The Other McCain

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

Who Is Murdering Whom?

Posted on | March 26, 2018 | Comments Off on Who Is Murdering Whom?

Newt Gingrich got his facts wrong in an appearance Sunday on Fox News:

There are five cities in America that have most of the killings in America, five cities. All five theoretically have gun control. All five cities are a disaster. By the way, those guns are almost all handguns.

This is false. There were 17,250 murders in the United States in 2016, of which only 1,568 (i.e., 9%) occurred in the top five cities: Chicago (765), St. Louis (188), Detroit (303), Washington, D.C. (138), and New Orleans (174). So it’s not true that “five cities . . . have most of the killings in America.” This false claim has been spread around the Internet, and probably originated as a misstatement of an actual truth:

Most homicides in U.S. occurred
in 5 percent of counties, says study
The homicide rate may be rising in some U.S. cities, but slayings are still a localized phenomenon, with most U.S. counties not seeing a single homicide in 2014.
The vast majority of homicides occurred in just 5 percent of counties . . . according to a new report released [in April 2017] by the Crime Prevention Research Center. . . .
About 70 percent of the counties, accounting for 20 percent of the U.S. population, had no more than one murder in 2014, with 54 percent of counties experiencing zero murders, the report found.
Meanwhile, 5 percent of the counties, which made up nearly half the population, accounted for more than two-thirds, with the highest numbers concentrated in areas around major cities like Chicago and Baltimore.

The main point of that study was that rural America is relatively free of violent crime, which is far more prevalent in urban areas.

If Gingrich got the facts wrong on Fox News, he was correct in his general point that cities with strict gun-control laws (which include Chicago and Washington, D.C.) are nonetheless very dangerous places. Why? Because crime is a people problem, and a propensity for criminal violence is not randomly distributed within the population. For decades, liberals promoted misleading claims about the “root causes of crime” — racism, poverty, etc. — that did not translate to effective policy for preventing crime, which is what most people actually care about.

By the 1990s, even Democrats had figured this out, so that Bill Clinton struck a tough-on-crime posture in his presidential campaigns, seeking to exorcise the ghosts of Mike Dukakis and Willie Horton that had haunted the Democrat Party. As a result of more effective policies, the U.S. homicide rate declined from 9.8 (per 100,000 population) in 1990 to 4.4 in 2014 — a 55% reduction in 24 years. Of course, there were non-policy factors involved in the decline of crime, including the advent of DNA testing and the widespread use of video surveillance cameras. However, the shift toward a tough-on-crime policy stance had a major impact, and the old liberal “root causes” arguments about crime were thereby proven wrong. Human behavior can be influenced by incentives, and effective law-enforcement provides negative incentives to criminal behavior.

The “Black Lives Matter” movement that was launched in 2014 can be viewed as an attempt to revive the discredited “root causes” mythology. By depicting criminals like Michael Brown as innocent victims of racist police, activists sought to exploit widespread public ignorance about the reality of crime and law enforcement in America. Heather Mac Donald exposed this reality in her book The War on Cops, pointing out that a police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by black man than the other way around (see “Putting Homicide in Perspective vs. the Media’s ‘Atrocity Narrative’ Propaganda,” Oct. 3, 2017). The racial aspect of violent crime is impossible to ignore. Black males, who constitute barely 6% of the U.S. population, are about 44% murder victims in the country, and are also about half of those arrested for murder. Effective policies to reduce violent crime in the United States will save black lives, but such efforts will also require locking up black criminals.

Which brings us back to the subject that got Gingrich tangled up on Fox News Sunday: The Parkland High School shooting and the resulting hysteria ginned by Democrats and their media allies (see “The Phony ‘Gun Violence Epidemic,’” March 25). There is no “epidemic” of school shootings, America’s children are safer in schools now than they were 25 years ago, and therefore demands for draconian gun-control laws are unjustified and misguided. The real crime problem, as Gingrich said, is in cities like Chicago, where 23 people have been shot to death so far this month and another 108 were shot and wounded. A total of 91 people have been shot to death in Chicago so far this year, despite the city’s gun-control laws. Crime is a people problem, and there are a lot of bad people in Chicago. By contrast, there are a lot more good people in Parkland, Florida, but there was this one bad kid with a gun.

