Sheppard’s Long Night’s Journey

Posted on | January 1, 2018 | Comments Off on Sheppard’s Long Night’s Journey

by Smitty

The Information Age has lowered barriers to entry across the board. One is truly grateful for the breadth of people met in the last decade. By hanging out with Stacy McCain, I got to go to CPAC, and be in the right place to meet Andrew Breitbart. That led to being in the right place at the Tax Day Tea Party to ask a question of Andrew pertaining to the Kill the Bill protest, and have someone else I suspect it was Mr. Pinko, film over my shoulder, capture the moment, and have it get into Hating Breitbart. I can claim with graphic evidence that I had a hand in Hating Brietbart. My right hand.

The same spirit of community pertains to Long Night’s Journey Into Day. M. Joseph Sheppard has been an online friend for years. His “A Point Of View” point of view has been a consistent supporter of things conservative. It’s great to see that has published an online collection of posts. I have done this myself, as has Stacy McCain, and a couple of other bloggers. These little vanity tomes are a fantastic way to remember what happened; a sort of public diary, if you will.

Sarah Palin aficionados will especially welcome this document, as Sheppard captures her major public acts in a chronological fashion. I’ve always admired her charisma (I guess the 2008 Northern Virginia rally appearance she made with Stacy’s cousin predated my blogging debut.) Given that I come from about the same stripe of Evangelical Christianity, I’ve both admired the lady, and understood that her priorities seem to have tended more toward family than public service of late.

Blogging is a in keeping with the American tradition. I’ve been mostly on haiatus while enjoying the two little ones. But the historical continuity from the Founders thumbing their noses at the British Parliament runs through to the modern Tea Party thumbing its nose at Progressivism. Ensuring that these boys are raised to understand that it’s in God, not Government we trust is key to protecting Liberty. And that’s what blogs in general, and Sheppard in particular, all about.

Category: Uncategorized

Cynthia Yockey Is a Real Woman Battling the Trans Cult, and She Needs Your Help

Posted on | January 1, 2018 | 3 Comments

Andrew Breitbart (left) with Cynthia Yockey (right) at CPAC 2012.

The first time I met Cynthia Yockey was in the lobby of the Omni Shoreham Hotel at CPAC 2009, and her story fascinated me. Cynthia had been a Democrat, one of the PUMA (“Party Unity My A–”) women, supporters of Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries enraged by what they saw as the sexist tactics of Barack Obama’s campaign. Although most of the PUMAs eventually reconciled themselves to Obama’s nomination, Cynthia was so angry she decided to give conservatives a chance, and you can read her account of being welcomed with open arms at CPAC. (Among other things, I made sure she got invited to all the good parties.) Cynthia was part of the crowd at the gigantic Tea Party rally on the D.C. Mall in September 2009, and when I flew back from covering the 2012 Florida primary, she gave me a ride home from the airport. Cynthia was a friend of Andrew Breitbart, and more recently has become a one-woman army determined to battle the transgender cult:

Powered by a coalition of wealthy leftist non-profits, transgender activists have seized control of social media, magazines, news media, teachers’ unions, public schools, and universities, mostly by establishing policies that make it hate speech and bullying to say things like “women don’t have penises,” “men don’t have babies,” and “nothing changes your sex.” . . .
As a conservative lesbian, I’m in a unique position to lead the battle against the destructive, totalitarian transgender activist agenda because the left can’t attack me with bogus claims of prejudice without committing real acts of prejudice themselves. Also, in my book I have created a win-win agenda that will protect women and children without harming the rights of transgender people. But right now the payment for work I’ve done that would cover my bills this month is indefinitely delayed. I don’t know how I’m going to keep the lights and heat on, never mind the Internet connection I need to do my work and finish my book. . . .

You can read the whole thing, and you can also read some of the work Cynthia has recently been doing at the Capital Research Center’s Bombthrowers blog, including a report about how activists tried to get a Boise State University professor fired for opposing their agenda:

