In The Mailbox: 03.08.18

Posted on | March 8, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.08.18

OVER THE TRANSOM
First Street Journal: Libby Schaaf Needs To Go To Jail
EBL: Stormy Weather For Donald Trump?
Twitchy: NO MERCY. Dana Loesch Blasts Gun-Grabbers Trying To Backpedal On Calling The NRA Terrorists
Louder With Crowder: Chris Cuomo Triggered By Clever Ted Cruz Ad
Reason: What Forfeiture Reforms? NH Cops Ignore State Law, Keep Seizing Stuff

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Podcast #76 – The Purpose Episode
American Power: I Got My News From Print Newspapers
American Thinker: Why Trump is So Hated By Leftists
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily “Vikings In Canada, Eh” News
BattleSwarm: Crooked Dem Nashville Mayor Pleads Guilty, Resigns
Bring The HEAT: Sonobuoy
CDR Salamander: The Best Call For FFG(X), also, Oh, It’s International Womens’ Day?
Da Tech Guy: At Least He Didn’t Use A Gun, also, Gender Politics Update
Don Surber: First 500 Jobs Added Under New Trump Tariff
Dustbury: Wiener And Still Champion
The Geller Report: Britain First Leaders Jailed For “Hate Crimes”, also, Minneapolis Muslim Crawls Into Woman’s Bathroom Stall, Attempts To Rape Her
Hogewash: Jupiter’s Jet Stream, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Joe For America: Joe Biden Says Democrats Don’t Understand The Working Class
Legal Insurrection: Oprah Giving This Poor Girl Advice Is Everything That’s Wrong With Our Culture, also, Baltimore Mayor Charges Taxpayers To Send Students To Anti-Gun March
Power Line: A Fake Republican Runs In Minnesota, also, If You’re Gonna Run In Texas…
Shark Tank: Secretary DeVos Visits Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS
Shot In The Dark: Watching The Bubble Pop
STUMP: The Fiscal State Of Connecticut? Totally Screwed.
The Jawa Report: Everyone Wave Buh Bye To Ali Muhammad Brown
This Ain’t Hell: “Cannabis Candidate” Under Fire, also, CT Governor Says NRA Is “Terrorist Organization”
Victory Girls: McDonald’s Sucks Up For International Womens’ Day
Weasel Zippers: Harvard Giving Hillary Award For “Transformative Impact”, also, Poll – Five Democratic Senators Likely To Lose Seats To GOP
Mark Steyn: The New House Of Peers

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Category: Linkagery

Baltimore Mayor Uses Taxpayer Money to Send Students to Gun-Control Event

Posted on | March 8, 2018 | 2 Comments

Taxpayer-funded Astroturf:

Baltimore’s new Mayor Catherine Pugh is sending public school students to the “March for Our Lives” event in Washington, DC. The event has been organized for the students of Parkland who have been repeatedly exploited by the left to push gun control. Pugh is charging the taxpayers of Baltimore for the trip. . . .
Less than a month ago, Baltimore was named the most dangerous city in the United States.
Baltimore is the big city with the highest per capita murder rate in the nation, with nearly 56 murders per 100,000 people. At 343 murders in 2017, the city tallied the highest per capita rate in its history. Columbus tallied 143 murders — 37 more than 2016 and the most the city has seen in a single year.

If the Democrat Party didn’t demonize police as “racist,” while turning criminals loose on the streets, maybe cities like Baltimore would be safer.

Category: Crime, Democrats

Tucker Carlson: ‘Something Ominous Is Happening to Men in America’

Posted on | March 8, 2018 | 1 Comment

If you did not see Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program Wednesday night, you missed a stunningly detailed description of the problems that are affecting men in America:

The signs are everywhere. If you’re a middle aged man, you probably know a peer who has killed himself in recent years. At least one. If you’re a parent, you may have noticed that your daughter’s friends seem a little more on the ball than your son’s. They get better grades. They smoke much less marijuana. They go to more prestigious colleges. If you’re an employer, you may have noticed that your female employees show up on time, the young men don’t. And of course if you live in this country, you’ve just seen a horrifying series of mass shootings, far more than we’ve ever had. Women didn’t do that. In every case, the shooter was a man.
Something ominous is happening to men in America. Everyone who pays attention knows that. What’s odd is how rarely you hear it publicly acknowledged. Our leaders pledge to create more opportunities for women and girls, whom they imply are failing. Men don’t need help. They’re the patriarchy. They’re fine. More than fine.
But are they fine? Here are the numbers:
Start with the most basic, life and death. The average American man will die five years before the average American woman. One of the reasons for this is addiction. Men are more than twice as likely as women to become alcoholics. They’re also twice as likely to die of a drug OD. In New Hampshire, one of the states hit hardest by the opioid crisis, 73 percent of overdose deaths were men.
But the saddest reason for shortened life spans is suicide. Seventy-seven percent of all suicides in America are committed by men. The overall rate is increasing at a dramatic pace. Between 1997 and 2014, there was a 43 percent rise in suicide deaths among middle-aged American men. The rates are highest among American Indian and white men, who kill themselves at about ten times the rate of Hispanic and black women.
You often hear of America’s incarceration crisis. Well that’s almost exclusively a male problem too. Over 90 percent of inmates are men.
Now these problems are complex, and we know they start young. Relative to girls, boys are failing in school. More girls than boys graduate high school. Considerably more go to and graduate from college. In schools at every level boys account for the overwhelming majority of school discipline cases. One study found that fully one in five high school boys had been diagnosed with hyperactivity disorder, that’s compared with just one in 11 girls. Many of them were medicated for it. The long term health effects of those medications, not fully understood, but they do appear to include depression in later life.
Women now decisively outnumber men in graduate school. They earn the majority of doctoral degrees. They are now the majority of new enrollees in both law and medical schools.
For men, the consequences of failing in school are longterm and profound. Between 1979-2010, working age men with only high school degrees saw their real hourly wages drop about 20 percent. Over the same period, high school educated women saw their wages rise. The decline of the industrial economy disproportionately hurt men.
There are now seven million working age American men who are no longer in the labor force. They’ve dropped out. Nearly half of them take pain medication on any given day. That’s by far highest rate in the world.
Far fewer young men get married than did just a few decades ago, and fewer stay married. About one in five American children live with only their mothers. That’s double the rate in 1970. Millions more boys are growing up without fathers. Young adult men are now more likely to live with a parent than with a spouse or partner. That is not the case for young women. Single women buy their own homes at more than twice the rate of single men. More women than men now have drivers licenses.
Whenever gender differences come up in public debate, the so-called wage gap dominates the conversation. A woman makes 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That’s the statistic you’ll hear. It’s repeated everywhere. But that number compares all American men to all American women across all professions. No legitimate social scientist would consider that a valid measure. The number is both meaningless and intentionally misleading. It’s a talking point.
Once you compare men and women with similar experience working the same hours in similar jobs for the same period of time — and that’s the only way you can measure it — the gap all but disappears. In fact it may invert. One study using census data found that single women in their 20s living in metropolitan areas now earn eight percent more on average than their male counterparts. By the way, the majority of managers in the workplace are now women. Women on average are now scoring higher on IQ tests than men are.
Men are even falling behind physically. A recent study found that almost half of young men failed the Army’s entry-level physical fitness test during basic training. Fully seventy percent of American men are now overweight or obese. That’s compared to 59 percent of American women.
Perhaps most bafflingly or terrifyingly, men seem to be becoming less male. Sperm counts across the west have plummeted, they’re down almost 60 percent since the early 1970s. Scientists don’t know why this is. Testosterone levels in men have also fallen precipitously. One study found that the average levels of male testosterone dropped by one percent every year after 1987. And it’s not unrelated to age. The average 40-year-old-man in 2017 would have testosterone levels 30 percent lower than the average 40-year-old man in 1987. There is no upside to this. Lower testosterone levels in men are associated with depression, lethargy, weight gain and decreased cognitive ability. Nothing like this has ever happened to a population this big. You’d think we’d want to know why and how to fix it. But the media ignore the story. It’s considered a fringe topic.
Nor is it a priority in the scientific research establishment. We checked and couldn’t find a single NIH-funded study on why testosterone levels are falling. We did find a study on, ‘Pubic Hair Grooming Prevalence and Motivation Among Women in the US.’
This is a crisis. Yet our leaders pretend it’s not happening. They tell us the opposite is true: Women are victims, men are oppressors. To question that assumption is to risk punishment. Even as women far outpace men in higher education for example, virtually every college campus supports a women’s studies department, whose core goal is to attack male power. Our politicians and business leaders internalize and amplify that message. Men are privileged. Women are oppressed. Hire and promote and reward accordingly.
Now that would be fine if it were true. But it’s not true. At best, it’s an outdated view of an America that no longer exists. At worst, it’s a pernicious lie.
Either way, ignoring the decline of men does not help anyone. Men and women need each other. One cannot exist without the other. That is elemental biology, but it’s also the reality each one of us has lived, with our parents and siblings and friends. When men fail, all of us suffer. How did this happen? How can we fix it? We hope this series answers those questions.

