In The Mailbox: 03.15.19

Posted on | March 16, 2019 | 2 Comments

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: What Happens When Students are Better At Cybersecurity Than The Administrators?
EBL: Beware The Ides Of March
Twitchy: Occasional Cortex Politicizes NZ Shooting By Trashing Prayer Then Backpedals To Blame NRA
Louder With Crowder: Mike Rowe Weighs In On College Admissions Scam
According To Hoyt: The Eyes Of The Present
Vox Popoli: New Zealand = False Flag

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The Luxury Of Being Humane
American Power: Arthur C. Brooks, Love Your Enemies
American Thinker: We Fight Now, Or The Socialists Win
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Blind Hogs & Acorns Friday
Babalu Blog: Socialism In Action – Another Building Collapse In Havana
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For March 15
CDR Salamander: So How Was Your Deployment? also, Fullbore Friday
Da Tech Guy: Non-Tweets Under The Fedora, also, Lenten Reflections – The Long Game
Don Surber: You Silence Him, You Silence Yourself
Dustbury: The Time Has Come
First Street Journal: The Christchurch Massacre And NZ’s Gun Laws
The Geller Report: Muslim Migrant Crimes In Germany Concealed To Prevent “Prejudice”, also, Top Facebook Executives Bolt As Zuckerberg Takes A Wrecking Ball To Social Media Giant
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, Meanwhile At The SPLC
Hollywood In Toto: Conan Scribe Explains Why O’Brien Avoids Trump-Bashing
Joe For America: School Violence Skyrocketed After Obama’s DOE & DOJ Imposed Racial Discipline Quotas
JustOneMinute: No Brexit No Peace, or, The Wall Will Stall
Legal Insurrection: UN Appoints Iran To Global Womens’ Rights Commission, also, Trump To Issue First Veto After Senate Rejects Emergency Declaration
The PanAm Post: Luisa Ortega Diaz – Chavez Is Responsible For The Tragedy In Venezuela
Power Line: Go Beto! [Update – “I Need A Butt Shine], also, Omar Headlines For CAIR
Shark Tank: Rep, Waltz Honors Womens’ History Month On House Floor
Shot In The Dark: A Good Congregant With A Gun
STUMP: Judgment In Moscow – Story About The Trial For Truth That Didn’t Take Place
The Jawa Report: Terrorist Murders 49 In NZ Mosque Attack
The Political Hat: The Ides of March
This Ain’t Hell: Actress Chooses Army Over Hollywood, also, Valor Friday
Victory Girls: St. Patrick’s Day Meets Political Correctness
Volokh Conspiracy: Implications Of The Senate Vote Against Tump’s Emergency Declaration
Weasel Zippers: Beta O’Rourke Belonged To Infamous Hacker Group, Wrote Fantasies About Murdering Children, also, Top Defense Officials Slam Google For Aiding Chicom Military
Megan McArdle: The College Education Scam Reveals A Lot About Our Self-Perpetuating Elites

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Category: Linkagery

OK, Rod Dreher Nails It

Posted on | March 15, 2019 | Comments Off on OK, Rod Dreher Nails It

During his 2007 Crunchy Con phase, I dissed Rod Dreher hard in a Reason book review, but either (a) he’s gotten better or (b) times have changed, or maybe just (c) a little of both. Anyway, Dreher has gotten out of his crypto-Buddhist thing and has been doing excellent work lately, including this take on the New Zealand massacre:

Here’s the chilling part: Everything Tarrant identifies as qualities of a disintegrating Western civilization is true. You may think that declining numbers of ethnic Europeans is a good thing, or something that has no particular moral meaning. But it really is happening. So are all the rest.

Read the whole thing. It’s very good.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

Category: Terrorism

CNN’s Ratings Are SO LOW …

Posted on | March 15, 2019 | Comments Off on CNN’s Ratings Are SO LOW …

Ace of Spades calls attention to the latest cable-news ratings, as reported by @RoadMN on Twitter, and it really is astonishing how bad CNN ratings are. It’s not just the fact that Fox News is stomping the crap out of CNN in prime time where, for example, Tucker Carlson’s 8 p.m. ET audience (3.14 million viewers) is three times larger than Anderson Cooper’s (1.03 million). CNN’s ratings are so low that no show on the network rates higher than 28th in all cable news programming.