Professor [Scott] Yenor writes their next big goal is to promote the transgender activist agenda, especially its drive to repeal age of consent laws so that children may self-diagnose as transgender and be socially and medically transitioned without their parents’ knowledge or consent. . . .
As a conservative lesbian and author of the forthcoming book, War in the Women’s Room: How to Get Men in Dresses Out of Women’s Spaces and Save Your Children from Confusion about Their Sex, published by Dangerous Books, I can tell you repealing age of consent laws to allow children to diagnose themselves as transgender is indeed a major goal of the transgender movement, but it is being pushed by people of testosterone, not feminists. Even the pussy-hat feminists didn’t include or give center stage to transgender activists in their big march on Washington, D.C., the day after President Trump’s inauguration.
In fact, second- and third-wave feminists are at war with one another over the demands of transgender activists that feminists must consider men to be women, if they say they are, and even privilege them above natal women because they demand special treatment.
It is transgender activists of testosterone who seek control of children and their schools to indoctrinate and convert children to their dogma that biological sex is irrelevant to determining a person’s nature. At the same time, they argue that gender, also known as taste in clothes and social presentation, has mutually exclusive qualities. They say gender is something that can be imposed on children as a social construct, yet also innate and essential, which allows them to argue they were “born this way.” As I explain in detail in my upcoming book, the reasons why transgender activists are doing this to children have to do with the largely hidden real reasons people become transgender and the fact that they discovered their campaigns . . . succeed when they use children as visual persuasion devices. . . .

Powerful stuff there, and you’ll note that Cynthia indicts “people of testosterone” (i.e., males who “identify” as women) for promoting this weird agenda. When I first started covering the internecine conflict between radical feminists and transgender activists in January 2014, my attitude was that this was a battle between two competing victimhood lobbies on the Left. The more I paid attention to it, however, the more I realized that the radical feminists, crazy as they may be, were at least fighting in defense of biological facts. Their opponents are a cult which promotes denial of scientific truth with propaganda targeting vulnerable youth. The Transgender Cult is one of the most wicked things I’ve ever encountered in more than three decades of journalism. As I have argued (“The Problem With ‘Gender Equality’ and How SJWs Reached Their Stalingrad”), transgender activists are exploiting basic errors in the feminist movement’s ideology to advance an anti-woman agenda.

What makes the transgender cult so dangerous is its totalitarian demand for the suppression of dissent, its quasi-Stalinist subversion of reality: “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.” By compelling people to repeat falsehoods — e.g., to address Zachary Antolak as “Zinnia Jones” — and thereby participate in deception, transgender activists seek to corrupt society in a profound way. Their effort to silence opposition has led to violence (“Transgender Bullies Make Worldwide News After Attack in London’s Hyde Park”) and yet, in a complete reversal of reality, these fanatical bullies claim that they are actually the victims of “hate.”

Cynthia Yockey is working to expose the truth. As she says, she is “in a unique position” to speak out on this issue, and when her book is published, I think a lot of people will take notice. In the meantime, however, she’s two days away from getting her Internet service shut off, and so I am asking readers to go hit Cynthia’s tip jar, which I’ve already done. She wrote in an email to me: “I was in tears yesterday wondering how I would meet this bill, then I prayed. I hope this turns out to be the answer to my prayers.” However much you can give — $5 or $10 or $20 — will help. Thanks in advance, and may God bless you.

UPDATE: You did it! Cynthia has posted her thanks to everyone who contributed, and I hope you’ll follow her on Twitter.

Got $17.76? Here's the PayPal link https://t.co/hFr2RtSpPx to help support Cynthia Yockey's work. She's been praying. @conservativelez

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) January 1, 2018

Category: Cynthia Yockey, Sex Trouble, The Transgender Cult

Death by SWATting: A Former Target’s Thoughts About a Deadly ‘Prank’

Posted on | December 31, 2017 | Comments Off on Death by SWATting: A Former Target’s Thoughts About a Deadly ‘Prank’

Tyler Barriss was arrested for a deadly SWATting incident this week.

SWATting is attempted murder. In 2013, I was the target of a SWATting, which is a type of hoax in which someone (usually using online services that can mimic a telephone number) calls 911 to make a false report of a violent crime at an address, typically claiming to have murdered someone and threatening further violence. This results in police dispatching a heavily armed SWAT (special weapons and tactics) team to the residence.

Now, SWATting has claimed its first life, an innocent Kansas man who happened to live at an address that a Call of Duty player wrongly believed was the residence of another player he was angry at:

Blue and red lights flashed outside of the McCormick Street house just after 6 p.m. on Thursday. Curious of what was going on, Andrew Finch, 28, opened the door.
“I heard my son scream, I got up and then I heard a shot,” his mother, Lisa Finch, said Friday morning.
Finch and other relatives invited reporters into their home Friday morning — more than 12 hours after Wichita police said an officer fatally shot a 28-year-old man, who was identified by family as Andrew “Andy” Finch. . . .
On Thursday, Deputy Wichita Police Chief Troy Livingston said a substation received a call that there was a hostage situation in a house in the 1000 block of West McCormick — and that someone had been shot in the head. . . .
Online gamers have said in multiple Twitter posts that the shooting was the result of a “swatting” call involving two gamers.
Andrew Finch was not involved in the online game, according to his mother and people in the gaming community.
“He doesn’t play video games,” Finch said. “He has better things to do with his time.”