Watch part one of our series on #MenInAmerica. These statistics are shocking. Full video on Facebook. #Tucker @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/y4kWpF3d2h

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) March 8, 2018

Because I’m sure this will be extensively discussed by the commenters, I won’t go too far with my own discussion, but I do wish to point out how much of this problem is caused by our education system.

Because teachers in K-12 schools are overwhelmingly female, there is a built-in educational prejudice against boys. This prejudice has severely worsened in recent decades because (a) the enforcement of Title IX has resulted in deliberate anti-male discrimination in the name of “diversity,” and (b) radical feminist ideology is now part of the curriculum in the universities where teachers are trained.

It is important to note, also, that some of the statistics cited by Carlson don’t reflect any recent trend. Men have always committed more violent crime than women, and men have always been more prone to suicide. (Women are more likely to threaten or attempt suicide, as a way of getting attention, whereas men are more likely to actually do it.)

Finally, we must realize that statistical trends about collective groups are not predictive of individual outcomes. No young man should feel that he is doomed to defeat by the “male crisis.” However, he may be doomed if he does not realize the nature of the problems he faces. Look at the list of problems Tucker Carlson cites — drug addiction, alcoholism, crime, fatherlessness. All of these reflect individual choices. The young man who hangs around dopeheads and criminals is putting himself at risk, and the young man who abandons his children is putting them at risk.

Tucker Carlson promises to return to the “Men in America” topic every Wednesday this month, and it should be interesting to watch.

Like I keep saying, people need to wake the hell up.

Next week, I expect @TuckerCarlson to discuss how feminists have reacted to #MenInAmerica with mockery and more piling-on of anti-male rhetoric.

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) March 8, 2018

Category: Sex Trouble

The Attitude

Posted on | March 8, 2018 | Comments Off on The Attitude

Mike Damone explains ‘The Attitude.’

Why do some guys win with the ladies and some guys always lose? When I occasionally read the kind of “advice” (if you could call it that) emerging from the so-called “Manosphere,” sometimes I’m troubled by the mood of despair and resentment expressed by these congeries of losers. Let’s face it — if a guy’s really winning, he’s not going to have much time or patience for the endless blabber about “Alpha” vs. “Beta” males, and other pseudo-scientific Darwinian discourse endlessly rehashed among devotees of pickup artist (PUA) culture.

No, if a guy is really winning, he’s so busy with real-life women that he’s not going to spend hours on some PUA forum talking about women as theoretical abstractions. Nor should we expect that the winner would freely share the secrets of his success with losers. Like he’s a philanthropist or something? Being a happily married father of six (now with four grandkids), I could claim a certain expertise in this area, but what would be my motivation to give away this valuable knowledge to every guy with an Internet connection? From the perspective of Darwinian advantage, wouldn’t it behoove me to treat this expertise as a proprietary trade secret, which I share only with my sons? If my sons are winning (and trust me, they are) while so many of their male peers are losing, why should I do anything to clue in the losers? Nevertheless . . .

Because I am such a magnanimous benefactor of humanity, and because I’m sick and tired of reading feminist diatribes inspired by the lame pickup efforts of pathetic losers, I will offer some guidance to steer young men in the general direction of a clue. One of the great teen movies of the 1980s was Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and one of the best scenes in the movie was when nerdy Mark “The Rat” Ratner sought advice from Mike Damone about how to win his dream girl:

Damone: This is what you do — start from the minute you walk into biology. I mean, don’t just walk in. You move across the room. And you don’t talk to her. You use your face. You use your body. You use everything. That’s what I do. I mean I just send out this vibe and I have personally found that women do respond. I mean, something happens.
Ratner: Well, naturally something happens. I mean, you put the vibe out to 30 million chicks, something is gonna happen.
Damone: That’s the idea, Rat. That’s the attitude.
Ratner: The attitude?
Damone: Yeah! The attitude dictates that you don’t care whether she comes, stays, lays, or prays. I mean whatever happens, your toes are still tappin’. Now when you got that, then you have the attitude.