(You can click that graphic to enlarge full-size.)

You see that the highest-rated hour on CNN (Chris Cuomo at 9 p.m. ET) has an audience of 1.11 million, which is not only dwarfed by Sean Hannity’s audience (3.3 million), but is also smaller than, for example, the 7 a.m. hour of Fox & Friends (1.47 million). The audience for CNN’s morning programming is microscopic — New Day, hosted by Alisyn Camerota and John Berman, gets barely half a million viewers.

How can words convey just how pathetic CNN’s numbers are? You’re talking about a national network, with anchors earning millions annually, supported by a vast staff of reporters, producers, editors and technicians. And at 8 a.m. ET, Camerota and Berman are viewed by an audience of 567,000. By comparison, Olivia Jade Giannulli, the vapid airhead whose mother cheated to get her into college, has 1.9 million YouTube subscribers. That’s right — this idiot teenager can post a makeup tutorial that gets more than twice the viewers of CNN’s New Day.

CNN has no viable commercial purpose. There are many YouTube channels with larger audiences — PewDiePie routinely gets 4 million views. If a Swedish comedian on YouTube is four times more popular than your cable-news network, the word for this is failure.

Category: CNN

NZ Mosque Shooter’s American Dystopia

Posted on | March 15, 2019 | 4 Comments

Brenton Tarrant, the 28-year-old Australian who killed 49 people in the mosque massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, published a manifesto entitled “The Great Replacement,” that has been described as a shorter and “more sloppy” version of “the same themes” expressed in the 2011 manifesto of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik.

In one section of his 74-page manifesto, Tarrant predicts that a racial civil war will erupt in the United States:

Civil war in the so called “Melting pot” that is the United States should be a major aim in overthrowing the global power structure and the Wests’ egalitarian, individualist, globalist dominant culture.
In the United States, perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, the cult of the individual has been practiced for the longest time and with the deepest devotion.
Luckily for us, the end results of this deracialized, irreligious and deculturized program show themselves.
The United States is in turmoil, more so that at any other time in history. States hate other states, the electoral college is under attack at every turn and the races are at each others throats. On top of this is a two party political system, split by racial, social, cultural, linguistic and class divides.
The end result is a nation in gridlock, unable to respond to any great change, unable to commit to any great projects. A political and social stalemate that makes any advancement impossible.
Meanwhile the 10000 ton boulder of demographic change rolls ever forward, gaining momentum and possibly destroying all in its path. Eventually, when the white population of the USA realizes the truth of the situation, war will erupt. Soon the replacement of the whites within Texas will hit its apogee and with the non-white political and social control of Texas; and with this control, the electoral college will be heavily stacked in favor of a democratic victory so that every electoral cycle will be a certainty.
After an election cycle or two with certain Democratic victory, those remaining, non democratic voting, non brainwashed whites will see the future clear before them, and with this knowledge realize the impossibility of a diplomatic or political victory.
Within a short time regular and widespread political, social and racial violence will commence. In this tempest of conflict is where will be strike, a strong, unified, ethnically and culturally focused pro-white, pro-european group will be everything the average white family need and long for. With these boosted numbers, and with our unified forces, complete control of the United states will be possible. Above all be ready for violence, and when the times comes, strike hard and fast.

Well, this is interesting, eh? Tarrant sees the American “cult of the individual” as giving rise to a “deracialized, irreligious and deculturized program” that he blames for the decline which his act of violent terrorism was intended to reverse. Elsewhere in his manifesto, Tarrant declares: “Conservatism is dead. Thank god. Now let us bury it and move on to something of worth.” So he was not a conservative; indeed, he denounces “modern conservatism” as part of the problem.

This is an argument I’ve heard before, and which I have argued against. When the Left attacks conservatives as “racist,” seeking to link conservatism to violent terrorist hate groups, this is a deliberate misrepresentation, as these extremists generally deride conservatism — a recruiting tactic. Telling the alienated white man that politics is futile, that he is doomed by “demographic change,” extremists seek to inspire such people to reject politics altogether. Indeed, the white racialist is often the same type of individual who joins Antifa. Have none of these young fools bothered to read Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer?