The suspected 25-year-old SWATter was arrested in California:

Los Angeles police on Friday arrested Tyler Barriss, who law enforcement claimed is the “prankster” who called 911 and made up a story about a kidnapping in Wichita, ABC 7 reported. . . .
In the audio of the 911 call, the caller claimed his father had been shot in the head and that he was holding his mother and a sibling at gunpoint. The caller added that he poured gasoline inside the home and “might just set it on fire.” . . .
Dexerto, an online news service focused on gaming, reported that the series of events began with an online argument over a $1 or $2 wager in a “Call of Duty” game on UMG Gaming, which operates online tournaments including one involving “Call of Duty.” . . .
The FBI estimates that roughly 400 cases of swatting occur annually, with some using caller ID spoofing to disguise their number.

Tyler Barriss was arrested in October 2015 for making bomb threats to KABC-TV in Los Angeles. Barriss was charged with two felony counts of a false report of a bomb to an agency of business and one felony count of criminal threats, which raises the question, why wasn’t he in prison? Are prosecutors and courts not taking such crimes seriously?

In 2012, Andrew Breitbart warned about the "horrifying act" of SWATting. https://t.co/mZOFsw64xe pic.twitter.com/8KGSIpEgJE

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) December 31, 2017

Although SWATting originated as a “prank” in the online gaming community, this dangerous tactic has also been used as a form of political terrorism. This was what Patrick “Patterico” Frey believed happened to him. Frey had written about convicted bomber-turned-progressive activist Brett Kimberlin, and also about the 2011 Anthony Weiner sexting scandal. In July 2011, Frey was SWATted, which became part of a very complex story that attracted my attention in May 2012, and led eventually to a SWATing directed at me in March 2013.

Mir Islam was sentenced to prison for SWATting.

In July 2016, a 22-year-old New York man named Mir Islam was sentenced to federal prison in that case. He also targeted many others, including tech writer Brian Krebs, Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association and a University of Arizona cheerleader that Islam spent months cyberstalking. As I wrote at the time of Islam’s sentencing:

What the reader should ask themselves is this question: “Why would the NRA president, a conservative blogger like Stacy McCain, and a tech security guy like Brian Krebs all be targeted by Mir Islam (and his yet-to-be-identified co-conspirators) in 2013?”
While the reader is speculating on that, let me add a very curious fact: I wasn’t living at the address that was SWATted in March 2013.
In May 2012, after I started reporting on the Brett Kimberlin case, concern for my family’s safety caused me to move to “an undisclosed location” outside Maryland. However, certain people who were allied with Brett Kimberlin — among them, deranged cyberstalker Bill Schmalfeldt — went to extraordinary lengths to defame me, and one of their character-assassination tactics was to claim that I had lied about moving out of state. Over and over, these allies of Brett Kimberlin falsely claimed online that I was still living at my former address in Maryland.
And guess which address was SWATted in March 2013?
Yep. A young couple with an infant daughter was living at my family’s former address, and the terrifying ordeal of being confronted in the middle of the night by a heavily armed police tactical unit was a trauma that they will never forget. Who is ultimately to blame for that incident?

Just as in the Wichita case that led to the death of Andrew Finch this week, the 2013 SWATting targeted at me involved the wrong address, so that innocent people who never had anything to do with my enemies were confronted by armed police in the middle of the night. Journalists who use “prank” to describe SWATting are seriously misrepresenting a very dangerous crime. Patterico argues that the SWATter in the Wichita case should be charged with murder, after hearing a man believed to be Barris being interviewed about this deadly incident:

The lack of remorse or empathy is infuriating if not surprising.
If you believe his story, he was not involved in the argument that precipitated the SWATting. Two gamers were playing Call of Duty online and got into an argument. One gamer (we’ll call him Gamer #1) gave a fake address to the other gamer (we’ll call him Gamer #2) and challenged Gamer #2 to SWAT him. Gamer #2 then contacted the SWATter and said, basically, some guy gave me an address and thinks he isn’t going to get SWATted. Want to prove him wrong? The SWATter said sure; after all, he SWATs people all the time. Then Gamer #1 contacted the SWATter on Twitter and taunted him, further spurring the SWATter to make the SWATting call.
If this story is to be believed, several other people were involved in this incident, from the police officer who fired the fatal shot, to Gamer #1 who provided the fake address, to Gamer #2 who solicited the SWATting.
But never mind all that. If it’s Barriss, I want him to go down for murder.