Now, this is just a scene in a comedy film and (spoiler alert) Damone ultimately proves to be a disgusting swine, but important truths are being conveyed here. For starters, notice that Damone begins by telling Ratner not merely to walk, but to move across the room. A young man should learn to carry himself with a sense of poise and style. Good posture and a confident stride are impressive. So often, you can spot a loser merely by the way he stands and moves. The loser slumps and slouches and shuffles. The winner stands tall, and he walks like (a) he knows where he’s going, and (b) he doesn’t have all day to get there. Damone is telling Ratner to be conscious of the message he sends by the way he moves, to think of himself as a performer on a stage, so to speak.

Consistent with that strategy, Damone tells Ratner not to talk to the girl he’s seeking to impress, but rather to communicate his interest by subtle gestures — to “just send out this vibe.” Dear friends, if young men would only heed this advice, we would be spared so many feminist diatribes about the stupid things guys say to women. Here is a clue for you losers: Most women are smart enough to spot a guy who’s on the hunt and, let’s face it, the typical teenage boy is always on the hunt. Read more

Category: Sex

In The Mailbox: 03.07.18

Posted on | March 7, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.07.18

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: How Long Till You Notice?
Twitchy: Dana Loesch Truth-Nukes Anti-Gun Actress Marina Sirtis, Who Isn’t Following Her Own Advice
Louder With Crowder: Male Privilege Is A Myth – Change My Mind (Second Season)
USA Today: How Buffett, Bezos, & Dimon Can Change Our Too Much Health Care Crisis (h/t NeoWayland)

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Harvard – Do As We Say, Not As We Do
American Thinker: Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf Should Be Prosecuted
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
BattleSwarm: 2018 Texas Primary Results
Bring The HEAT: Neptunus Lex – Six Years On
CDR Salamander: History May Not Be Bending The Way You Want It To
Da Tech Guy: A Sensible Partitioning Of California, also, China Under Xi – Trigger Warnings Backed BY Real Triggers
Don Surber: Trump Will End California’s Exploitation Of Mexicans
Dustbury: Where Do They Go From Here?
The Geller Report: GOP Calls For Resignations Of Seven House Democrats With Ties To Anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, also, Utah Muslim Attempts To Detonate Bomb At School
Hogewash: Second Star To The Right, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Joe For America: Department Of Justice Sues California Over Illegals
JustOneMinute: As The World Turns
Legal Insurrection: No Blue Wave In Texas Primaries; Media Shocked To Find Texas Isn’t Just Their Austin Friends, also, Brendan Tevlin’s Jihadi Killer Pleads Guilty
Michelle Malkin: Give VA Secretary Shulkin The Boot
Power Line: How Russia Tried To Block US Energy Production, also, Why Won’t Georgia Protect Christian Speech On Campus?
Shark Tank: Another Democrat Looks To Replace Ros-Lehtinen
Shot In The Dark: Lie First, Lie Always – Why Is Erin Maye Quade Lying?
STUMP: More On Divestment – Your Money? Go For It. Other Peoples’ Money? Not So Fast
The Jawa Report: Meanwhile At Pine View High School
The Political Hat: The Woke White-Free Future Of The BBC
This Ain’t Hell: Two More Plead Guilty In “Fat Leonard” Case, also, “Gunsplaining” To Adam Weinstein
Victory Girls: Political Pundits & Pundits Miss The Mark – Again
Weasel Zippers: NC Monument Singled Out For Vandalism At South Mountain Battlefield, also, Eleven Europeans Caught Trying To Sneak Into The US From Canada
Mark Steyn: And Then There Were Nunberg…, also, Inclusion Riders Of The Showbiz Apocalypse

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Category: Linkagery

History, Race and ‘Science’

Posted on | March 6, 2018 | 3 Comments

Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.
— Hillaire Belloc, 1898

A few days ago, I stumbled across a feminist Tumblr blog called “Fierce Fat Feminist” (“Intersectional Transnational Feminist — Fat Black Babe — Queer”) which offered this startling assertion:

“Race was invented by white people to prove that
white people were superior to all People of Color
to justify murdering them, raping them, and stealing
all their land and resources. That’s why People of Color
can’t be racist towards white people. You can’t
take part in a system that exists solely to oppress you
and people like you, but people who
benefit from that system can and do.”

