FMJRA 2.0: Mother Of Pearl

In his third book, The Rational Male: Positive Masculinity, Rollo Tomassi observes that women are prone to solipsistic thinking, making their own feelings the measure of everything, a self-referential point of view that makes objectivity impossible. Of course, many men are also inclined toward solipsism, but in our feminine-primary social order (to employ Rollo’s phrase), only male behavior is considered a proper object of criticism, whereas we are generally forbidden to criticize women. Therefore, the selfish attitudes and emotionalism of women is never noted — at least not by academics or journalists in any “respectable” forum — and these tendencies are indulged, encouraged and even celebrated. In our society, women’s desires are treated as entitlements, so that to deny her what she wants is an infringement of her “rights.” Women are considered to be so morally superior that they are incapable of lying (#BelieveAllWomen) and a woman’s anger is always legitimate.

This is the Red Pill perspective on contemporary culture, and you are free to argue with Rollo — don’t bother arguing with me, as I am merely the messenger — but my point in raising this topic involves the feminist reaction to the recent enactment of laws restricting abortion in several states, particularly Georgia and Alabama. Professor Donald Douglas calls attention to Rebecca Traister, feminist author of Good and Mad:
The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger.

Once again, I was mad on television. I am also available for weddings and bat mitzvahs. I’m really the life of the party, I think you’ll find https://t.co/2hD24kcH10

— Rebecca Traister (@rtraister) May 16, 2019

I wrote about abortion and rage. https://t.co/Al4VQ0Rz8o

— Rebecca Traister (@rtraister) May 17, 2019

Okay that’s it. I’m going to take my clenched fist, hard heart and spewing hate and use them to bake 48 chocolate cupcakes for my father in law’s 90th birthday.

— Rebecca Traister (@rtraister) May 18, 2019

Keep in mind, even the draconian law in Alabama only applies to Alabama, a conservative state with a population of about 4.9 million, which is about 1.5% of the U.S. population of 328.9 million. In other words, 98.5% of American women are unaffected by Alabama’s abortion law and, if a woman in Alabama wants an abortion, she can go to another state and obtain one. Rebecca Traister doesn’t live in Alabama and yet, believing abortion to be a fundamental right (because anything a woman wants is a “right”) she has worked herself into a towering rage over a law that doesn’t affect her or any of her liberal friends in New York. Speaking of places where Rebecca Traister doesn’t live, did you know abortion is completely illegal in El Salvador, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic? Also, with the exception of where necessary to prevent maternal death, abortion is illegal in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Guatemala, Honduras, and many other countries.

Now, I suppose since Ms. Traister cares so doggone much about abortion rights, she’ll soon be venting her rage at leaders of all those countries. But of course she won’t, because what she wants is to continue the relentless slaughter of American babies. She hates Americans so much, she wants all American babies to be aborted, and she especially hates babies in Alabama, because a lot of Christians and Republicans live there.

You might say I’m unfairly exaggerating Ms. Traister’s enthusiasm for abortion, but what else can explain her rage? The U.S. abortion rate has been declining for several years, partly because of more effective contraceptives (e.g., the so-called “morning after” pill). While I don’t know the total number of abortions performed in Alabama last year, I don’t think it’s a particularly large number, and so it is unlikely that many women in Alabama will be inconvenienced by this new law.

Maybe you should read Rollo Tomassi’s books. Just sayin’ . . .

Category: Abortion, Sex Trouble

The Internet Is Making You Crazy

Posted on | May 18, 2019 | 1 Comment

One way to drive yourself crazy is to become obsessed with a problem that is too large, or too distant, for you to influence the outcome — famine in Africa, global warming, “white supremacy,” etc. This is what Jordan Peterson’s “clean your room” advice to young people is about, correcting the “activist” mentality that plagues modern youth:

“Don’t be fixing up the economy, 18-year-olds. You don’t know anything about the economy. It’s a massive complex machine beyond anyone’s understanding and you mess with at your peril. So can you even clean up your own room? No. Well you think about that. You should think about that, because if you can’t even clean up your own room, who the hell are you to give advice to the world?”

