UPDATE 10:40 p.m. ET: With 100% of precincts reporting:
Andy Beshear (Dem) ……. 711,955 …… 49.2%
Matthew Bevin (GOP) ….. 707,297 …… 48.8%
John Hicks (Lib) …………… 28,307 …….. 2.0%
I asked earlier, and there is apparently no runoff provision for elections in Kentucky. WHAS-TV reports the latest:
In a hotly contested race for Kentucky governor, Democratic challenger Andy Beshear is claiming victory while current Governor Matt Bevin refuses to concede.
The race has been too close to call for the Associated Press.
Before making a speech to his supporters, the attorney general tweeted “Thank you Kentucky.”
“After tonight, we move forward with every citizen in Kentucky,” Beshear said to thunderous applause.
He says he is committed to every citizen of the Commonwealth regardless of whether they’re Democrat or Republican.
“I will work hard to earn your trust,” Beshear said.
Beshear was joined by his family and his father, former Governor Steve Beshear.
With 100 percent of precincts reporting, Beshear has a lead of 4,658 votes out of more than 1.4 million counted, or a margin of 0.3 percentage points.
“This is a close, close race, we are not conceding by any stretch. Not a chance,” Bevin told his supporters at the Galt House. . . .
There is no mandatory recount law in Kentucky. Bevin may request counties recanvass their results, which is not a recount, but rather a check of the vote count to ensure the results were added correctly.
Bevin would need to seek and win a court’s approval for a recount, the process for which would be dictated by the court.
9:05 p.m. ET: With about 97% of precincts reporting the Kentucky governor’s race, these are the numbers:
Andy Beshear (Dem) ……. 687,014 …… 49.4%
Matthew Bevin (GOP) ….. 676,677 …… 48.6%
John Hicks (Lib) …………… 27,448 …….. 2.0%
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:
Jefferson County (Louisville) ………………. 770,517
Fayette County (Lexington) ………………… 323,780
Kenton County (suburban Cincinnati) …. 166,051
Boone County (suburban Cincinnati) …… 131,533
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!”
“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.
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.