Challenged on this, “Fierce Fat Feminist” proved the truth of Vox Day’s maxim “SJWs Always Double Down” by adding a series of quotes (apparently cribbed from the “Scientific racism” article on Wikipedia) implying that the concept of race was invented in the 18th century for such purposes (i.e., “to justify murdering . . . People of Color”).

This is a false history, a species of anti-white propaganda intended to incite racial animosity by inflaming a sense of historical grievance. The economist Thomas Sowell addressed such arguments in his 1999 book The Quest for Cosmic Justice which, among other things, addresses the myth of transtemporal injustice. This is the idea that a group of people living in the present day (Victims) are entitled to retribution against other present-day groups of people (Oppressors) whose ancestors may have committed injustices against the ancestors of the Victims.

Sowell so effectively demolished that idea that I need only recommend his book to anyone who might be laboring under such a delusion, but I think it is important to show how historical ignorance is exploited in the service of these misbegotten notions of “social justice.”

Start with this: Time moves in only one direction. No one can go back and change the past, and every person alive is born with a historical inheritance that is beyond his control. It doesn’t matter what your race may be, what the economic condition of your parents or grandparents, whatever wars or plagues or natural catastrophes befell your remote ancestors. Everyone is born with certain advantages or disadvantages, and we have to make the best of our situation in a world where we are powerless to change anything that happened yesterday, much less what happened a hundred years before we were born.

Just to cite one obvious personal example, I was born in 1959, the same year that Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba. When I was 4 years old, one of Castro’s admirers named Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy, forever changing American history.

So many evils of our world today began that fatal November afternoon in Dallas that we can scarcely begin to imagine what America would be like had it not been for JFK’s assassination. As I say, Oswald was inspired by Castro, and also by Soviet Communism, which in turn can be traced directly backward to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, a consequence of the First World War, which began when a Serbian nationalist assassinated the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand. In a sense, then, I was born into a world full of evil that can be blamed directly on a handful of madmen — damn you, Gavrilo Prinzip! — and I might be justified in an eternal hatred of Serbs, or Russians, or Cubans. However, nothing would be gained by basing my worldview on such ancient grudges, and it is pathetically foolish for people to allow themselves to be consumed by impotent rage over past wrongs. Making historical grudges the basis of public policy is a surefire formula for civil war, as demonstrated by the history of the Balkans, the Middle East and other such cases where perpetual animosity results from a sense of inherited grievances.

The Fallacy of Collective Guilt

“Fierce Fat Feminist” would have us believe that history (“Race was invented by white people,” etc.) defines a “system” which means that “People of Color can’t be racist towards white people.” In other words, hating white people in 2018 is justified because white people in the past allegedly did all that “murdering . . . raping . . . and stealing.”

Implied in that assertion is that (a) white people were uniquely guilty of such wrongs, (b) “People of Color” have never historically committed any similar wrongs, and (c) the uniquely evil past of white people means that they deserve to be hated. The logical flaws of such claims are so obvious that I won’t insult my readers’ intelligence by refuting “Fierce Fat Feminist” point-by-point. Suffice it to say that collective guilt is a fallacy.

How am I to blame for, e.g., Pizarro’s conquest of Peru? Certainly my own obscure 16th-century British ancestors were not consulted by the Spanish in matters of colonial policy in Peru, nor were my more recent ancestors consulted in regard to U.S. policy toward the Lakota Sioux. You want to blame me for General Custer? That would be a shock to my Alabama and Texas ancestors, who spent four years fighting Custer and the whole damned U.S. Army. Not that I wish to rekindle that old dispute, you see, but the collective category “white people” includes an awful lot of people who aren’t me, or remotely related to me, and I resent being hated for things those other white people did.

Every man is accountable to God for his own sins, and certainly no Christian can justify hating someone because of that person’s ancestry. Nothing could be more foolish. My Scottish ancestors and my English ancestors were mortal enemies, once upon a time, and because I married a Yankee — my wife is from Ohio — my own children have an inheritance from both sides of the bloodiest war in American history. My oldest daughter’s husband is of Argentine ancestry, and I sometimes annoy him by loudly singing “Rule Britannia” to tease him about Argentina’s defeat in the Falklands War, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t mind the joke.