Reporting by Brian Krebs indicates that Barriss was behind the handles “SWauTistic” and “GoredTutor36” on Twitter:

KrebsOnSecurity managed to obtain several weeks’ worth of tweets from Swautistic before his account was renamed. Those tweets indicate that Swautistic is a serial swatter — meaning he has claimed responsibility for a number of other recent false reports to the police.
Among the recent hoaxes he’s taken credit for include a false report of a bomb threat at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that disrupted a high-profile public meeting on the net neutrality debate. Swautistic also has claimed responsibility for a hoax bomb threat that forced the evacuation of the Dallas Convention Center, and another bomb threat at a high school in Panama City, Fla, among others.
After tweeting about the incident extensively this afternoon, KrebsOnSecurity was contacted by someone in control of the @GoredTutor36 Twitter account. GoredTutor36 said he’s been the victim of swatting attempts himself, and that this was the reason he decided to start swatting others.
He said the thrill of it “comes from having to hide from police via net connections.” Asked about the FCC incident, @GoredTutor36 acknowledged it was his bomb threat. “Yep. Raped em,” he wrote.
“Bomb threats are more fun and cooler than swats in my opinion and I should have just stuck to that,” he wrote. “But I began making $ doing some swat requests.”

If this is true — that Barriss was a serial hoaxer, who targeted a federal agency and was actually paid for SWATting other people — his arrest should be the beginning of a serious crackdown on such crimes. As my friend Pete Da Tech Guy points out, the mainstream media ignored the menace of SWATting five years ago, when conservatives were being targeted for harassment. Perhaps they’ll pay attention now.

Category: Crime, Terrorism, The Kimberlin Files

TWO MEN CHARGED IN MURDER OF LESBIAN COUPLE, TWO CHILDREN

Posted on | December 30, 2017 | 4 Comments

Murder suspects Justin Mann (left) and James White (right).

Breaking news from upstate New York:

Two Schenectady men were arraigned on several murder charges Saturday morning following the brutal slayings of two women and two children.
Justin C. Mann and James W. White are each charged with a count of first-degree murder and four counts of second-degree murder, according to police.
Information given in court Saturday said the killings took place at about 9 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 21. The victims were found in the basement of 158 Second Ave. [in Troy, N.Y.] on Tuesday by the apartment caretaker.
Mann, 24, of 627 Hamilton St. and White, 38, of 850 Albany St. pleaded not guilty in Troy City Court as several family members of the victims looked on. Rensselaer County District Attorney Joel Abelove was also present. . . .
During a press conference, Troy Police Chief John Tedesco said the two were apprehended without incident at 627 Hamilton St. in Schenectady. He said one of the defendants knew one of the victims but would not elaborate.
He and Abelove would not discuss the motive and declined to answer a number of questions about the case, including the method of the killings, citing the investigation. They would not say how the two suspects know each other, but said that both have records and Mann is on parole.

(Hat-tip: Kirby McCain on Twitter.)

UPDATE: As previously reported here, the victims were Shanta Myers, 36, her girlfriend Brandi Mells, 22, and two of Ms. Myers’ children, Jeremiah, 11, and Shanise, 5. Ms. Myers’ 15-year-old son Isaiah was on a trip to a basketball tournament when his family was killed, and was the lone survivor. The question of motive remains.

Left to right: Shanta Myers, Brandi Mells, Jeremiah Myers, Shanise Myers.

UPDATE II: The Daily Mail reports that the arrests followed a tearful televised plea by a sister of one of the victims:

Before the arrests . . . Shakera Symes, the sister of 36-year-old victim Shanta, appealed to the public. ‘Give the information to the authorities so that they can help find the person who has destroyed us, emotionally, mentally. It feels like somebody has ripped us to shreds,’ she said.
‘My sister was supposed to be with me and her children, all three of them for Christmas. And I got robbed of that,’ she emotionally told reporters.
She said her and the rest of the family are completely and utterly heartbroken. ‘It feels like somebody ripped us to shreds and we only have each other right now and we are grasping and holding on to each other for dear life.’

