The Other McCain

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

The Covington Boys Election

Posted on | November 5, 2019 | Comments Off on The Covington Boys Election

 

Kentucky’s Republican Gov. Matt Bevin faces a tough re-election contest today. Bevin is personally unpopular in the Bluegrass State, a problem exacerbated by a falling out with Lt. Gov. Jenean Hampton, and polls indicate a surprising tight race in a state that Trump won by a landslide in 2016. Liberals view Bevin’s problems as a harbinger of difficulties for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s re-election next year, but this may be one of those red-to-blue pipe dreams like when Democrats got all excited for Wendy Davis and Beto O’Rourke for statewide office in Texas.

At any rate, Trump held a rally Monday night in Lexington to rally support for Bevin ahead of today’s election, and hit hard on the cultural issues that define the Left-Right divide:

President Trump invoked the Covington Catholic High School incident and protests against Confederate statues Monday night in Kentucky as examples of his liberal opponents’ dangerous “authoritarian ideology.”
Speaking at a campaign rally in Lexington, Kentucky, Mr. Trump cited the infamous confrontation of the high school boys from Kentucky at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in January as proof of leftists’ values run amok.
“They want to indoctrinate your children [and] destroy anyone who holds traditional American values,” Mr. Trump said. “All you have to do is ask the boys from Covington, Catholic high school, some of whom are here tonight.”
Critics on the left accused the high school students of intolerance in a confrontation with a leftist activist and a black supremacist group at the Lincoln Memorial in January. An independent investigation found the students, some of whom were wearing “Make America Great” hats, were blameless in the encounter.
Mr. Trump said it was an example that “the far left wants to impose their authoritarian ideology on the nation, telling you what to think what to believe and how you should live.”
“They want to erase our traditions, our culture, our history and our heroes,” Mr. Trump said in an apparent reference to the movement to take down statues of prominent Confederates.
The president said the left won’t win.
“Kentucky will never be broken,” he said. “Kentucky can’t be broken — you’re too strong and you’re too smart.”

Remember how Trump stood by those kids in January:

 

You have to understand how the Covington Catholic School fiasco — where boys in MAGA hats were falsely accused of racism — plays out in the context of Kentucky’s demographics. It is a largely rural state where 88% of the population is white. The five largest counties in Kentucky are:

  1. Jefferson County (Louisville) ………………. 770,517
  2. Fayette County (Lexington) ………………… 323,780
  3. Kenton County (suburban Cincinnati) …. 166,051
  4. Boone County (suburban Cincinnati) …… 131,533
  5. Warren County (Bowling Green) …………. 131,264

If the anti-white/anti-Christian bias expressed in the Covington Catholic incident is on the minds of voter in Kenton and Boone counties and elsewhere in Kentucky today, that could help shift toward the Republican column many Trump voters who might not like Matt Bevin very much.


 

Category: Election, Kentucky

New ‘Terminator’ Flops at Box Office

Posted on | November 5, 2019 | 4 Comments

 

Hasta la vista, “wokeness”:

According to a new report, Skydance Media, Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox stand to lose around $120 million in total, given the long-term prospects of Terminator: Dark Fate bombing at the box office. The movie, directed by Tim Miller (Deadpool) and produced by franchise creator James Cameron, made just $29 million in its domestic debut, which was far below industry estimates, which had it taking in around $40 million. Even that number wasn’t great, but it gave Sarah Connor and the gang a fighting chance.
The biggest issue here is that the movie is said to have cost $185 million to produce, with each of the aforementioned companies putting up 30 percent of the budget. It’s also worth mentioning that figure doesn’t account for marketing, which estimates peg at $100 million.

Ace of Spades writes:

This might be the final wake-up alarm that alerts Hollywood to the notion of Get Woke, Go Broke. They’ve had ten alarms already, but they kept hitting snooze. This one will finally get their attention, I think.
It might also be the end of “dark marketing,” which is a term some give to the practice of trying to gin up controversy — and get #Woke movie reviewers and “journalists” to write clickbait articles in your favor — by choosing sides in the Civil War 2.0.

The plot of Terminator: Dark Fate seems to have been concocted by a committee of Gender Studies majors and DNC consultants. Director Tim Miller went out of his way to emphasize the “progressive” ideas symbolized by the character played by Mackenzie Davis:

Miller, who broke out in Hollywood after directing “Deadpool,” recently spoke with Variety ahead of bringing “Terminator: Dark Fate” to Comic-Con later this month. The filmmaker said Mackenzie’s cyborg character Grace will be enough to get misogynistic internet trolls shaking in their boots.
“If you’re at all enlightened, she’ll play like gangbusters. If you’re a closet misogynist, she’ll scare the f–k out of you, because she’s tough and strong but very feminine,” Miller said. “We did not trade certain gender traits for others; she’s just very strong, and that frightens some dudes. You can see online the responses to some of the early s–t that’s out there, trolls on the internet. I don’t give a f–k.”