Well, what about “scientific racism”? What about “Fierce Fat Feminist” and her claim that white people “invented” the concept of race merely to justify their own sense of superiority? One of the interesting things about science is that one must be literate to produce science or to consume it. That is to say, science has no proper meaning except to those who can read and write and, until Gutenberg invented the printing press circa 1450, science was restricted to a comparative handful of the cultural elite who had access to manuscripts. It was the revolution wrought by Gutenberg’s invention that permitted mass production of literature — including scientific literature — and even then, it must be remembered, the printed word was only influential among those whose education enabled them to read. As recently as the 19th century, public education was not universally available in Europe or America, most people were quite poor by modern standards, and whatever science had to say about racial differences circa 1800 (or even 1900), this did not reflect the beliefs or knowledge of anyone except the scientists themselves.

How foolish, then, to blame “white people” collectively for whatever views of race were circulated as science among the educated elite of the 19th or 18th centuries? Let the curious reader purchase a copy of Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color — a very influential book in the 1920s, written by a Harvard Ph.D. — and see what sort of insulting assertions he makes about white people who are not of “Nordic” ancestry. Italians, Spaniards and Greeks are disparagingly lumped into the “Mediterranean” category and, as for the Jews — oh, let’s not even start about what a Harvard man had to say about Jews circa 1920.

Scientific progress is a wonderful thing to study, if you have both the ability and the time to do it, and I think the 21st-century scholar could benefit from reading Stoddard’s work just to see which of his claims of “science” have been discredited. On the other hand, I hesitate to recommend this topic, for fear that some readers might conclude that Stoddard wasn’t entirely wrong about everything. But I digress . . .

We should be cautious when making categorical statements about large groups that include millions of human individuals, the way “Fierce Fat Feminist” has done by assigning to “white people” a collective guilt for “murdering . . . raping . . . and stealing.”

This is an insult, and insults lead to resentment. Does anyone suppose that “white people,” as a collective group, will forever be content to shrug off this kind of insulting racial guilt-trip? Any sober student of history must conclude that “Fierce Fat Feminist” is a fool to imagine she can haphazardly hurl such provocative anti-white insults onto the Internet without consequence. Even if you know nothing of history, however, why do you think Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton? And why do you think liberals were so surprised by Hillary’s defeat?

We could hypothesize that a major contributing factor in Trump’s victory was that a lot of white people in 2016 were fed up with the kind of “intersectional” nonsense emerging from the Left. The campus rape hysteria, the Black Lives Matter movement, university student protests — every time you turned on the news there was an idiotic mob screaming for “social justice” because they’d been “triggered” or whatever.

“America Was NEVER Great” — I remember standing in the middle of that protest in Cleveland during the 2016 Republican convention and noticing that there were maybe 300 protesters, 400 reporters there to cover the protest, and 800 cops to maintain order. Nobody was harassed or assaulted, nobody’s civil rights were violated. Academic celebrity Cornell West showed up and gave a speech, then everybody paraded down the streets to protest against the alleged “racism” of police. But as I say, there were hundreds of armed police on the scene, none of whom engaged in any police brutality, despite the provocation of a Communist mob waving anti-police signs and chanting anti-police slogans:

“There will be no peace unless there is justice,” Professor Cornell West said Tuesday in a speech to an anti-police rally here organized by the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). Speaking through a megaphone amid a crowd of protesters gathered at Public Square in downtown Cleveland, West invoked “the legacy of white supremacy in this country that goes back 400 years” to condemn police.
West spoke in front of a giant RCP banner declaring, “Time to Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution. STOP MURDER BY POLICE.” Activists with the RCP held aloft signs that read, “America Was NEVER Great! We Need to OVERTHROW This System!”

If I could see the absurdity of such protests, as a reporter on the scene, wasn’t the absurdity apparent to everyone else? Imagine a middle-class Ohio voter, coming home from his job, switching on the TV news and seeing coverage of that protest. “Those people are crazy,” says the Ohio voter, cracking open a cold beer, as he decides to vote for Trump.

Liberals never saw this coming, because liberals live inside an echo chamber where everybody watches MSNBC and shares their certainty that (a) “racism” is the worst thing in the world, and (b) the Republican Party is the political vehicle of “racism” in America. It never occurs to the liberal to question either (a) or (b), because if anyone ever begins to doubt these ideas, it won’t take too much scrutiny for them to discover how absurd these beliefs are, and they won’t be a liberal anymore.