Teaching young people to be like Mrs. Jellyby was always a bad idea, and it has been exacerbated by social media, where hashtags become a substitute for rational argument, and kids think they’re changing the world by re-tweeting a liberal celebrity’s message. Those of us who were adults before the Internet existed — I’m 59 — have difficulty understanding how the social-media environment has reshaped the minds of young people, who cannot remember a world before Twitter, Instagram, Tinder, Tumblr and Pornhub. Speaking of which . . .

Pornhub said [May 2] it is “extremely interested” in buying Tumblr, a blogging platform once notorious for the pornography it fostered before it banned adult content last year.
“We’ve long been dismayed that such measures were taken to eradicate erotic communities on the platform, leaving many individuals without an asylum through which they could comfortably peruse adult content,” Corey Price, vice president at Pornhub, said in a statement.
The statement follows Wall Street Journal reports that Verizon is looking to offload Tumblr after failing to meet revenue targets. Verizon wound up with Tumblr as part of its acquisition of Yahoo in 2017. Yahoo bought the then-fast-growing blogging platform for $1.1 billion in cash back in 2013.

As I have previously noted, Tumblr is “effectively worthless.” Once hailed as an innovative platform, the site was wrecked by a social-justice warrior (SJW) mentality that disdained advertising revenue, and its blogging-for-dumb-people system where users could create the appearance of engagement merely by “reblogging” other people’s content. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s billion-dollar purchase of Tumblr was one of the biggest blunders in Silicon Valley history, and the fact that Pornhub might end up owning Tumblr is deeply ironic, considering that Tumblr also hosts some of the most strident radical feminists online.

Tumblr has so many problems, it’s impossible to describe them all. In 2013, nearly half of Tumblr’s users were age 16-24, and that youth vibe was why the site was considered a hot commodity. But much of that audience has been lost to other sites — primarily Twitter and Instagram — and Tumblr’s problems intensified last November after they got hit with accusations of hosting child pornography. Because the site didn’t have enough staff to properly monitor content, Tumblr announced a ban that effectively prohibited all nudity on the site, using some kind of software that flagged as “inappropriate” content that was not even remotely pornographic. The Internet reacted harshly: “Tumblr banning porn is like KFC banning chicken.” The site started shedding users rapidly, and by March, had lost nearly a third of its traffic.

You might think the Tumblr implosion would make other social-media firms think about the downside risk, but Facebook and Twitter continue stumbling forward as if their monopolistic hegemony were secure. However, Professor Glenn Reynolds is sounding the alarm:

Right now, it almost seems as if the social media world was designed to spread viruses of the mind. And that’s probably because it was. While in the earlier days of the internet, ideas spread faster than before, today in the walled gardens of social media outlets like Facebook, Instagram, or especially Twitter, ideas spread much, much faster, and with less time for rumination or consideration, than ever before. And that’s by design, as social media companies use algorithms that promote posts based on ‘engagement’ — which typically means users’ emotional reactions — and ‘share’ buttons allow each user to pass them on to hundreds or thousands of friends, who can then do the same. This repeated sharing and resharing can produce a chain reaction reminiscent of a nuclear reactor with the control rods removed. . . .

Read the whole thing. It’s an excerpt from Professor Reynolds’s forthcoming book, The Social Media Upheaval.

Category: How This Here Internet Thingy Works

Stupid Is as Stupid Does

Posted on | May 17, 2019 | 1 Comment

It’s possible for me to go many months at a time without remembering that Charles Johnson still exists. Diary of Daedalus called attention to Charles claiming he’d gotten a thousand hateful mentions after his endorsement of Alyssa Milano’s idiotic #SexStrike idea, but good luck finding evidence of these allegedly myriad mentions. Also, his claim that conservatives are “foaming at the mouth” is fictitious; point-and-laugh is far more accurate as a description of the reaction.