So, this auteur tells us, the world is divided into “enlightened” people, on the one hand, and “misogynistic Internet trolls” on the other. Anyone who doesn’t want to pay $12.50 to be insulted by a two-hour cinematic Gender Studies lecture is therefore a misogynist. As I explained in July (“SJWs Ruin New ‘Terminator’ Sequel”), the reason hit movies become hits is because they usually follow classic formulas, expressing themes with a timeless appeal. The original 1984 Terminator was formulaic in that it was a damsel-in-distress story — the female lead threatened by sinister forces from which the hero must rescue her. Kyle Reese (played by Michael Biehn) the soldier sent back from the future to rescue Sarah from the Terminator, heroically sacrifices himself in the rescue attempt, leaving Sarah to finally escape on her own. And yet the whole point of this drama is that Sarah’s live is worth saving because she is destined to give birth to John Connor, the future hero who will lead the resistance against Skynet. So, in one sense, Sarah is analogous to the Virgin Mary, and the Terminator represents the persecution of Herod.

The idea of a woman who is most valuable as a potential mother is, of course, anathema to the kind of androgynous feminist ideology that Tim Miller sought to celebrate in Dark Fate, and the fact that this box-office bomb might lose more than $100 million for the studio ought to cause the money men in Hollywood to rethink their “woke” investments.


 

Category: Movies

Americans Murdered in Mexico

Posted on | November 5, 2019 | Comments Off on Americans Murdered in Mexico

Breaking news from the Salt Lake Tribune:

Three mothers and at least six children with Utah ties were killed Monday in Mexico, according to the victims’ families.
Three other children suffered bullet wounds, said Lafe Langford Jr., a relative of some of the victims. He said doctors from across the Mexican state of Sonora were coming to help, though they would prefer to fly the wounded and others to the United States.
“We can’t get a helicopter or any airplanes or airlifts,” Langford said, “and it’s going to be at least a six-hour journey to El Paso or Tucson.”
The crimes set off a wave of social media posts from the victims’ families expressing sorrow at the deaths and pleas for the return of those who had earlier been kidnapped.
Maria Rhonita Miller and four of her children died on a road in northern Mexico, according to Langford and social media posts.
The bodies of Dawna Ray Langford, 43, and Christina Marie Langford, 31, were found later Monday, Lafe Langford Jr. said.
The bodies of two of Dawna Ray Langford’s children, Trevor, 11, and Rogan, 3, also were recovered Monday. An earlier report said Christina Marie Langford’s baby daughter Faith Marie Johnson had died, too, but that turned out to be incorrect.
Social media posts from family of the victims said at least one of the children walked from the ambush site to the family home. Other children were found on the side of the road where the attackers abandoned them.
The families are from La Mora, about 70 miles south of Douglas, Ariz. They are a mix of people who worship with the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and polygamous offshoots. Lafe Langford Jr. said the killings happened near the town of Bavispe in the state of Sonora. The gunmen, Langford said, are believed to be members of a cartel from Chihuahua who encroached on another cartel’s territory.

Mexico has apparently descended into a condition of violent anarchy.


 

Category: Crime, Mexico

Democrats Are Brainwashing Children

Posted on | November 4, 2019 | Comments Off on Democrats Are Brainwashing Children

Students in public schools are not longer educated, they’re indoctrinated to become radical “social justice” activists. George Leef explains what has replaced actual education in California:

Across the Golden State, many schools have adopted an “ethnic studies” curriculum, the point of which is to indict capitalism, “whiteness,” and western civilization as forms of power, privilege, and oppression. Teachers revel in giving students assignments that are meant to turn them into social justice warriors. In this RealClearInvestigations article published in September, John Murawski provides examples of what students learn in their classes:

At Santa Monica High School, students organize and carry out “a systematized campaign” for social justice that can take the form of a protest, a leaflet, a workshop, play, or research project. They demonstrate their mastery of the subject matter by teaching about social justice to middle school students.
Students at Environmental Charter High School are assigned to write a ‘breakup letter with a form of oppression,’ such as toxic masculinity, heteronormativity, the Eurocentric curriculum, or the Dakota Access Pipeline. Students are asked to “persuade their audience of the dehumanizing and damaging effects of their chosen topic.”
Students at schools in Anaheim, San Jose, Oakland, and San Francisco are taught how to write a manifesto to school administrators listing “demands” for reforms.