Why should this anomalous event — a tragedy that could have been averted if the authorities had acted on all the tips they had about the shooter — be made the justification for a crusade to disarm the millions of law-abiding gun owners in America? Of course not, and if people knew the facts, they’d be mad as hell at the way the media have lied to them.



 

Category: Crime

In The Mailbox: 03.26.18

Posted on | March 26, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.26.18

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Spring Cleaning
Twitchy: Michael Ian Black’s Latest Gun Control Rant Is An Absolute Trainwreck
Louder With Crowder: #MarchForOurLives Speaker Admits True Gun Control Plans

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – The Big Government Edition, also, Say Hello To The Alt-Shite
American Power: Robert Spencer, The History Of Jihad, also, Roseanne On Jimmy Kimmel
American Thinker: America Doesn’t Have A Gun Violence Epidemic. Democrat Cities Do.
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye Blue Monday
BattleSwarm: Greg Gutfeld On The Trump/Biden Rumble
BLACKFIVE: J. Todd Scott, High White Sun
Bring The HEAT: Saudi Air Defense Intercepting Ballistic Missiles From Yemen
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday, also, Oh, Your Air Force Chief Of Staff Got Caught Lying To Your Defense Chief?
Da Tech Guy: Trashed World, also, The Congressional GOP Demonstrates How To Lose A Base Election
Don Surber: The Army May Build The Wall
Dustbury: Strange Search Engine Queries, also, Simply Undeflatable
Fausta: Guatemala – The Bitkov Case
The Geller Report: Dutch Mayor Robbed In Her Own City’s Migrant Suburb, also, 85-Year-Old French Holocaust Survivor Raped, Stabbed, & Burned By Muslim Neighbor, also  also, Brigitte Bardot – “I Didn’t Fight Against A French Algeria To Accept An Algerian France
Hogewash: Don’t [Know] Much About History, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Joe For America: Why Gun Control Is A Very Bad Idea
JustOneMinute: A Hero In France
Legal Insurrection: The Stormy Daniels Story Is Not About Stormy Daniels, also, Chicoms Willing To Sit Down And Negotiate To Avoid A Trade War
Power Line: Trump Fought The Swamp, And The Swamp Won, also, Seven Reactions To The #MarchForOurLives
Shark Tank: Gun Violence Marches Co-Opted By Extremists
Shot In The Dark: Hogging The Limelight
STUMP: Around The Pension-O-Sphere – IL, CA, PR, And Shareholder Activism, also, Memory Monday – The Men Who Fought For Womens’ Votes, and Fourth Week In March 1918
The Jawa Report: Just A Car Loaded With Propane, No Biggie, also, Iraqi Immigrants Beat Young Muslima For Refusing Arranged Marriage
The Political Hat: The Imam’s Magic Pro-Child Rape Zipper
This Ain’t Hell: Read It And Weep, Gungrabbers, also, Remembering The Bataan March, also also, I’m A Combat Veteran, And Everyone Should Own An AR Rifle
Victory Girls: You Say You Want A Revolution, also, #FutureDavidHoggCareer As We See It
Weasel Zippers: Brown U Vows To Give Illegals Free Master’s Degree If DACA Repealed, also, Left Proclaims Porn Star Stormy Daniels “A Feminist Hero”
Megan McArdle: The Truth About Medical Bankruptcies
Mark Steyn: Nuts And Bolton, also, Chivalry & Suicide

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Category: Linkagery

Dopehead Sex Fiends

Posted on | March 26, 2018 | Comments Off on Dopehead Sex Fiends

 

It was notorious among dopeheads, back in the day, that chicks always got free dope. At least, good-looking chicks did. Maybe ugly chicks paid for dope, but a good-looking chick? Never. In hindsight, we can understand the transactional nature of why chicks didn’t pay for dope, and say that they actually did pay for it, in services rendered, but it was the ’70s, man. There was no shortage of casual sex in the ’70s. AIDS hadn’t happened yet, herpes was still rare, and everybody was gettin’ it on. If the prevalent free-dope-for-chicks policy of that era could be viewed as a market exchange of goods and services, few dopeheads at the time bothered thinking about it. In the Golden Age of drugs, sex and rock-and-roll, dopeheads generally never bothered thinking at all.