Who cares if a menopausal actress denies sex to her liberal husband? For that matter, who wants to have sex with a liberal woman? Ms. Milano’s #SexStrike, even if it were universally pursued by Democrat women, would only impose a hardship on men who vote Democrat anyway, while Republican men continue having sex with their pro-life wives. So if you’re a guy in a blue state like California or Massachusetts, maybe you’d suffer a nookie shortage, but the guys in Alabama and Oklahoma will be happily banging away. Who’s “foaming at the mouth” here?

Also, when was the last time a woman — any woman, amateur or professional — had sex with Charles Johnson? He has never reproduced, and he’s now 66 years old, so it looks like he’s a Darwinian dead end. Reproductive failure is common among liberals, because #science or something. Like a three-toed sloth in the La Brea Tar Pits, CJ is doomed to extinction, and no one will miss him when he’s gone.

Category: Charles Johnson

In The Mailbox: 05.17.19

Posted on | May 17, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Remember, deadline to submit links for the FMJRA is noon tomorrow; links for Rule 5 Sunday are due by midnight. All times Pacific.

OVER THE TRANSOM
Tacky Raccoons: A Humble Request
EBL: I.M. Pei & Herman Wouk, RIP
Twitchy: Occasional Cortex On Brink Of Full-Blown Psychotic Break With This Unhinged Anti-GOP Rant
Louder With Crowder: Thanks, Leftists, For Admitting You Think Abortion Is A Form of Contraception
According To Hoyt: It’s Not A Magic Spell
Vox Popoli: It WAS Treason, also, Not A Man Of The Right

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – Time To Bend Over & Get Socialism Edition
American Greatness: Democrats Rally Around Their Anti-Semites
American Thinker: Death Always Follows Democrat Policies
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five “Liar Or Incompetent?” News
Babalu Blog: Jeff Bezos’ Cuban-American Dad Celebrates Escaping Socialist Cuba To Live The American Dream
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For May 17
Da Tech Guy: Under The Fedora Facts
Don Surber: Trump – Justice Is Coming
Dustbury: I Might Not Give The Answer That You Want Me To
The Geller Report: Rep. Omar Complains Trump Is Droning Somalia Jihadis To Death, also, Austria Approves Ban On Headscarves For Girls In Primary School
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, Laws Are For The Little People
Hollywood In Toto: You’ll Wince, Laugh, And Cheer For John Wick: Chapter 3
Joe For America: KISS’ Gene Simmons Emotionally Addresses The Pentagon
JustOneMinute: Bill DeBlasio To The Rescue!
Legal Insurrection: Tom Steyer Tells Dems They Shouldn’t Have Waited On Mueller To Impeach Trump, also, UK Police Complain Proposed Islamophobia Definition Would Undermine Counter-Terror Operations
The PanAm Post: It’s Time To Give Puerto Rico Its Independence, also, Liberation Of Drug Trafficking FARC Leader Causes Outcry In Colombia
Power Line: Relearning The Lessons Of The Past, also, Thoughts From The Ammo Line
Shot In The Dark: When Satire & The News Run Neck & Neck
The Political Hat: Firing Line Friday – The Irish Problem
This Ain’t Hell: Valor Friday, also, Just Gobsmacked
Victory Girls: The Hard Left Doesn’t Want Biden
Volokh Conspiracy: Colorado Court Seals File In Highlands Ranch School Shooting Case
Weasel Zippers: George Papadopolous Says Italy’s Giving Up John Brennan’s Involvement, also, Illegal Alien, Suspected Serial Killer Charged In Murders Of Twelve Elderly Texas Women
Mark Steyn: Failing Upwards

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Category: Linkagery

Guys, Never Do This

Posted on | May 17, 2019 | 1 Comment

Are you a parent? Do you have a teenage son? Have you talked to him about how to deal with girls? Because if boys are not properly instructed, they will turn out to be pathetic losers, like Tyler:

Who does this? Set aside, for the moment, the fact that the guy knew he was hitting on a lesbian. Who thinks that obscene text messages are an appropriate way to propose a hook-up? Even beyond that, why are you messaging the girl at all? How is Tyler a “friend” to Emily?