Those “ethnic studies” classes are not about teaching facts about history. They’re about casting a certain mindset in students, one that will incline them to activism against Progressivism’s designated villains. Murawski quotes Professor Julia Jordan-Zachery of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who said, “I oftentimes think of ethnic studies as radical social action.” That’s exactly what leftist educators want.

Of course, any parent who objects to this is “RAAAAACIST!”

(Hat-tip: Gail Heriot at Instapundit.)


 

Category: Education, Racism

‘The Heresy of Equality’

Posted on | November 4, 2019 | 1 Comment

In 1970, Willmoore Kendall and George W. Carey published The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition, a careful attempt to distinguish our nation’s actual historic traditions from the mythical version of those traditions that had gained popular currency. In 1975, Professor Harry Jaffa published a critique of Kendall and Carey’s work with the title, “Equality as a Conservative Principle.” To this, Professor M.E. Bradford replied in 1976 with an essay, “The Heresy of Equality,” (included in Bradford’s 1979 book, A Better Guide Than Reason) which included this quote:

“Equality as a moral or political imperative, pursued as an end in itself — Equality, with the capital ‘E’ — is the antonym of every legitimate conservative principle.”

The grounds of that dispute between Kendall, Carey, Jaffa and Bradford we need not rehash here. In 2010, I found myself in the comments here explaining the problem with Jaffa, as a disciple of Leo Strauss, and his influence on the conservative movement:

Jaffa made his name as a Lincoln hagiographer, and has spent a half-century attempting to make Lincoln’s rhetoric the basis of a sort of conservatism. But as Kendall, Bradford and others pointed out, Jaffa’s arguments are ahistorical and serve to obscure, rather than reveal, the genuinely conservative nature of the American founding. This has also brought Jaffa into conflict with Robert Bork, among other conservative thinkers.
Let me cite just one example of the fundamental problem with Jaffa-ism: Jaffa has argued against gay rights. Yet if equality is, as Jaffa insists, a conservative principle, why shouldn’t this principle apply to homosexuals?
This is the kind of problem that Kendall and others foresaw, and Jaffa clearly did not: Equality is a ravening wolf (cf., Matthew 7:15) with a boundless appetite, and there is no telling what future use might be made of such a “principle,” which is most certainly not conservative.

Jaffa died in 2015, and the Claremont Institute, in which he was a towering figure, has since apparently purged some of his writings against gay rights from its website, but the problem persists of the confusion caused by “Equality as a Conservative Principle.” And what Bradford called the heretical nature of Equality — with a capital “E” — has affected our society in many harmful ways. Red Pill philosopher Rollo Tomassi, speaking of how some men try to use egalitarian approach to male-female relationships, calls equality “a deliberate lie with the hoped-for purpose of empowering people who cannot compete, or believe they have some plenary exclusion from competing in various aspects of life. . . . There is no such thing as ‘equality’ because life doesn’t happen in a vacuum.”

The point Rollo makes is important: People do not embrace an intellectual abstraction like “equality” because it is self-evidently true, but rather because, as he says, they fear that they are somehow disadvantaged in the competition of life. Thus, whatever advantages are enjoyed by the winners in the competition are condemned as unfair — a violation of equality — and from this emerges a politics of envy called “social justice.” We see this, for example, in demands for “free” health care and “free” college tuition. Because more affluent people can afford to pay cash to send their kids to Harvard, according to this egalitarian “social justice” mentality, it is unfair that less fortunate people are effectively excluded from elite schools or, if they can gain admission to Harvard, must borrow money to attend. But if college tuition is to be “free,” why not a new car? Some people can afford new Cadillacs, while other people are forced to settle for used Nissans. (Don’t tell me that quality transportation is less important than quality education, or I might get triggered — that’s a micro-aggression against old Nissan drivers.)

What we see is that Equality with a capital “E” has attained such influence in our way of thinking that, as Rollo points out, even our romantic relationships are distorted by this concept. Many people believe they are abused or exploited in relationships, simply because their partners fail to fulfill their expectations of “equality.” They believe they are entitled to a 50-50 compromise on every disagreement, or that their partner is obligated to reciprocate their efforts in a certain way — “I bought her a steak dinner, she should have sex with me” — and become disgruntled if their expectations are not met: “It’s not fair!”

Expectations of “equality” cause us to forfeit happiness by dwelling on situations that seem to us unfair. Rather than to be grateful for what we’ve got — we can afford to pay the electric bill this month — “equality” incites us to envy those who have more, and to resent people who have done us no harm, simply because they fail to meet our expectations.


 

Category: Culture

Rule 5 Sunday: Sean Young

Posted on | November 4, 2019 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

We’re now in November of 2019, which is when the movie Blade Runner is supposed to take place, and there’s been a lot of discussion online about the resemblances between Los Angeles in the movie and Los Angeles in real life. Our concern, however, is with the ladies of that movie, and particularly Sean Young, who played the cute cyborg Rachel. Unfortunately for our purposes, Rachel is quite conservatively dressed in that movie, so I had to pull this pic from Ace Ventura, Pet Detective.

