
EBL

Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes
357 Magnum
Pushing Rubber Downhill
A View From The Beach
EBL

Muslim Immigrant Attacks Police
Dark Brightness
EBL

A Reason to Riot, or a Pretext?
Dark Brightness
EBL

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge
EBL

In The Mailbox: 06.05.20 (Early Evening Edition)
Proof Positive
EBL

In The Mailbox: 06.05.20 (Late Night Edition)
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Top linkers for the week ending June 5th:

  1. EBL (16)
  2. (tied) 357 Magnum & Proof Positive (6)
  3.  A View From The Beach (5)

Honorable Mentions – Dark Brightness, who got hosed out of a link last week because I screwed up (Calendars, how do they work?) and Pushing Rubber Downhill. All hail our ANZAC brothers!

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Category: FMJRA Award

A 21st-Century Mrs. Jellyby

Posted on | June 7, 2020 | 2 Comments

 

What can be said about David French? Honestly, my preference would be to say nothing, to forget that such a person even exists, and indeed, I make it a habit to ignore all #NeverTrump people. So you can imagine what extraordinary effort is necessary to attract my notice to any #NeverTrump argument, and David French has outdone himself:

Today let’s dive into one of the toughest questions of our religious, cultural, and political lives. While we write and print millions of words about race in America, why is it still so hard to have a truly respectful, decent, and humble dialogue about perhaps the most complicated and contentious issue in American life? . . .

(Notice all the caveats stacked up here in the first two sentences. Having invited readers to “dive into” this topic, David French then feels compelled to add multiple warnings about how difficult it is to be “respectful,” etc., in discussing this “complicated and contentious issue.” Don’t try this at home kids. This man is a Harvard Law graduate!)

Take “systemic racism,” for example. I daresay that only a vanishingly small number of Americans know that this is a term with an academic meaning that’s not entirely obvious from the words themselves. . . .

(Are you part of the “vanishingly small number” familiar with the “academic meaning” of this phrase? No, you’re a stupid Republican voter, so you need a Harvard Law alumnus to explain it to you.)

Yet millions of Americans read the accusation that America is beset with “systemic racism” and hear a simpler and more direct meaning of the term — you’re saying our systems (and by implication the people in them) are racist. But that’s completely contrary to their experience. They think, “How can it be that ‘the system is racist’ when I just left a corporate diversity training seminar, I work at an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer, my son’s college professors are constantly telling him to ‘check his privilege,’ and no one I know is a bigot? It seems to me that the most powerful actors in ‘the system’ are saying the same things—don’t be racist.” . . .

(Notice the mind-reading trick David French performs here. He presumes to know what other people think when hearing the phrase “systemic racism,” and even offers a verbatim quote from inside the mind of “millions of Americans.” Do they teach this skill at Harvard Law, or does the admissions process screen out any applicants who fail to demonstrate clairvoyant abilities?)

If you’re conservative, chances are your social media feed is full of images of rioting and looting. There are viral videos (including one the president retweeted Saturday) that declare “George Floyd was not a good person” and “the fact that he has been held up as a martyr sickens me.” There is the constant repetition of statistics about black-on-black crime, and posts and pieces arguing that police racism and brutality are overblown are shared across the length and breadth of social media. . . .

(Note the requisite appearance of the “Orange Man Bad” theme here. The fact that President Trump retweets a video means that whatever was in the video was wrong. Why bother making an actual rebuttal to an argument about, e.g., the statistical frequency of police brutality, if instead you can simply say that Trump is on the same side as people who cite such statistics, and therefore this argument must be wrong?)

I freely confess that to some extent where I stood on American racial issues was dictated by where I sat my entire life. I always deplored racism –those values were instilled in me from birth — but I was also someone who recoiled at words like “systemic racism.” I looked at the strides we’d made since slavery and Jim Crow and said, “Look how far we’ve come.” I was less apt to say, “and look how much farther we have to go.”
Then, where I sit changed, dramatically. I just didn’t know it at the time. I went from being the father of two white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed kids to the father of three kids — one of them a beautiful little girl from Ethiopia. When Naomi arrived, our experiences changed. Strange incidents started to happen. . . .

(He now wheels out the proof — PROOF! — of his moral superiority, just in his case his Harvard Law degree wasn’t sufficient proof.)

There was the white woman who demanded that Naomi — the only black girl in our neighborhood pool — point out her parents, in spite of the fact that she was clearly wearing the colored bracelet showing she was permitted to swim.
There was the time a police officer approached her at a department store and questioned her about who she was with and what she was shopping for. That never happened to my oldest daughter.
There was the classmate who told Naomi that she couldn’t come to our house for a play date because, “My dad says it’s dangerous to go black people’s neighborhoods.”
I could go on, and — sure — some of the incidents could have a benign explanation, but as they multiplied, and it was clear that Naomi’s experience was clearly different from her siblings, it became increasingly implausible that all the explanations were benign.
Then the Trump campaign happened, the alt-right rallied to his banner, and our lives truly changed. . . .

You can read the whole thing, if you’re afflicited with masochistic urges, but you get the general idea of where French is headed with this. The fact that he was bombarded with “alt-right” racist messages is not surprising. The Internet is a large place, and if one-tenth of 1% of Americans fit this description, in a nation of 280 million people age 15 and older, that means nearly 300,000 “alt-right” racists are available to harass anyone who attracts their hostile attention. The amplifying effect of social media can empower a strident minority to have enormous impact. This is how, for example, the transgender cult has become such a nuisance.