Both of the men arrested have criminal records, police said, but released no details of what crimes the suspects have previously committed. If their offenses were violent, the question will inevitably be raised, why were these two criminals out on the street, and not in prison?

Justin Mann, 24, is lead away to jail after pleading not guilty to four counts of felony murder, including one first degree charge. pic.twitter.com/Q3BjA0UkEz

— Dan Levy (@dlevywnyt) December 30, 2017

UPDATE III: The 22-year-old victim reportedly “hung out” with the 24-year-old accused of quadruple murder:

One of Myers’ family members told The Daily Beast that Mells was buddies with Mann, who is now accused of butchering her and her girlfriend’s family.
“I never seen him before a day in my life, neither of them,” Shanta Myers’ nephew Khalif Coleman said. “But some of my family members recognize him as Brandi’s friend. He supposedly always hung out with her.”
Department of Corrections records show Mann was released on parole in June. He was convicted of first-degree robbery in 2014.

So, just three years after being convicted of robbery, Mann was turned loose and, six months later, is now accused of mass murder.

Category: Gays, Violence Against Women

‘Heinous Atrocity’: N.Y. Lesbian Couple, Two Children Brutally Murdered

Posted on | December 30, 2017 | 1 Comment

Left to right: Shanta Myers, Brandi Mells, Jeremiah Myers, Shanise Myers.

News from Troy, N.Y.:

Police are working to try and unravel the mystery of who killed a woman, her partner and her two young children, whose bodies were found in a riverfront apartment house the day after Christmas.
“After being in this business for 43 years, I can’t describe the savagery of a person who would do this,” said Troy Police Chief John Tedesco.
Police on Thursday identified the victims as Shanta Myers, 36; Brandi Mells, 22; Jeremiah Myers, 11; and Shanise Myers, 5. Shanta Myers, the mother of both children, was in a relationship with Mells, the police chief said. Investigators declined to confirm the method of death or any details regarding the scene of the crime.
Tedesco declared during a news conference that the killings were “not a random act,” but wouldn’t say why he believed that was the case.
A property manager found the bodies Tuesday after being asked to check on the welfare of the residents of the apartment, one of five in a house located in the city’s Lansingburgh section along the Hudson River just north of Albany, police said.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt that a person who committed this crime is capable of anything,” Tedesco said, adding that police don’t believe there was an imminent danger to the public.
Police didn’t know when the slayings occurred, but Tedesco said he hoped autopsies being conducted Wednesday would provide clues. State police were involved in the investigation along with New York parole officials, Tedesco said.
“This will be a full-court press, if you will, until we bring someone to justice,” he said, adding that police were seeking any information the public may have about the crime. . . .
“This heinous atrocity is unimaginable, incomprehensible. I believe it affects the whole community,” said the Rev. Jackie Robinson, pastor of Oak Grove Baptist Church in Troy, who did not know the family. “Kids are traumatized. A lot of adults are traumatized too, because this monster is still out there.”

The Albany Times-Union reported that “all four of the victims were bound, with their throats cut.” The basement apartment where this occurred was in a large home that had been subdivided into five apartments. We must ask how four people could be tied up and murdered — and no one in the other apartments heard anything at the time — if there was only one killer. The police say this crime was not “random,” but neither have police suggested that the murder of a black lesbian couple and their children was a “hate crime.”

When I was tipped to this story by my brother Kirby, my immediate suspicion was that this must be a personal crime, perhaps perpetrated by the father of one of Ms. Myers’ children. But then Kirby suggested another possibility: MS-13. Could this be gang-related violence? Earlier this year, for example, police say four men were hacked to death in a New York park by MS-13 in what was described as an “initiation” for gang members. And the Rensselaer County Sheriff warned in July that MS-13 could be a problem in their area. But this is only speculation, however.

What do we actually know about the victims? The younger woman, Ms. Mells, dropped out of high school in a town near Syracuse in 2013. Ms. Myers was originally from North Carolina, and moved to Troy in 2011:

Myers was described by friends and family as a “great mother” who took her kids to school and picked them up every day, once worked at a homeless shelter, and had been toiling at a fast-food restaurant to support her kids.
“She was just a very sweet, sweet girl,” Equasia Watson, 30, who lived on the same floor of a River Street housing complex where Myers and her children previously resided, told The Post.
“I knew her from when she moved here from down South,” she said. “My son played with her son. We had dinners together. She took her kids to school. She went to work. She got her kids from school. She was always with them kids. She was a great mother.”
Myers’ sister told Spectrum News that Mells, who began dating Myers three years ago after the two met at a bar, loved Jeremiah and Shanise very much and treated them as her own.
“[Mells] was a little person, but her heart was bigger than she was,” close pal Dria Hector told NBC News, noting how Mells had dwarfism.
“She was very real. She spoke the truth. She was a sweet person, but she could have her bad days, like we all do.”