That era ended long ago, but apparently some dopeheads never got the news. Last month, the board of directors of the National Cannabis Industry Association voted to remove Rob Kampia from the board:

“NCIA’s Board of Directors voted to remove Rob Kampia in accordance with our bylaws after an ethics committee review surfaced a pattern of behavior unbecoming of a board member,” Aaron Smith, executive director of the NCIA, wrote in an email to MJBizDaily. . . .
Former board member Kayvan Khalatbari had filed an ethics complaint with the NCIA regarding sexual misconduct allegations against Kampia. Kampia has denied those allegations.

Last December, Kampia left the Marijuana Policy Project:

Kampia’s departure from MPP comes as several sources tell Marijuana Moment that a major newspaper is working on a story about previously unreported allegations against the former executive director. It is unknown when that article will be published, but its existence has been an open secret in cannabis reform circles for weeks.

In 2010, Washington City Paper published a lengthy article about Kampia’s alleged habit of sleeping with employees at MPP, and the article included the detail that Kampia had a “purple Columbia Heights mansion with a rooftop hot tub.” Because what’s the point of having a purple mansion, if you don’t also have a rooftop hot tub, right? And if you’re the executive director of the dope lobby? Well, chicks never pay for dope.

Was it a scandal that Rob Kampia allegedly slept with a 19-year-old intern? He was the head of an organization devoted to legalizing dope, after all, and if a 19-year-old intern for such an organization didn’t understand what she was signing up for, whose fault is that?

In the aftermath of the 2010 revelations, Kampia announced he was taking a three-month medical leave from the Marijuana Policy Project, “to get therapy for his attitudes toward women.” He told the Washington Post‘s Reliable Sources column: “I just think I’m hypersexualized.”

He’s a dopehead sex fiend, just like we were warned about in those old anti-dope propaganda movies like Marihuana: Assassin of Youth.

Rob Kampia probably drinks gin and dances to jazz music, too.

It’s rather amusing to see officials of the dope lobby filing ethics complaints and talking about “sexual misconduct” by one of their associates, as if they were shocked — shocked! — to discover that the Devil’s Weed turns people into degenerate sex fiends.

All those old anti-dope movies were right. Trust me, I survived the ’70s. While I insist on my Miranda-warning right to remain silent — anything I say can and will be used against me in a court of law — nobody can convince me there is no such thing as a dopehead sex fiend. So please excuse my cynical laughter at the dope lobby, which suddenly developed concerns about “ethics” and “sexual misconduct” in the #MeToo era.

In other not-exactly-shocking news, Donald Trump banged a porn star.

Republican voters are shocked — shocked! — by this revelation, I’m sure.

 

Category: Scandal, Sex

Rule 5 Sunday: Nikki Nicole

Posted on | March 26, 2018 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

One of the ways social media has changed things is that models no longer have to blow a lot of money on having photos taken for portfolios, which they then have to lug around to agencies. Now they can post the pics online, which means that not only can agents more easily access them, but so can the public – opening up new money-making opportunities for aspiring models. William McCain brought one of those models, Nikki Nicole, to my attention, and she’s our appetizer for this week’s Rule 5 Sunday. You can see more of her at her Instagram, and support her work through her Patreon.

Up close and personal.

Ninety Miles From Tyranny leads off with Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode 202, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns. Animal Magnetism celebrates his return from Japan with Rule Five NRA Founding Friday and “another scrumptious Saturday Gingermageddon!” Word.