A few weeks ago, I told a friend that there are two books every conservative should read if they want to understand how liberals think: Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951) and Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (1995). The herd mentality of the indignant mob — e.g., the “intersectional” queer feminist on Tumblr — cannot be understood as a rational response to objective reality. Rather, liberalism can only be understood as a psychological and emotional phenomenon. People living in a prosperous society with a freely elected government don’t join a Communist protest march (or spend their time ranting about racism on Tumblr) because they are “oppressed,” in any objective sense of that word. Instead, it is their subjective emotions — and their ignorance of objective reality — which explains why they succumb to the mob mentality.

One of the chief causes of this derangement is the failure of our education system to teach history. Properly taught, history requires students to step outside their own subjective feelings — what are my feelings about Serbian nationalism? — and view events objectively. It is extraordinarily difficult for me to be objective about the Battle of Gettysburg, when I know that my great-grandfather was captured there just east of Willoughby Run and spent the next two years as a prisoner of war in Fort Delaware. Yet because the study of history requires me to consider this in comparison to other events (e.g., the Battle of the Somme, where the British Fourth Army suffered more than 50,000 casualties on the first day of a battle that lasted more than four months), I am less likely to feel any especial hurt over my ancestor’s misfortune. Alas, the teaching of history has been hijacked by “social justice” ideologues who seek to advance a left-wing political agenda by indoctrinating young people with a sense of permanent rage about the “oppression” attributed to racism, sexism, homophobia, capitalism, imperialism, etc.

What the politicization of history has produced is a generation of allegedly “educated” young people with a shockingly shallow knowledge of actual history, but with very deep feelings about “injustice.” Handed diplomas that certify them as being “educated,” these ignorant young fools may then spend the rest of their lives searching around for “evidence” of the injustices that they have been taught to believe are everywhere in “a system that exists solely to oppress you.”

Victims of ‘Cisheteronormative Patriarchy’

Nothing could be more absurd than students at elite universities imagining themselves waging war against “oppression.” Yet in 2016, progressives at the University of Southern California (where the cost of attendance is $69,144 a year, including room and board) mounted an effort to impeach a conservative member of the student government who was accused, among other things, of “undermining the work . . . of our Women’s Student Assembly.” Upon investigation, I discovered that the executive director of the USC Women’s Student Assembly, Vanessa Diaz, called for the “dismantling of our capitalist imperialist white supremacist cisheteronormative patriarchy.”

Is anyone still surprised that Donald Trump got elected? What could be more perfectly calculated to piss off a working-class voter in Wisconsin than the spectacle of a girl at a $70,000-a-year elite private university claiming to be a victim of “cisheteronormative patriarchy”?

We live in a world where actual science has produced the marvelous technology that not enables “Fierce Fat Feminist” to rant endlessly on Tumblr about racism, but also allows white voters in Wisconsin to read about dimwit college students protesting in Southern California. And in the months leading up to the 2016 election, it seemed dimwit college students everywhere were protesting against some sort of oppression. For example, at elite Oberlin College ($68,672 a year, including room and board), students in December 2015 were angry that there were too many white musicians in the jazz band. They demanded “a 4% annual increase in the enrollment of Black students in the Jazz Department starting in 2016 to accumulate to 40% increase by the year 2022.”

How many votes for Donald Trump do you think were produced by that kind of “social justice” protest? Because, as I say, this left-wing protest mob mentality seemed to be everywhere in the months leading up to the 2016 election. Surely, I wasn’t the only one who noticed it, nor do I think I was alone in suspecting that these protests were ginned up by activists trying to mobilize young people to vote for Hillary Clinton.

Liberals never expected that this kind of activism could backfire, which is one reason they were so surprised on Election Night 2016. Perhaps if they had studied history more carefully, they might have anticipated a negative reaction to the insulting accusations of racism and sexism that were the rhetorical output of these left-wing protest mobs.

Studying history, you learn a lot about human nature, including the fact that people get angry when they are unfairly accused of wrongdoing — “murdering . . . raping . . . and stealing” — so that this kind of collective scapegoating inevitably produces a backlash. Think about that Trump voter in Wisconsin or Ohio, the white guy who gets up every morning and goes to work to pay the bills, just trying to give his kids a better life. Does that guy want to listen to “Fierce Fat Feminist” lecture him about his collective racial guilt? Probably not, but he damned sure doesn’t want to be lectured by Mika Brzezinski (Williams College, Class of ’89) about why he’s a “sexist” because he didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton (Wellesley College, Class of ’69, Yale Law, Class of ’73). All these rich people with their elite college degrees keep telling that white working-class guy that he is what’s wrong with America, and on Nov. 8, 2016, he voted for Donald Trump as a gesture of his contempt for the liberal elite.