What causes the alienated young man — whatever his race, whatever his ideology — to join an extremist movement? The fact is that mainstream politics does not appeal to his grandiose desire for personal significance, his short-sighted craving for action. Effective activism in the political sphere requires patient toil, and it may take decades to achieve real success. One must become a cog in the vast machinery of party politics, where even many of your allies may not share your particular vision, and where even the most talented and visionary leader might spend years in the wilderness before obtaining power. Winston Churchill, for example, spent the decade of the 1930s marginalized within British politics which was then dominated by advocates of appeasement. Ronald Reagan, whose debut in partisan politics was his 1964 “Time for Choosing” speech on behalf of the doomed Goldwater campaign, required another 16 years to win the presidency. If such world-historic figures had to struggle against powerful opposition, and await their chance for many years, what is the prospect that someone like Brenton Tarrant can “make a difference” in the regular work of politics? His resort to violent terrorism is an expression of his sense of hopelessness. And in this, it is the terrorist himself who represents “the cult of the individual.”

Whenever I encounter this sort of “white supremacist” mentality, what I want to say to these fools is, “If you are so damned superior, why not just go succeed in life, and demonstrate your superiority through personal achievement? If you are so concerned about demographic change, get yourself a wife and sire a dozen children!” But they can’t do these things, and it is their sense of failure that inspires their hopelessness.

Don’t bother quoting Nietzsche and Spengler at me. I’ve stared into the abyss, contemplated the prophecies of decline and rejected them. The future does not belong to those who lose hope. However foolish it may seem to keep plugging away — “three yards and a cloud of dust” — and however little share of glory may belong to the lineman in the trenches, the hero does not surrender to the siren song of despair. You may be trailing by two touchdowns at halftime, but you can’t quit.

Consider this: When Whittaker Chambers left the Communist Party in the late 1930s and became an anti-Communist, he feared that he was joining the losing side of the struggle. When he exposed Alger Hiss, he was vilified, smeared as a liar and worse. But there was a young California congressman who believed Chambers — Richard Nixon proved that Hiss was a liar. That early Cold War drama inspired other anti-Communists, including a Yale student named William F. Buckley Jr., and an actor named Ronald Reagan. From the time of the 1948 HUAC hearings, two decades elapsed before Nixon was elected president, another 12 years before Reagan became president and finally — in 1991, more than four decades after the Chambers-Hiss controversy — the Soviet Union collapsed into the “ash heap of history.”

None of that history was inevitable. Beginning with Chambers, who did the right thing even though he believed the Communists would ultimately destroy America, each man involved made his choice. What John F. Kennedy called “the long twilight struggle” against Communism could have turned out much differently, if not for the choices made by a handful of men. And the most important choice they made was to hope.

Hope requires a sense that your life has meaning and purpose, no matter how obscure your station in life or how great your hardships may be.

Brenton Tarrant is a loser. He had what was, in some ways, an enviable life. After high school, he worked a couple of years as a personal trainer, then began traveling the world. How many young men would like to spend their 20s jetting off to see the sights in Europe and Asia? Despite these advantages, Tarrant surrendered to despair and his manifesto was an argument for others to embrace hopelessness, to resort to violence — indeed, he dreamed of bloody racial warfare in the United States as preferable to “the cult of individualism.” What a stupid waste of life, not only in terms of the dozens of unarmed people he murdered, but also in how Tarrant threw away any hope for his own future for the sake of the sick “blaze of glory” fantasy that inspires mass murderers.

“My experience of men has neither disposed me to think worse of them nor indisposed me to serve them; nor in spite in spite of failures which I lament, of errors which I now see and acknowledge, or of the present aspect of affairs, do I despair of the future.
“The truth is this: The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.”
— Robert E. Lee, 1870

Category: History, New Zealand, Terrorism

Like ‘Call of Duty’ IRL: Aussie Gunman Massacres Muslims at NZ Mosque

Posted on | March 15, 2019 | Comments Off on Like ‘Call of Duty’ IRL: Aussie Gunman Massacres Muslims at NZ Mosque

A 28-year-old Australian man livestreamed on Facebook his massacre of Muslims at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. I’ve seen the video, and it’s like Call of Duty, except that there’s no return fire — Brenton Tarrant just murdered about two dozen unarmed people, including women and children. I’ve skimmed through the shooter’s manifesto, and it is wrong to call Tarrant crazy, because his premeditated act was carefully planned, for reasons he explains in a deliberate way. It’s basically the “Fourteen Words,” embellished with anecdotes.