EBL’s heifers this week include St. Joseph’s Day Beauties, Priorities, The Beaches, Volleyball, Smooth, Haley Clauson, and some ladies exercising their Second Amendment rights.

A View From The Beach chips in with Baskin Champion, For Her Bad Taste in Music, Carla’s Hubby in the Dock,  #HerToo: Mindy Was Such a Good Sport, Weinstein Hanky Panky in New York Justice System, Former Fox News Babe Rising Star at State, “Fade Into You”, Silly Girl . . ., Ancient Humans Were Really Into Denisovans and Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Christina Ochoa, his Vintage Babe is Etchika Choureau, there’s some Sex in Advertising, and of course some Stormy Daniels. At Dustbury, it’s Nicole Trunfio and Zuhal Olcay.

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious links!

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Category: Rule 5

Violence Against Muslim Teen in Texas

Posted on | March 25, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

In January, 16-year-old Maarib Al Hishmawi was reported missing in Bexar County, Texas. She was last seen leaving Taft High School in San Antonio. Was she a victim of right-wing anti-Muslim violence?

No, she was a victim of her parents:

She was located in mid-March when she was taken in by an organization that cared for her after she ran away, KSAT reported.
Authorities on Friday said Al Hishmawi’s parents — Abdulah Fahmi Al Hishmawi, 34, and Hamdiyah Saha Al Hishmawi, 33 — had allegedly beaten their daughter with a broomstick and poured hot cooking oil on her when she refused to marry a man in another city. The parents reportedly agreed to the arranged marriage in exchange for $20,000.
“This young lady, at various times over that time period was subjected to some pretty bad abuse because she didn’t want to be married to this person,” Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar said on Friday, according to KSAT.
“Several times it was reported to us that this young lady was abused with hot cooking oil being thrown on her body. She was beat with broomsticks,” Salazar added. “At least one point, she was choked almost to the point of unconsciousness.”
The teenage girl and her five siblings, between the ages 5 and 15, were placed under Child Protective Services custody.
The parents face charges of continuous violence against a family member. They were taken into custody on Friday.
Police said the man who was arranged to be married to Al Hishmawi may also be charged in the case.

This is the kind of “violence against women” feminists will ignore.

(Hat-tip: Kirby McCain on Twitter.)

 

Category: Violence Against Women

The Phony ‘Gun Violence Epidemic’

Posted on | March 25, 2018 | 2 Comments

“Today we are going to start a revolution. We will change America with or without these politicians.”
— David Hogg, March 24, Good Morning America

Promising a “revolution” to “change America” by disarming citizens is rather a radical ambition, but ABC News and other liberal media organizations promote this propaganda without offering any critical analysis or providing access to facts that contradict Hogg’s claims.

The liberal media did not produce news coverage of Saturday’s protests. Instead, they produced one-sided publicity for gun-control activists. The media have uncritically amplified the claim that events like last month’s Parkland massacre represent an “epidemic” of “gun violence.”

Facts contradicting this rhetoric are not difficult to find, and any journalist who ignores these facts has failed his professional duty.

America’s schools are not experiencing an “epidemic” of shootings. In fact, as Northwestern University researchers James Alan Fox and Emma Fridel recently reported, school violence is declining:

Since 1996, there have been 16 multiple victim shootings in schools, or incidents involving 4 or more victims and at least 2 deaths by firearms, excluding the assailant.
Of these, 8 are mass shootings, or incidents involving 4 or more deaths, excluding the assailant. . . .
Mass school shootings are incredibly rare events. . . . [O]n average, mass murders occur between 20 and 30 times per year [in the United States], and about one of those incidents on average takes place at a school.
Fridel and Fox used data collected by USA Today, the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Report, Congressional Research Service, Gun Violence Archive, Stanford Geospatial Center and Stanford Libraries, Mother Jones, Everytown for Gun Safety, and a NYPD report on active shooters.
Their research also finds that shooting incidents involving students have been declining since the 1990s.
Four times the number of children were killed in schools in the early 1990s than today, Fox said.
“There is not an epidemic of school shootings,” he said, adding that more kids are killed each year from pool drownings or bicycle accidents. There are around 55 million school children in the United States, and on average over the past 25 years, about 10 students per year were killed by gunfire at school, according to Fox and Fridel’s research.