She is not your friend, Tyler.

This is where popular culture misleads people with romantic scripts that never work in real life. There are all sorts of ensemble-cast TV comedies about groups of 20-something friends in which the luckless guy and the quirky girl strike up a romance that begins as friendship. And so Tyler imagines that his “friend” Emily Greberman, despite her avowed lesbianism, might be secretly harboring a crush on him, or something.

She is not your friend, Tyler.

And you were never her friend, either. You were apparently hovering around Emily — the Beta orbiter — in the misguided belief that “lesbian” is a synonym for “just needs to meet the right guy.” No, sir, Tyler. Any intelligent person (a category that doesn’t include you) could have looked at Emily’s Instagram page and seen she has no heterosexual potential.

Here’s an idea I wish to share with young men, and adults who may be in a position to counsel young men: Don’t waste time on cold prospects.

Time is a young person’s most precious resource, which they are apt to squander foolishly. From the time a boy is about 15, he is on a mission to find The One, and it behooves him to learn to be opportunistic and resourceful in pursuit of that goal. Some guys are lucky, born with natural advantages in the competition, and I have in the past referred to this as the 1-in-7 rule. About 15% of guys are just natural-born Alpha males, and never have any problem finding female companionship. Such guys are generally athletic and gregarious and, while they might make errors and misjudgments in their pursuit of The One, they will never be lonely.

The 1-in-7 are winners by nature, and everything written to advise guys on how to be successful with girls — all pickup artist (PUA) “game” theory — is for the benefit of the other 85% of guys. The natural-born Alphas don’t need “game.” They can play badly and still win. Maybe that explains Tyler’s clumsiness. Maybe he’s a jock who is accustomed to being able to score more or less effortlessly (“a little up front . . . never been one to hold back”) and therefore imagines that every girl he meets is interested in him. But if that were the case, why did Tyler resort to hitting on a known lesbian? If he’s really a winner, Tyler would already have all the action he can handle and wouldn’t even think about bothering his “friend” Emily.

Tempus fugits, young man. Don’t waste time.

There is a term in PUA lexicon called “push-pull”:

For example, when you call a girl for the first time, and you don’t ask her out, and you get off the phone first, you are practicing push-pull. She is receiving mixed messages: “He seems to like me, he seems to enjoy my company, but he didn’t ask me out. Why didn’t he ask me out?” Or when you invite a girl to a group activity: on one hand, you’re asking her out, but on the other it doesn’t feel like a date, so she doesn’t know where she stands.

What this is about, really, is putting the ball in her court. It’s like what I call “stick-and-move,” a way to work a group gathering. Rather than to target one girl and go bulldozing in, you circulate the room, making introductions, a bit of small talk, and then move on. You’re a busy guy and there are lots of fish in the sea, so you don’t waste the entire night targeting one girl as if you’ve got no other prospects. This is what I call rifle-vs.-shotgun. Some guys make the mistake of aiming directly at one girl they want to get (the rifle approach), rather than playing more generally for any girl that might be interested (the shotgun approach). Girls can’t stand a guy who seems desperate, and if you crowd a girl into a corner at a party and try to monopolize her time (which is where the rifle approach leads), you’re signaling desperation. Using stick-and-move and push-pull, what you’re doing is allowing her to feel a sense of personal agency — she is actively choosing you, rather than having her choices foreclosed by the unwelcome intrusion of a needy loser.