Tarrant’s attack was intended as a conscious emulation of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, and he expressed the hope that others will in turn emulate him. How many other guys like this are out there? Guys in their 20s or 30s who feel they have no future, nothing worth living for, and who might do something like what Tarrant did? The number is larger than zero, and the question is, how much larger? The video of this New Zealand attack will add a “monkey see, monkey do” factor to copycat attacks, and I fear we could see a half-dozen such attacks worldwide over the next 12 to 18 months. We may have reached a tipping point of some kind, and it’s hard to predict the consequences. Here’s the Washington Times story by Victor Morton:

A Facebook Live video was posted Friday apparently showing the New Zealand mosque gunman videotaping his attack while it was ongoing.
The video was apparently taken by the account “Brenton Tarrant 9,” according to the visible URL. A screengrab shows the credit “Brenton Tarrant was live.”
The disturbing 17-minute video follows the attacker from his car before the attack to fleeing in his car after. . . .
According to reporters, Mr. Tarrant claimed responsibility in a 74-page manifesto titled “The Great Replacement,” portions of which were screen-grabbed on Twitter and all of it posted on Scribd. . . .
In the manifesto, Mr. Tarrant offers qualified support for U.S. President Donald Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose,” but “as a policymaker and leader, dear god no.”
The manifesto criticizes declining white birthrates — “It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates.” it begins.
“If there is one thing I want you to remember from these writings, its that the birthrates must change. Even if we were to deport all Non-Europeans from our lands tomorrow, the European people would still be spiraling into decay and eventual death.”
Mr. Tarrant decries “mass immigration” as “white genocide” and says why he commits the attack.
“To most of all show the invaders that our lands will never be their lands, our homelands are our own, and that, as long as a white man still lives, they will NEVER conquer our lands and they will never replace our people.”
He then goes on to catalog a list of atrocities committed against white Europeans that he is avenging.
Mr. Tarrant also has a U.S. goal in mind in committing the attack — fomenting a second American Civil War.
“Finally, to create conflict between the two ideologies within the United States on the ownership of firearms in order to further the social, cultural, political and racial divide within the United States. This conflict over the 2nd amendment and the attempted removal of firearms rights will ultimately result in a civil war that will eventually balkanize the US [that] will not only result in the the racial separation of people within the United States ensuring the future of the White race on the North American continent but also ensuring the death of the ‘melting pot’ pipe dream,” he writes.

Are you praying hard? Pray harder.

Category: Immigration, New Zealand, Racism, Terrorism

SPLC Fires Founder Morris Dees

Posted on | March 14, 2019 | Comments Off on SPLC Fires Founder Morris Dees

Excuse me for not blogging this happy news sooner, but I’ve been too busy dancing as deliriously as troops in Times Square on V-J Day:

“Effective yesterday, Morris Dees’ employment at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was terminated,” SPLC President Richard Cohen told The Montgomery Advertiser in a statement on Thursday. “As a civil rights organization, the SPLC is committed to ensuring that the conduct of our staff reflects the mission of the organization and the values we hope to instill in the world. When one of our own fails to meet those standards, no matter his or her role in the organization, we take it seriously and must take appropriate action.”
Dees, 82, co-founded the SPLC in 1971. The organization gained a reputation for taking the Ku Klux Klan to court and then it started labeling and tracking “hate groups.” In recent decades, it started listing conservative and Christian organizations along with the KKK, and last year it settled a defamation lawsuit for $3.375 million.
Dees’s departure is not the only big news Cohen broke on Thursday, however.
“Today we announced a number of immediate, concrete next steps we’re taking, including bringing in an outside organization to conduct a comprehensive assessment of our internal climate and workplace practices, to ensure that our talented staff is working in the environment that they deserve — one in which all voices are heard and all staff members are respected,” Cohen said in the statement.
“The SPLC is deeply committed to having a workplace that reflects the values it espouses — truth, justice, equity and inclusion, and we believe the steps we have taken today reaffirm that commitment,” he concluded.
In 1994, the Montgomery Advertiser took a deep dive into the organization’s activities, uncovering some evidence of discrimination against black employees.
Last December, a Baltimore lawyer filed a lawsuit taking aim at the SPLC’s tax-exempt status. His suit is moving toward the discovery period, and SPLC’s decision to clean house may have resulted from this litigation, first reported by PJ Media.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)