This doesn’t look like a transsexual to me.

Ninety Miles From Tyranny tees up with Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #790, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns. At Animal Magnetism, it’s Rule Five Income Inequality Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL brings us Lucy Fry, Baseball’s Banned Boob Flashers, Katie Hill, Naomi Watts, Michelle Phillips, Halloween, Noomi Rapace, LA November 2019, Barbara Pepper, and Allison Paige.

A View From The Beach serves up A Late Halloween Treat – Deborah Ann Woll, The Great Spotted Lantern Fly Massacre, Of Course We Should Offer Her Asylum, Trick, or Treat?, Tanlines for Thursday, Water Bottles or Wet Shirts for Wednesday?, “Born For This”, Maryland Gets a New Record Fish, Try (Just a Little Bit Harder), She Will Be Missed, Bottles, Bags, and Straws Banned and The Night That the Lights Went Out in California.

Proof Positive’s Vintage Babe this week is Cassandra Peterson, better known as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. Yitzakhon, a/k/a Red Pill Jew, has Women With Drinks.

Thanks to everyone for the luscious linkagery!


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Category: Rule 5

The Myth of Social-Media ‘Meddling’

Posted on | November 3, 2019 | 1 Comment

In the most recent Canadian election, a lot of media coverage was devoted to hyping fears of “foreign interference” on social media. Researchers found that this didn’t really happen:

Now that the election is over and researchers have combed through the data collected, their conclusion is clear: there was more talk about foreign trolls during the campaign than there was evidence of their activities.
Although there were a few confirmed cases of attempts to deceive Canadians online, three large research teams devoted to detecting co-ordinated influence campaigns on social media report they found little to worry about.
In fact, there were more news reports about malicious activity during the campaign than traces of it.
“We didn’t see high levels of effective disinformation campaigns. We didn’t see evidence of effective bot networks in any of the major platforms. Yet, we saw a lot of coverage of these things,” said Derek Ruths, a professor of computer science at McGill University in Montreal.
He monitored social media for foreign meddling during the campaign and, as part of the Digital Democracy Project, scoured the web for signs of disinformation campaigns.
“The vast majority of news stories about disinformation overstated the results and represented them as far more conclusive than they were. It was the case everywhere, with all media,” he said.
It’s a view mirrored by the Ryerson Social Media Lab, which also monitored social media during the campaign.
“Fears of foreign and domestic interference were overblown,” Philip Mai, co-director of the Social Media Lab, told CBC News.

Gosh, it’s like “Russian collusion” was a hoax or something.


 

Category: Canada

NBC: The Rape Network

Posted on | November 3, 2019 | Comments Off on NBC: The Rape Network

Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!

Certainly by now it’s clear that Me Too has not gone too far in canceling powerful men. Harvey Weinstein is popping up at industry networking events in New York City. Louis C.K. just announced tour dates.
Perhaps the most glaring sign that the boys’ club is still alive — and somewhat well — is flashing at NBC News. At its 30 Rock headquarters, NBC News President Noah Oppenheim and his boss NBC News Chairman Andy Lack are still running the show.
They remain at the helm despite the explosive reporting in Ronan Farrow’s new book “Catch and Kill,” which reveals how Oppenheim and Lack not only shut down the investigation into Harvey Weinstein’s predatory and abusive treatment of women, but how NBC News silenced or ignored multiple allegations of sexual misconduct inside the company ? including overlooking the behavior of “Today” show host Matt Lauer for years before finally firing him in 2017.
What Farrow’s book, and other reporting, shows is a news outlet more concerned with protecting powerful men than reporting the truth ? or protecting its employees from sexual predation. The tactics the company used to silence women — Farrow reports on nondisclosure agreements used to keep women silent — were not unlike the ones employed by Weinstein himself, or so many other sexual harassers.
However, there are some recent signs that those methods are failing the news outlet: On Wednesday, 150 staffers at NBC News’ digital arm announced plans to unionize, in part because they wanted more transparency over how sexual misconduct is handled at the company.
“Recent weeks have highlighted serious questions as to how NBC News has handled incidents of sexual misconduct in the workplace as well as the opaque processes and procedures for reporting on and exposing powerful predators,” said the announcement from the organizing workers.

Normally, as a matter of principle, I believe in due process of law — “innocent until proven guilty” — but if the feminist #MeToo movement is going to destroy powerful institutions of the liberal media establishment, I’m willing to waive my principles: #BelieveWomen!

(Via Memeorandum.)


 

Category: Uncategorized
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