None of this works, however, if you can’t read signals. What does attraction look like? How does a girl signal interest in a guy? How do you know whether she welcomes your advances? You can’t learn this stuff if you’re not observant, and you can’t observe female behavior patterns by sitting in your room playing Call of Duty every night, which is why so many young guys are utterly hopeless with girls nowadays. Isolation not only means you’re missing out on potential opportunities to meet girls, it also leads to a loss of social skills and — let’s face it, loser — if you had good social skills to begin with, you wouldn’t be alone in your room, so you’re degrading from a level that’s already substandard. That’s how you end up in Elliot Rodger “incel” territory. Not a good place to be.

Emily Greberman is a sophomore at Drexel University, where the annual cost of attendance is $65,892 including room and board. It seems safe to assume that Tyler is one of her classmates and so the question is, why is this guy who can afford to attend Drexel so desperate that he’s making rude overtures to a lesbian? Like, you’re a young guy from an upper-middle class background with a promising future, and you’ve got nothing better to do with your time? While we’re at it:

NEVER SAY RUDE STUFF IN A TEXT MESSAGE!

Years ago, when the Anthony Weiner scandal happened, I read my teenage sons the Riot Act on this subject. Don’t ever say anything in a text message (or email or DM) that you wouldn’t want to see published on the front page of the New York Times. Guys who think “sexting” is fun are creating trouble for themselves. Especially if you’re sending or soliciting nude photos from people, you need to stop, step back and think. Digital communications create a permanent record, and yet some guys will say stuff to girls in an online format that they would never say to her face — as if she’s never going to show this to anyone else? Fool!

This goes for girls, too, by the way. No girl should ever believe she can send nudes to a guy and he’s not going to show that to his buddies. Young people, male and female alike, are living in a very dangerous age, thanks to advances in communications technology. Parents are being negligent if they do not warn their kids about these dangers.

Look at what happened to Tyler. We don’t know his last name, but I’ll bet money that every one of Emily Greberman’s friends knows who he is, and he is now “cancelled,” as the kids say. Tyler’s reputation has been permanently damaged by his stupid text message to Emily.

She is not your friend, Tyler. She was never your friend.

If Emily were your friend, as soon as you started in on that pursuit, she would have stopped texting and called you on the phone, to explain how stupid your behavior was. Friends don’t let friends be ignorant, you see, and Tyler obviously needs to be properly educated. Exactly how someone so ignorant got into Drexel, I can’t imagine, but if Tyler had any real friends, they wouldn’t let him remain so ignorant. So now that he’s been “put on blast,” as the kids say, Tyler probably thinks he’s being unfairly victimized, but he is actually just a victim of his own ignorance.

Well, that’s 1,300 words of education, and there’s no point belaboring it endlessly. The bottom line is, guys have to get smart, or they’re going to pay the price for their stupidity. Selah.

Category: Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 05.16.19

Posted on | May 16, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Tim Conway, RIP
Twitchy: Jim Acosta Shredded For Deliberately Misquoting & Spinning Trump’s Remarks About Asylum Seekers
Louder With Crowder: Ted Cruz Exposes Twitter’s Conservative Bias With Just One Tweet