Myers had an older son, Isaiah, 15, who survived because he was away at a basketball tournament at the time his family was murdered.

There is an element of mystery about this “heinous atrocity.” Who committed this crime and what was the motive? And why haven’t feminists called attention to this act of “violence against women”? We must await developments in the police investigation, but let me go on record with my own hunch: The perpetrators were not Trump voters.

UPDATE: TWO MEN CHARGED IN MURDER OF LESBIAN COUPLE, TWO CHILDREN

Category: Crime, Violence Against Women

In The Mailbox: 12.29.17

Posted on | December 29, 2017 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Will 2018 Be an Excellent Year?
Twitchy: Believer In Science Elizabeth Warren Quizzed On Gender, Life, And DNA
Louder With Crowder: Female Comedian Sued Over “No Boys Allowed” Show
Reason: “Sensitivity Readers” Are The New Thought Police (h/t NeoWayland)

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The Rebirth Of The Study, also, Friday Links & Hawt Chicks
American Power: So Totalitarian Leftists Want The Vanity Fair “Hillary Knitting” Writers Fired? also, Ben Shapiro, Primetime Propaganda
American Thinker: The Republican Red State Is Dead
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Amazing 2017 Friday
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For December 29, 2017
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Da Tech Guy: Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid, also, OK – So I’m Worse Than Melania
Don Surber: Joe Manchin, Trumped
Dustbury: From The Top Center Square
The Geller Report: Freedom Protests Spread Across Iran, also, Russian Woman Stabbed To Death By Jilted Muslim Boyfriend
Hogewash: Programming Reminder, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Joe For America: Chinese Honor Trump With Statue As They Ring In The Year Of The Dog
JustOneMinute: Yes, We Will Have No Bananas, also, He Died A Hero
Legal Insurrection: Trump Tells Dems – You Want 800K “Dreamers” To Stay? Build The Wall! also, Can Someone Check On CNN?
Power Line: The Year In Journalsim – Mainstream Media Flunks The Trump Challenge, also, The Dossiad
Shark Tank: DeSantis Expected To Announce Run For Governor In January
Shot In The Dark: Berg’s Seventh Law Is Universal And Inviolable
Sister Toldjah: Doug Jones Says It’s Time To Move On From Trump Sexual Harassment Allegations
STUMP: To Prepay Or Not to Prepay Taxes, That’s The Question
This Ain’t Hell: Friday Morning Feelgood Stories, also, Nork Nuke Defector Kills Himself
Weasel Zippers: Dem Congressman Outraged That Trump Tweets While People Die From Global Warming, also, Trump’s Ratings At End Of First Year Same As Obama’s
Mark Steyn: Collusion And Covfefe, also, The Wall Is All

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Category: Linkagery

The Problem With ‘Gender Equality’ and How SJWs Reached Their Stalingrad

Posted on | December 29, 2017 | 6 Comments

Feminists who have raised concerns about the transgender cult deserve the support of all decent people, and conservatives ought not to withhold that support because of ideological differences. When you’re at war, you need allies, and if Churchill could make an alliance with Stalin for the sake of defeating Hitler, then I see no reason why conservatives and feminists can’t make an alliance to defeat the transgender cult.

How many issues do I agree with Magdalen Berns about? Probably very few, but THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A LESBIAN WITH A PENIS!

“Lesbians don’t have penises. . . . If you’re born with a penis and [testicles], you’re male. You don’t get ‘assigned’ reproductive organs. Males are defined by their biological sex organs. Likewise, a homosexual is someone who’s attracted to members of the same biological sex. . . . Males can’t be lesbians.”
— Magdalen Berns

Where do weirdos like Riley Dennis and Zinnia Jones get the idea, first of all, that they can “identify” as female and demand that the rest of us accept this identification as legitimate? But having once made that leap beyond the bounds of biological reality, how do these deranged people then have the effrontery to call themselves “lesbians”? Well, this is the logical conclusion of the “gender equality” argument.