We must keep in mind The Law of Large Numbers when considering such phenomena, or otherwise we might be deceived into thinking that the most militantly obnoxious voices on the Internet represent widespread public sentiment. Thinks about the “incel” phenomenon, which some people have inflated into a terrorist threat, as if nerds who can’t get laid are a menace equivalent to al-Qaeda. Yes, a few “incels” have carried out mass-murder sprees, but is Elliot Rodger typical? Is every introverted geek a would-be killer? Is this a genuine trend? Or are such incidents being wrongly magnified by the media which, by devoting so much coverage to mass-murder incidents, actually help inspire copycats?

Is having “a truly respectful, decent, and humble dialogue” about race really that much more difficult than discussing other issues? If so, why? Isn’t the real reason that people are afraid of being “canceled” if they say the wrong thing? And why is that? Who has made it so risky to speak plainly about this issue? So what we need is not pious sermons from Harvard Law alumni, but instead someone courageous enough to say, “It’s OK if your opinion is unpopular. People shouldn’t be getting fired for disagreeing with liberals.” In fact, David French used to be engaged in such work, as an attorney for FIRE, but that was before he succumbed to Trump Derangement Syndrome. Now he’s just another liberal, an ally of the Thought Police who want to silence anyone who dissents from Officially Acceptable Opinion. The salt has lost its savour.

Being a conservative requires taking the unpopular side of arguments in which you know a majority of public opinion is on the other side. In a culture devoted to liberal notions of Progress, we know going into the fight that it will be unpopular to defend Tradition. Conservatives assert the value of “ordered liberty” in a society suffused with egalitarian sentiment. Surrounded by the decadent perversity of modernism, the conservative calls attention to ancient distinctions of Good and Evil. Of course this means that liberals hate us. We must learn not only to endure their hatred, but to embrace it as a badge of honor.

If you ever let yourself lose sight of this — if you ever start craving liberal approval — your value as a conservative is at an end. On what issue does David French, the Principled Conservative™, now disagree with Joe Biden? If there is any such issue, how does David French propose to influence the direction of public policy, given that his stance as a Principled Conservative™ can now be summarized as “Vote Democrat”?

Perhaps it is not necessary to further elaborate how #NeverTrump, with all their fine talk of “principles,” have in fact embraced an unconditional surrender to liberalism. It was not by my urging that Republican primary voters chose Donald Trump as their presidential nominee, but once the voters had made their choice, I felt bound to respect it, and thus counted myself among those in the “basket of deplorables.” Of course this put me on the side of certain “alt-right” types whose attitudes or opinions I don’t share, but what about 2012, when I was forced to stifle my complaints in order to support Mitt Romney? If I could bite my tongue and work with a bunch of open-borders country-club RINOs, why shouldn’t I be able to do the same with the “alt-right”? But more importantly, isn’t the existence of the “alt-right” a testimony to the failure of “mainstream” conservatives? What if National Review hadn’t purged Peter Brimelow and John O’Sullivan? What if the Bush administration hadn’t embraced a globalist agenda? What if conservatives had actually tried to conserve something?

We must live in reality, and not our fantasy of an ideal world. Of course, your ideal world may be a lot different than mine, but the point is that we are all forced to accommodate ourselves to realities that are beyond our control, including the historic consequences of events that transpired long before we were born. How different might the world be, for example, had it not been for the Bosnian assassin Gavrilo Princip?

Why do we live in a world where David French imagines that the rest of us stand ready to applaud his incessant virtue-signalling?

It’s hard even to begin to describe all the ramifications of 345 years of legalized oppression and 56 years of contentious change, but we can say two things at once — yes, we have made great strides (and we should acknowledge that fact and remember the men and women who made it possible), but the central and salient consideration of American racial politics shouldn’t center around pride in how far we’ve come, but in humble realization of how much farther we have to go.

You see how the liberal conception of Progress comes sneaking in, with this history of “great strides” toward the Heaven-on-Earth destination which, nevertheless, is still a long way off in the distance, perhaps as far away as Borrioboola-Gha, the missionary venture of “telescopic philanthropy” that consumed Mrs. Jellyby’s attention.

My belief is that we are not following a path of Progress at all, but are instead far gone down the road to decadence and anarchy. Frankly, I’m reminded of something Martin Luther King Jr. once said, that he feared black people were being “integrated” into a burning house.

If America is such a terribly racist country as David French would have us believe, then is the “beautiful little girl from Ethiopia” his family adopted actually better off here? Wouldn’t she be safer in Ethiopia, far away from all these racist Americans, including the 60% majority of voters in Tennessee who voted for Trump? Obviously, if racism is the worst thing in the world, and if Trump voters are all despicable racists — because this is what David French actually means by his pious sermon — then shouldn’t the French family get out of Tennessee and go someplace more liberal, where their Ethiopian daughter would be safer?

Well, there is such a place in America — a congressional district where Hillary Clinton got 74% of the vote, where liberals elected an African immigrant to represent them in Congress. Minnesota’s 5th District is a bastion of liberalism. It’s also where George Floyd got killed.

David French’s sermon about “how much farther we have to go” in dealing with “the most complicated and contentious issue in American life” is misguided in its fundamental premise that white racism, however it manifests itself, is the sole determining factor in the quality of life for black people — or anyone else, for that matter. This belief in the omnipotence of racism is part of a liberal mythology so self-evidently false that I struggle to imagine how any intelligent person could believe it. There were black millionaires in America long before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted. Harvard graduated its first black student in 1870, at a time when my own illiterate ancestors were farming the red clay hills of Alabama with mule-drawn plows. One can acknowledge the existence of racism without imagining that the mere existence of such prejudice has a debilitating effect that renders black people helpless.

But don’t let me interrupt your sermons about “legalized oppression,” Mrs. Jellyby, and good luck with your project in Borrioboola-Gha.


 

 

Category: Racism
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