If school shootings are a rare phenomenon that is actually declining — that is to say, the opposite of an “epidemic” — why did the February shooting at Parkland High School inspire more than a month of saturation media coverage advocating gun control? The answer can be summarized in two words: Partisan politics.

Donald Trump is president, Democrats are angry, we are a few months away from a midterm election, and the Democrat-controlled liberal media organized a propaganda campaign to demonize Republicans, by blaming them as responsible for the deaths of students in Parkland. A coalition of Democrat-aligned organizations, including Planned Parenthood, spent millions of dollars to fund Saturday’s protest rallies.

Like the “Occupy Wall Street” protests of 2011 and the “Black Lives Matter” movement of 2014-2016, the post-Parkland gun-control crusade is a “battlespace preparation” campaign by Democrats and their liberal media allies, who seek to establish a narrative that makes Republicans the scapegoats for a social problem. With “Occupy Wall Street,” the problem was economic inequality; with “Black Lives Matter,” the problem was racism and police brutality; with David Hogg and the Parkland crusaders, the problem is gun owners and the NRA. But like other political crusaders, the anti-NRA protest mobs are advancing a false narrative about an alleged “crisis” that does not actually exist. Ryan McMaken emphasizes the need to reject this phony “crisis” narrative:

In the wake of last month’s Florida shooting, many opponents of gun control made the mistake of simply accepting the claim that school shootings are getting worse, and are more deadly overall.
According to Fox’s research, though, this is simply not the case. . . .
Maybe American society is in a more perilous position that in the 1980s. But if we’re looking for evidence of that, the homicide data won’t help the argument.

If there is not actually an “epidemic” of school shootings, there is no need for new gun laws to prevent such shootings. And, as Ann Coulter has suggested, maybe guns aren’t the real problem:

There have been about 34 mass shootings since 2000. Forty-seven percent — 16 — were committed by first- and second-generation immigrants, i.e. people who never would have been here but for Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 immigration act.
And the immigrant mass shootings have been some of the most spectacular ones, such as Fort Hood and San Bernardino. Two of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history, at Virginia Tech in 2007 and at the Pulse Nightclub in 2016, were committed by first- and second-generation immigrants. . . .
On account of the Rule of Journalism that permits the word “immigrant” to be used only in sentences with the word “valedictorian,” you may not have heard of some of these mass shootings at all.

Omar Mateen (Orlando), Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik (San Bernardino), Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech), Nidal Malik Hasan (Fort Hood) — Coulter’s list of immigrant killers goes on and on. If anyone at CNN or a major newspaper was willing to look seriously at this data, the question of why immigrants commit so many mass murders might arouse their curiosity. You don’t have to be a xenophobic bigot to wonder about the underlying causation. It could be that social alienation is a major contributor to mass violence, and that immigrants and their children experience higher levels of social alienation.

Democrats and their liberal media allies, however, aren’t interested in any facts or statistics or analysis about school shootings except those that support their narrative of an “epidemic” that can be blamed on gun owners, the NRA and Republicans. So they convey a distorted propaganda designed to appeal to emotions, and ignore (or demonize) anyone who cites facts that contradict the liberal narrative.