The announcement was deliberately vague as to what Dees did to prompt his dismissal from an organization he built into a $500 million smear machine, but it must have been very bad, indeed. My hunch is that serious criminal charges will soon be announced against Dees. Either that, or somebody in the media got hold of documented evidence of egregious sexual harassment by Dees — text messages, emails, something. No way the SPLC would have dumped Dees over a trivial “he said, she said” type of thing, and I’m almost certain it must be something serious enough that the FBI is involved. If we were to learn that Dees has been keeping a harem of teenage Thai sex slaves on the SPLC payroll, I would not be surprised. Dees is the lowest form of human life on the planet, and I’m prepared to believe the worst about him.

UPDATE: Professor William Jacobson notices that an Alabama-based reporter, Josh Moon, has been sharing what he’s got:

The SPLC fired Morris Dees yesterday and announced it today. Multiple sources have told me that the allegations of inappropriate conduct involve sexual harassment incidents. Multiple incidents that have come to light after an initial recent allegation.

— Josh Moon (@Josh_Moon) March 14, 2019

I have been sent a number of internal SPLC emails that address the ongoing situation and specifically discuss Dees. Looks like a combination of complaints regarding sexual harassment and racial biases in promotion and hierarchy led to this.

— Josh Moon (@Josh_Moon) March 14, 2019

In other SPLC emails, it is clear that Dees is being accused by female employees of some level of mistreatment. The allegations aren't specific and speak more of a history of mistreatment.

— Josh Moon (@Josh_Moon) March 14, 2019

The recent resignation of a black female attorney, Meredith Horton, seems to have been the “last straw” in terms of the SPLC’s issues with women and minority employees. Which is just so deliciously ironic, isn’t it? Here you have Dees & Co. smearing honest people as perpetrators of “hate,” and yet SPLC employees like Horton and others say they were mistreated by this liberal organization.

Still, I’m sure there must be underage Thai hookers involved.

Category: Racism

One Hundred Trillion Dollars: Zimbabwe, Hyper-Inflation and the ‘Green New Deal’

Posted on | March 14, 2019 | 1 Comment

You might think $100,000,000,000,000 is a lot of money, but in Zimbabwe’s currency, it was equivalent to 40 cents on the U.S. dollar in 2015. What happened to Zimbabwe is difficult to describe without sounding racist. On the other hand, basically the same thing has happened in Venezuela, so the idiocy that causes hyperinflation is not limited to Africa, although that’s small comfort to either Venezuelans or Zimbabweans. It would be wrong to say hyperinflation could never happen here, because if the Democrats ever obtain power again . . .

Dear God, I’m afraid to finish that sentence. The Zombie Apocalypse would not be worse than the presidency of Kamala Harris.

John Hoge describes how the Democrats propose to pay for their Green New Deal: “All we have to do is adopt the magic of so-called New Monetary Theory which states that a government that borrows in its own currency doesn’t need to worry about debt because it can print money to pay the debt.” This disastrously dumb idea “has been espoused by, among others, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who explains that we can pay the $90 trillion bill for the Green New Deal by printing the money,” John Hinderaker explains. Where such a policy could lead might actually be worse than Venezuela or Zimbabwe. We’re talking about civil war, concentration camps, cannibalism, something resembling Cambodia in “Year Zero”, Somalia in 1993, Rwanda in 1994, or Bosnia in 1995.

Democrats have made clear that they are willing to wreck the economy, using as their pretext a desire to punish the “rich” and/or to save us from “climate change,” but the real reason they want to wreck the economy is because Democrats hate America. Full stop.

Democrats want to turn our country into a Third World socialist hellhole, and if you won’t cooperate with their agenda, you must be a racist. And guess what Democrats are planning to do to racists like you?

Buy more ammunition now. If Kamala Harris wins the Democrat nomination, the cost of ammo will go sky-high, and if she gets elected . . .

Zimbabwe, Venezuela, “Year Zero,” the Zombie Apocalypse.

(Hat-tip: Gail Heriot at Instapundit.)