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Actions Have Consequences, also, James Charles & Bursting The Gay Bubble
American Greatness: A Full Presidential Pardon, also, The FISA Footnote That Could Doom Collusion Hoaxsters
American Power: Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming
American Thinker: No Wonder The Post Hid Obama’s Red Mentor
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Random Notes News
Babalu Blog: Charlie Crist’s “Secret” Trip To Chum Around With The Castros Finally Exposed, also, How The Castro Dictatorship Strangled Democracy In Veezuela
BattleSwarm: The Man Nobody Wants Running For President Is Running For President
CDR Salamander: Diversity Thursday
Da Tech Guy: Mother Angelica Strikes In Alabama, also, Microsoft Introduces The First Newspeak-compliant Word Processor
Don Surber: J. Edgar Comey Tried To Blackmail Trump
Dustbury: Let’s Rob Someone With No Money
The Geller Report: Rep. Ilhan Omar Target Of Immigration Fraud Lawsuit, also, Geraldo Rivera Defends Rep. Tlaib, Claims She’s Being Taken Out Of Context
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, Beresheet Impact Site
Hollywood In Toto: Powerful New Tool Lets Conservative Artists Shine
Joe For America: Brian Sims’ Office & Social Media Go Dark As He Hides From Backlash Of Harassing Constituents
JustOneMinute: All In Good Fun
Legal Insurrection: College Student Shocked At Being Arrested For Stealing Pro-Life Sign, also, Who’s Going To Cut A Deal First In Spygate?
The PanAm Post: Did Venezuela’s Relationship With Hezbollah Prompt US Suspension Of Flights?
Power Line: Straight Talk About Red China & Corporate America, also, The Infantile, Superficial Left
Shot In The Dark: What if You Declared A “Sex Strike” And Nobo…Er, Let Me Try That Again
The Political Hat: Gender Pronouns – Policy, Lawsuits, & Neutered
This Ain’t Hell: Top IN Department Of Veterans Affairs Staffs Resign After Scandal, also, Get The Ginsu Missile!
Victory Girls: Abortion Stories That Will Make Your Head Hurt
Volokh Conspiracy: The Crazy Verdicts Against Bayer/Monsanto In The Roundup Litigation
Weasel Zippers: Occasional Cortex Caught Lying About AL Abortion Law, also, Reporter Asks AL Gov About Money For Childre
Megan McArdle: SCOTUS Should Never Have Intervened On Abortion
Mark Steyn: Universal Exports Is Hiring

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Category: Linkagery

Elizabeth Warren Is Over

Posted on | May 16, 2019 | Comments Off on Elizabeth Warren Is Over

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign is doomed. Anyone can look at the Real Clear Politics average of national polls and see that Warren — currently in third place, with an 8.3% average — is flat-lining. Although two recent polls (Quinnipiac in April and Emerson last week) show her in double digits, the Emerson poll shows her tied for third with California Sen. Kamala Harris. It is obvious that Warren and Harris are vying for the “Not a Man 2020” vote, to use feminist Jessica Valenti’s phrase. Warren is essentially a female Bernie Sanders, combining socialist economics with an identity-politics appeal to her fellow vagina-owners, and this will predictably fail. Why? First, because nearly every second- and third-tier candidate in the Democratic primary campaign is running to the Left, trying to compete for the Bernie vote, and second, because many of those candidates are also women. When the first Democrat debates happen next month, there will likely be six women — Warren, Harris, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and author Marianne Williamson — among the 20 candidates on stage for the two-night debates. This will dilute the “Not a Man 2020” advantage for Warren, who benefits from having more name-recognition. My guess would be that, after the first round of debates, Warren will fade and Harris will rise, because Harris is black and is obviously better qualified than the other black candidate, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker. Such is the logic of identity politics, in which Democrats are heavily invested.

By the way, don’t discount Williamson’s potential impact. Everybody thought I was crazy when I went down to South Carolina to cover her campaign in March — I was the only reporter covering her on that trip — but she is now making headlines regularly. As I noted last week, she’s hit the 65,000-donor threshold needed to qualify for the DNC debates. That landed Williamson an eight-minute appearance on MSNBC Sunday, and she also scored an interview with The Hill, with the headline, “Don’t tell Marianne Williamson she can’t win,” which got linked by Drudge. And, meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren is dissing Fox News:

This tantrum is both counter-factual and self-destructive. Warren’s screed reads like it was written by an SPLC staffer.

Your ears must be tuned to a very high dog-whistle frequency to believe Fox News is “a mix of bigotry, racism, and outright lies” and “profits from racism and hate.” If any Democrats are reading this, trust me — it’s possible to click your remote and watch an hour or two of Fox News without becoming a Nazi, just like I can watch a few hours of CNN without becoming gay. The self-destructive aspect of Warren’s anti-Fox stance is obvious to Meagan Day of the left-wing magazine Jacobin:

When Sanders participated in the network’s town hall event, I explained why that was a good idea. Fox News is the most-watched cable news network in the country, and its viewers have the lowest average income of any major news network or outlet. Sanders’s campaign is centered around demands for ambitious redistributive reforms that will directly and materially improve life for all working-class people — some of whom, unfortunately, watch Fox News and currently vote for Republicans.