 

Category: Crime

FMJRA 2.0: Voices Carry

Posted on | March 24, 2018 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

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

Jeff Sessions Fires Andrew McCabe
A View From The Beach

Crazy People Are Dangerous
EBL

FMJRA 2.0: Warriors
The Pirate’s Cove
EBL
A View From The Beach

Illegal Immigrant from El Salvador Arrested on Child Exploitation Charge
EBL

The Other Podcast: Episode 4
EBL

What Is ‘Hate Speech’?
EBL

Africans Riot in Madrid
EBL

‘Europe Is Already Under an Invasion’
EBL

California vs. America
Proof Positive
EBL

In The Mailbox: 03.19.18
Proof Positive
EBL
A View From The Beach

Our So-Called ‘Allies’
EBL

‘Consciousness-Raising’ as Advertisement
Welcome To My Playpen
EBL

Crazy People Are Dangerous
EBL

‘Social Justice’ Indoctrination Is Now Mandatory for Future K-12 Teachers
EBL

In The Mailbox: 03.20.18
Proof Positive
EBL
A View From The Beach

UPDATE: Austin Bomber Reportedly Dead After Shootout in Round Rock
Rotten Chestnuts
EBL

Will Democrats Self-Destruct?
Pushing Rubber Downhill
EBL
Texas Bomber Identified
EBL

Don’t Mess With the USA
Nebraska Energy Observer
EBL

In The Mailbox: 03.21.18
Proof Positive
EBL
A View From The Beach

McCabe Targeted Sessions in ‘Coup’ Conspiracy by Obama-Era DOJ Officials
EBL
A View From The Beach

California Democrat Is Unemployed
Pushing Rubber Downhill
Proof Positive
EBL

In The Mailbox: 03.22.18
Proof Positive
EBL

Worst. Omnibus. Ever.
EBL

In The Mailbox: 03.23.18
Proof Positive
EBL

Top linkers this week:

  1. EBL (25)
  2. Proof Positive (8)
  3. A View From The Beach (7)

Thanks to everyone for the linkagery!


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Category: FMJRA Award

The ‘Controversial’ Kevin Williamson

Posted on | March 24, 2018 | Comments Off on The ‘Controversial’ Kevin Williamson

 

If you want to know what excellent journalism looks like, go read “The White Ghetto,” Kevin D. Williamson’s 2014 travelogue of Appalachia:

There used to be two movie theaters here — a regular cinema and a drive-in. Both are long gone. The nearest Walmart is nearly an hour away. There’s no bookstore, the nearest Barnes & Noble being 55 miles away and the main source of reading matter being the horrifying/hilarious crime blotter in the local weekly newspaper. Within living memory, this town had three grocery stores, a Western Auto and a Napa Auto Parts, a feed store, a lumber store, a clothing shop, a Chrysler dealership, a used-car dealership, a skating rink — even a discotheque, back in the 1970s. Today there is one grocery store, and the rest is as dead as disco. . . .

Read the whole thing. It’s both highly informative and highly readable, because Williamson is an elegant writer. Instead of clobbering readers over the head with political talking-points, he just tells the story and lets readers draw their own conclusions. It’s what used to be called New Journalism, the stuff that Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson started doing in the 1960s. An unsuspecting reader might not realize that the purpose of Williamson’s expedition to Booneville, Kentucky, was to illustrate a point made 20 years earlier by a Harvard University psychology professor and a famous political scientist.

On pp. 520-521 of The Bell Curve, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray briefly explore the topic of “The Emerging White Underclass.” Because their 1994 book was denounced as “racist” (facts are the new “hate”), no journalists at that time bothered searching for anecdotal evidence to illustrate their thesis about the correlation between intelligence and various socioeconomic problems. Williamson never invoked Herrnstein and Murray’s work in his 2014 article about the hopeless poverty of Owsley County, Kentucky, but anyone familiar with The Bell Curve could see that “The Emerging White Underclass” has now definitely emerged — and this is an important political fact.

The election of Donald Trump shocked our nation’s decadent elite, and Williamson’s work for National Review qualified him to explain the otherwise inexplicable phenomenon of Trumpism to the elite, most of whom have never set foot in a place like Owsley County, Kentucky. It is interesting to note that Trump got 84% of the vote in Owsley County, a bellwether of the Fear and Loathing in post-Obama America.