Why did the Supreme Court rule that VMI could not continue as an all-male institution? Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s majority decision invoked the “equal protection” clause of the 14th Amendment, but that amendment said nothing whatsoever about “gender equality.” The 14th Amendment was intended to protect the rights of the former slaves whose freedom had been won as a consequence of a war fought by all-male armies, and the amendment was ratified by all-male legislators in an age when women did not even have the right to vote. More to the point, when feminists had attempted to enshrine “gender equality” in the Constitution, legislators had rejected the proposed Equal Rights Amendment. What Justice Ginsburg and the Supreme Court majority were doing, in the case of United States v. Virginia Military Institute, was nullifying the democratic process for the sake of a “progressive” ideology that the American electorate had never embraced.

Let’s quote the opening paragraph of Justice Scalia’s dissent:

Much of the Court’s opinion is devoted to deprecating the closed mindedness of our forebears with regard to women’s education, and even with regard to the treatment of women in areas that have nothing to do with education. . . . The virtue of a democratic system with a First Amendment is that it readily enables the people, over time, to be persuaded that what they took for granted is not so, and to change their laws accordingly. That system is destroyed if the smug assurances of each age are removed from the democratic process and written into the Constitution. So to counterbalance the Court’s criticism of our ancestors, let me say a word in their praise: they left us free to change. The same cannot be said of this most illiberal Court, which has embarked on a course of inscribing one after another of the current preferences of the society (and in some cases only the counter majoritarian preferences of the society’s law trained elite) into our Basic Law. Today it enshrines the notion that no substantial educational value is to be served by an all men’s military academy — so that the decision by the people of Virginia to maintain such an institution denies equal protection to women who cannot attend that institution but can attend others. Since it is entirely clear that the Constitution of the United States — the old one — takes no sides in this educational debate, I dissent.

Exactly so. At some point during the 20th century, those whom Justice Scalia called “the society’s law trained elite” reached a consensus that anything done in the name of “equality” was good, and that all opposition was bad. It is unjust “discrimination” to believe that all-male institutions serve a useful purpose, and if the state of Virginia cannot be permitted to maintain an all-male military academy . . .?

FACT: Riley Dennis is the reason Donald Trump won the election. https://t.co/m0YoCQ7Khy pic.twitter.com/01znn5boq4

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) December 28, 2017

It may seem like a strange leap from the VMI case to a perverted idiot like Riley Dennis claiming to be a lesbian with a penis, but the premise of “gender equality” leads inevitably to such a syllogism. This was obvious to me in 2009, in regard to the same-sex marriage issue:

Are men and women equal in the fullest sense of the word? If so, then equality implies fungibility — the two things are interchangeable and one may be substituted for the other in any circumstance whatsoever. (La mort à la différence!) Therefore, it is of no consequence whether I marry a woman or a man. . . .
This is why so many of those who would defend traditional marriage find themselves unable to form a coherent argument, because traditional marriage is based on the assumption that men and women are fundamentally different, and hence, unequal. Traditional marriage assumes a complementarity of the sexes that becomes absurd if you deny that “man” and “woman” define intrinsic traits, functions, roles.
To declare men and women unequal, however, puts one outside the law — you are guilty of illegal discrimination if you say that there is any meaningful difference between men and women. Yet if you refuse to argue against sexual equality, you cannot argue effectively against gay marriage . . .

Far be it from me to dictate to others how they organize their domestic lives. My own marriage isn’t Ozzie and Harriet or Leave It to Beaver or any other 1950s situation-comedy model of “tradition,” yet the basic roles of husband and wife, mother and father have a way of scripting themselves according to circumstances and human nature. The idea of complementarity is to combine counter-balancing forces, male and female, in such a way that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Specialization, division of labor, economies of scale — these are logical advantages of a well-ordered family life, and it is a dangerous error to imagine that we can remodel family life in the name of “equality” without undermining the stability of the structure.

My oldest daughter married a wonderful man, who has devotedly performed his equal share of domestic duties. They recently had their first child, however, and I can confidently predict that, as my daughter stays home to care for their newborn, she will inevitably find herself doing a larger share of the household chores, while her husband works longer hours at the office to pay the bills, and their marriage will thus tend toward a more traditional division of labor, at least until such time as their baby (and any future offspring) is ready to start school.

No matter how committed a couple may be to an ideal of “equality,” the natural division of labor in family life is implicit in human biology, and only a fool would resent this arrangement as unfair. As pleasant as it might be to imagine a world where everyone can do whatever they please in a utopia where money grows on trees — where there are no electric bills or mortgage payments to worry about, no diapers to be changed or dishes to be washed — we do not live in such a world, and find ourselves constrained to live within limitations. We have duties we cannot escape, especially if we believe that the responsibility of caring for our children cannot be outsourced to government bureaucrats (which everybody should believe). As the welfare state has expanded, however, many have forgotten this sense of duty, which is why divorce is so rampant and 40% of the nation’s children are born to unmarried women.