Obviously, I disagree with Day about whether the “reforms” advocated by Democrats will “materially improve life” for the working class, but her point about the Fox News audience deserves consideration:

Fox’s audience has one of the lowest average incomes of any major news source. Seventy-seven percent of Fox viewers make less than $75,000 a year, compared to 62 percent for the New York Times and 57 percent for NPR. A third of Fox News viewers make less than $30,000 a year. More than half are over the age of 50 and a quarter are over 65, which means a good number are subsisting primarily on Social Security.
Since Fox is the most-watched cable news network in the country, we can surmise that millions of its viewers are facing exactly the issues addressed in Sanders’ platform — like pension cuts, medical debt, job insecurity, and unaffordable housing and eldercare.

Most Democrats don’t understand why lower-income voters — the “deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton called them — are watching Fox News. The fact is quite simple: Small-town and rural voters are the heart of the Republican grassroots, while Democrats appeal to wealthy urban elites.

You have to spend some time digging around in Census data and exit polls to understand this, and Elizabeth Warren, the former Harvard professor, is so out-of-touch she can’t fathom it. You don’t have to be rich to live a happy life in small-town America. It is only in the big metro areas, where only the wealthy can afford housing prices in good neighborhoods, that an income under $75,000 dooms you to living in squalor. Earlier this month, I visited a friend in Valdosta, Georgia, where the median household income is $31,701. If a married couple earned $75,000 between them, they’d be more than twice the median household income there — “rich” folks, by local standards. The quality-of-life advantages of small-town living are best understood by looking at real-estate prices. The median value of a single-family home in Valdosta is $116,000; by contrast, in the affluent Boston suburb of Brookline, the median home value is $829,300. Only the rich can afford to buy a house in a place like Brookline, whereas the working class have no problems finding affordable homes in Valdosta. There is more actual equality in rural South Georgia than in the posh Boston suburbs, and guess what? The population of Valdosta is 51% black, whereas the population of Brookline is only 3.3% black. Who are the real “racists,” the rural Georgians or Elizabeth Warren’s liberal voters in Brookline?

Elizabeth Warren will not win the Democratic nomination, but even if she did somehow emerge as the winner in the “clown car” primary, she would be certain to lose to Trump in November 2020. Even though Trump is a billionaire from New York, he still relates better to working-class voters than does the Harvard Law professor Warren. Right now, Joe Biden is riding atop the Democrat poll numbers and, while I don’t expect Biden to go the distance, the question is which of the other Democrats might beat him in the primaries. Bet money it won’t be Warren.

UPDATE: Although Warren is third in the national RCP poll average, she fares worse when we look at polls for the early caucus and primary states. In Iowa, she’s in fifth place, behind Biden, Sanders, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and Harris. In New Hampshire, she’s fourth behind Biden, Sanders and Buttigieg. In Nevada, she’s fourth behind Biden, Sanders and Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke. In South Carolina, she’s in fourth, behind Biden, Sanders, Harris and Booker. In other words, despite having high national name recognition, Warren doesn’t appear likely to do better than fourth place in any of the early states, and therefore doesn’t appear to have a path to the nomination.

We are still nearly nine months away from the first votes (the Iowa caucus is Feb. 3), and a lot can change in that time, but does it seem likely that Warren’s candidacy will grow stronger between now and then? No. She’s doomed. She’s “pining for the fjords.”

Category: Election, Elizabeth Warren

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FMJRA 2.0: Mother Of Pearl

Solipsism and Feminist Rage Syndrome

The Internet Is Making You Crazy

Stupid Is as Stupid Does

In The Mailbox: 05.17.19

Guys, Never Do This

In The Mailbox: 05.16.19

Elizabeth Warren Is Over

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