Kevin D. Williamson was announced Thursday as one of two new columnists for The Atlantic, a publication read by our decadent elite, and Williamson’s hiring immediately provoked howls of outrage:

It’s obvious why The Atlantic hired Williamson, however. First, more than most other imitators, Williamson has really nailed the Buckleyite tradition of espousing virulent racism while convincing some liberals that he’s got something important to say. Second, Williamson is an anti-Trumper, which fits in nicely with the trend of hiring the kind of conservatives who are completely irrelevant within their own movement anymore.
For Goldberg, hiring Williamson and a radical black thinker like Kendi at the same time seems like a coup that proves The Atlantic is a publication that fosters debate between people who subscribe to opposite ideological views. (From the Atlantic’s advertising materials: “We reach thinking people — and make them think harder.”)
But much of Williamson’s writing is just a better articulated version of thoughts that MAGA types say on a regular basis.

Well, what shall we say to this? Isn’t everybody to the right of Bernie Sanders now subject to denunciation as a “virulent racist”? And isn’t this a basic reason why Trump was elected in 2016? After eight years of Obama, a lot of white people in America are sick and tired of being called “racist” merely for disagreeing with Democrats. Voting for Trump was a symbolic middle finger waved in the faces of all those snooty Ivy League liberals — Obama with his Harvard Law degree, Hillary with her Yale Law degree — who have prospered while presiding over the decline of their nation. Is Williamson, despite being an “anti-Trumper,” merely offering “a better articulated version” of the “thoughts” behind Trumpism? Or is it rather that Williamson is interested in the facts which (a) explain Trumpism, but which (b) liberals prefer to ignore?

We are living through a Buffalo Springfield “For What It’s Worth” moment in our history. There’s something happening here, and what it is ain’t exactly clear. Williamson’s reporting helps us make sense of why there’s a man with a gun over there telling us we’ve got to beware.

The quality of his reporting, however, means nothing to liberals, who consider Williamson unacceptable because of his opinions. During a 2014 Twitter quarrel with Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, Williamson tossed out the suggestion that, because abortion is homicide, it ought to be criminalized as such and, because he supports the death penalty, Williamson proposed death by hanging as the penalty.

When arguing moot points — because obviously, the Roe v. Wade ruling relegates such a debate to the realm of hypothetical speculation — the participants cannot be presumed to be advocating policy in a serious manner. It’s not as if any state legislature is likely to defy federal authority, enact the policy Williamson described, and begin hanging women who get abortions. Therefore, intelligent people must regard Williamson’s Twitter remarks as provocative sarcasm.

It’s like debating what the age of consent should be for the daughters of future settlers of a proposed colony on Mars. Unless and until Elon Musk actually manages to get his space colony project going, speculations about laws to govern human life on Mars have no practical effect. If an eminent space lawyer like Professor Glenn Reynolds were to declare that, in the interest of rapid growth of the colonial population, it should be legal for Martian girls to marry at age 12, no intelligent person would accuse him of being an advocate of child molestation. Similarly, if I were to propose that child molesters should be exiled to Mars, no one could accuse me of advocating a breach of the Eighth Amendment, because such a punishment is not (yet) possible. Some imaginative science-fiction writer might be inspired to write a novel exploring these ideas (“Pedophiles in Space! Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture!”) but in the meantime it’s all moot — a hypothetical debate, in the same way Williamson’s idea of hanging women for abortion is hypothetical.

On the other hand, Williamson has more recently argued, abortion is definitely wrong, and is related to other social problems:

You mustn’t kill your children.
Many Christians believe that in separating sex from its procreative function contraception has deformed the family, fatherhood and motherhood, and sex itself. There is something to that, I think.

Insofar as Williamson’s Twitter remarks were an error, it was because he made the mistake of arguing with a fool. No wise person would bother arguing with Charles Johnson about anything, as I’m sure Williamson must now realize. He’s no longer on Twitter anyway, so unless anyone fears that his editors at The Atlantic would hit the “publish” button on some such egregious opinion piece, advocates of abortion can relax.

Americans have more important problems to worry about, like how to keep our daughters away from science-fiction fans . . .



 

 

Category: Culture, Fear. Loathing., Media Bias, Neutral Objective Journalism
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