“If Americans can be divorced for ‘incompatibility of temper’ I cannot conceive why they are not all divorced. I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.”
— G.K. Chesterton, 1910

You may not see how this discussion of marriage is relevant to the claims of the transgender cult, or to the Supreme Court’s 1996 VMI ruling, but the elite’s commitment to radical notions of “gender equality” has opened Pandora’s Box, from which a spirit of chaos has emerged. Permit me to enunciate a simple truth of human nature:

Men and women are different
in ways that are socially significant.

Commit that sentence to memory — it rhymes, and is easy to remember — and you will never succumb to the error of “gender equality.”

"Let's create a student group for sexually confused teenagers, because what could possibly go wrong?" https://t.co/0DEqtr39N1 cc @4th_WaveNow @conservativelez pic.twitter.com/JIRpz136S1

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) December 27, 2017

A major reason why feminists battling the transgender cult find themselves in such difficulties is that the feminist movement has spent the past half-century arguing for an ideal of “gender equality” based on a belief that there are no meaningful differences between men and women. Having made equality the first premise of their syllogism, however, feminists claim to be startled by the conclusion — lesbians with penises! And they are further dismayed that young women are getting their breasts amputated and injecting themselves with testosterone in order to become a Frankenstein’s monster simulacrum of a “male.”

In a free society, I cannot forbid others from “the pursuit of happiness,” but neither can I be forbidden to call insanity by its right name. What has happened, under the regime of “equality,” however, is that our right to free speech is being infringed if we express sentiments (or make reference to facts) that contradict whatever fashionable notion of “equality” the progressive elite may endorse at any given time. We are supposed to condemn as “hate speech” the concerns of parents like Susan Nagel:

About a year ago my then 16-year–old daughter told us she believes she is transgender. Soon after, she began begging to take testosterone, to wear a breast binder, to have others call her by male pronouns, and to legally change her name. . . . Over the course of a month or two after coming out, she changed from a generally cheerful person to a morose one who spent hours crying and who told me to hide the knives.. . .
I am a liberal, and I fully support equal access to housing, employment, education, and healthcare for all marginalized people, including transgender people. I do not think being transgender is immoral or that gender diversity is disturbing. Still after spending many sleepless nights researching the transgender movement, I have come to be very afraid for my daughter. . . .
I encounter many well-meaning people who believe the transgender movement is simply a civil rights movement. They do not understand my concerns and assume I am ignorant or a bigot. I think it is because most people’s knowledge of the transgender movement is limited to mass media accounts focusing on discrimination against transgender people or on an individual’s struggle to be true to his or her self. . . .
I am shocked by how readily some friends accept the idea of using synthetic hormones for the purpose of transitioning teenagers. Some of these people avoid drinking milk from cows treated with bovine growth hormone and avoid eating inorganic vegetables or food tainted by genetically modified organisms. If teenagers ingest risky chemicals for politically correct reasons, is the harm is somehow reduced? . . .

You can read the whole thing. The point is that concerns about the transgender cult are spreading, as more and more young people are being recruited by a network of online sites that present “transition” as a panacea that can cure whatever it is an unhappy teenager is unhappy about. These concerns involve rapid-onset gender dysphoria and the ways in which peer pressure can create a transgender social contagion.

What we are witnessing is a new appreciation of enduring truths about human nature among women whose feminist commitment to progressive ideals of “gender equality” had blinded them to reality. It’s rather like the way the Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939 shattered the Popular Front.

In which @MagdalenBerns instructs Riley Dennis in basic biology. pic.twitter.com/oq9fAnYmHg

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) December 28, 2017

This brings us back to Magdalen Berns, who holds a physics degree from the University of Edinburgh and describes herself as “a critic of religion, capitalism, identity politics, conservatism, neoliberalism and socially imposed gender norms.” She’s no right-winger, in other words, yet she is fighting the same “social justice warrior” (SJW) mentality that was exposed in 2014 by the #GamerGate activists. And what a pugnacious fighter she is! It would seem that SJWs have reached their Stalingrad, so to speak, and radical feminists like Magdalen Berns are the Red Army, ferociously defending the embattled city against the onslaught.

Give me such fighters as allies, I say, and I will not quibble with them over ideological differences, so long as the war continues.

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