Every time I call attention to idiot Tumblrinas like “Fierce Fat Feminist,” they respond by claiming that I’m engaged in “harassment,” trying to “intimidate” or “silence” them, but nothing could be further from the truth. As a conservative, nothing better suits my purposes than for these idiots to have a platform to spew the toxic contents of their warped minds, so everyone can see what liberal “education” has produced.

Maybe I’m not an expert in “science,” but I’ve studied enough history to learn a few things about human nature, and my hunch is that the election of Donald Trump was not a one-time fluke. The ordinary American’s resentment of our nation’s decadent elite has been building up for many years, and the elite have been desperately trying to suppress the political force of this resentment, which Trump so adroitly harnessed in 2016. The elite keep trying to distract Americans with media sideshows and carnival barkers like Jimmy Kimmel, but their propaganda project is failing. This year’s Oscars had the worst ratings ever, and CNN doesn’t have a single show in the Top 20 of cable-news ratings. Our decadent elite have sown the wind, and they are beginning to reap the whirlwind.

When white people are constantly lectured about their racism, many of them will respond exactly as the lecturers intend, by internalizing a sense of collective guilt. However, some people will predictably react against these lectures and their response will be, “F–k yeah, racism!”

That kind of backlash is the real danger of the “social justice” mentality, which celebrates victimhood as a heroic achievement. This is why you see highly privileged young people at elite universities absurdly claiming to be oppressed by “cisheteronormative patriarchy.” Yet there is a sort of Newtonian principle in politics, so that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction, and the opposite reaction — the backlash against “social justice” ideology — is likely to be quite ferocious, when the elite lack any kind of sympathy and understanding toward the people being demonized by this collective racial guilt-trip.

What does Mika Brzezinski know about the plight of a steelworker in Youngstown or a forklift drive in Kenosha? Nothing at all, and yet she and the rest of her snobby elitist media clique never hesitate to derogate the white working-class voter who rejects their liberal worldview.

It doesn’t really matter much what science says about race, because scientists constantly disagree with each other and today’s latest research will be contradicted by a new study published tomorrow. Cautious skepticism toward claims of “science” is really the most scientific viewpoint of all, but fools are not generally cautious or skeptical.

The fool is more likely to become The True Believer, a fanatical devotee of one of those “mass movements” that concerned Eric Hoffer. There is no shortage of fools in the world, or otherwise CNN and MSNBC would have even smaller audiences than they already do. There are all kinds of fools — Democrat fools, Republican fools, “intersectional” queer feminist fools — and in politics, the competing mobs of fools usually manage to cancel each other out, producing a Hegelian synthesis of folly, so to speak.

From time to time, however, this balance can shift quite suddenly, producing cataclysmic upheavals. History teaches that anarchy, civil strife and war can erupt unexpectedly in the most prosperous societies. The Peloponnesian War, our own Civil War, the First World War — the pages of history are cluttered with such examples, just as we can read of once-mighty empires that collapsed as a result of cultural decadence.

How many students today have read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? In my home library, there’s a big three-volume set of that classic history, which I’ve read through twice, but which I’m reasonably sure none of my children have ever bothered reading. If my kids haven’t read Gibbon, I doubt very much their peers have bothered with it, and so know nothing of this lesson, how the Romans fell victim to decadence until finally their empire was overrun by barbarians.

Our ancestors, who bequeathed to Americans this constitutional republic, securing to us “the blessings of liberty” after winning our independence in a war against the British Empire, were well aware of the lessons of history. It is now fashionable in academia to scorn the Founders as a bunch of racists, but this is the kind of nonsense we expect from our intellectual elite. What could be more decadent than a Ph.D. being paid a six-figure salary to teach the children of the rich (whose parents are paying $70,000 a year for this “education”) to hate their own country as “a system that exists solely to oppress . . . People of Color”?

Well, you “can’t be racist towards white people,” according to the “Fierce Fat Feminist,” but you can insult people by falsely accusing them of “racism,” and history teaches us that this kind of rhetoric — demonizing scapegoats for the sake of politics — never leads to good results.

Like I keep saying, people need to wake the hell up.