The Other McCain

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

In The Mailbox: 02.06.17

Posted on | February 6, 2017 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Post-Super Bowl LI Schadenfreude
Twitchy: Backfire Alert! Dems Given A Clue What The ‘Resistance’ Is REALLY Doing
Louder With Crowder: Crowder Hijacks Shia La Boeuf’s “He Will Not Divide Us” Installation


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Australian Conservative Party Pushes Gay Marriage Vote
American Power: The Left’s Outrage Fatigue Problem
American Thinker: The Press Eunuchs Rattling Their Cups
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Bring The HEAT: SGM Unable To Choose Anything But E-9 On Vending Machines
Da Tech Guy: Ten Thoughts Under My Fedora
Don Surber: The Fake News So Far In 2017
Dustbury: Strange Search Engine Queries, also, In Which I Hit A Nerve
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Jammie Wearing Fools: Columnist Tells CNN Fake News Clown “I Think You Can Border On Being Sort Of Quite A Ridiculous Figure”
Joe For America: Hungary Sets Out To Stop Soros’ Criminal Activities
JustOneMinute: The NYT On Gorsuch – With Enemies Like This…
Power Line: What Part Of “You Lost” Don’t Liberals Understand?
Shark Tank: Smoking Pot Is Still Illegal In Florida
Shot In The Dark: Happy Reagan’s Birthday
STUMP: Friday Trumpery – Social Security (And A Little Medicare)
The Geller Report: Canadian PM Smears All Canadians With Islamophobia Lie To Create A Sharia State
The Jawa Report: Ibrahim Al-Rahaal Abu Bakr Is Dead, Jim, also, Revenge Of Sith – Super Bowl LI Edition
The Lonely Conservative: If Only He Didn’t Make It So Hard To Defend Him
The Political Hat: Trump’s Useful Idiots
This Ain’t Hell: Pentagon Dumps SHARP, Replaces It With Spay/Neuter Program, also, New SecNav Is Inheriting A Mess
War Is Boring: Belarus Prepares For “Hybrid War” As Europe’s Last Dictator Knocks Russia
Weasel Zippers: Leftists Planning National Strike Against President Trump For February 17, also, Patriots Player Refuses White House Meeting With President Trump After Super Bowl
Megan McArdle: Obamacare, Abortion, And The Ease of Extremism
Mark Steyn: A Winter’s Tale


Today’s Digital Deals
Deal of The Day – H&R Block Tax Software

Category: Linkagery

Impeach the Unconstitutional Judge

Posted on | February 6, 2017 | 4 Comments

 

If the Republican-controlled House of Representatives wants to do something about judicial overreach — a pet peeve of conservatives — they could start impeachment proceedings against this judge:

James Robart, the U.S. district judge in Washington State, offered little explanation for his decision to stop President Trump’s executive order temporarily suspending non-American entry from seven terror-plagued countries. Robart simply declared his belief that Washington State, which in its lawsuit against Trump argued that the order is both illegal and unconstitutional, would likely win the case when it is tried.
Now the government has answered Robart, and unlike the judge, Justice Department lawyers have produced a point-by-point demolition of Washington State’s claims. Indeed, for all except the most partisan, it is likely impossible to read the Washington State lawsuit, plus Robart’s brief comments and writing on the matter, plus the Justice Department’s response, and not come away with the conclusion that the Trump order is on sound legal and constitutional ground.
Beginning with the big picture, the Justice Department argued that Robart’s restraining order violates the separation of powers, encroaches on the president’s constitutional and legal authority in the areas of foreign affairs, national security, and immigration, and “second-guesses the president’s national security judgment” about risks faced by the United States.
Indeed, in court last week, Robart suggested that he, Robart, knows as much, or perhaps more, than the president about the current state of the terrorist threat in Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and other violence-plagued countries. In an exchange with Justice Department lawyer Michelle Bennett, Robart asked, “How many arrests have there been of foreign nationals for those seven countries since 9/11?”
“Your Honor, I don’t have that information,” said Bennett.
“Let me tell you,” said Robart. “The answer to that is none, as best I can tell. So, I mean, you’re here arguing on behalf of someone [President Trump] that says: We have to protect the United States from these individuals coming from these countries, and there’s no support for that.”
Perhaps Robart has been briefed by the intelligence community on conditions in Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and the rest. Perhaps Robart has received the President’s Daily Brief. Perhaps not. In any event, the Justice Department argued — reasonably but not successfully — that it is the president, and not a U.S. District Court judge in the Western District of Washington State, who has the knowledge and the authority to make such decisions.
“Your Honor, I think the point is that because this is a question of foreign affairs, because this is an area where Congress has delegated authority to the president to make these determinations, it’s the president that gets to make the determinations,” Bennett said. “And the court doesn’t have authority to look behind those determinations.”

(Via Memeorandum.) Think I’m joking about impeachment? I’m not. If the president’s executive order was legitimately a matter of national security (as his defenders have argued) then Judge Robart is giving aid and comfort to the enemy by impeding the Commander-in-Chief in the lawful exercise of his duties. Beyond that, however, how else can the constitutional separation of powers be enforced, if the judicial branch disregards its own proper limits and impedes either the authority of Congress to make laws or the authority of the President to execute the laws? Congress has the power to impeach judges, and it ought not neglect to use that power in defense of the Constitution itself.

Liberals have spent decades building up the mystique of the Supreme Court’s authority, and you can go back tot the Bork hearings to show how Senate Democrats have used their own power in attempting to control the court. What have Republicans done to limit the imperial judiciary? Not much. And so this judge in Washington State thinks himself immune to consequences for his bizarre decision to issue a restraining order. Republican members of the House could disabuse Judge Robart of his delusion of immunity. All it would take is for one House Republican to bring forward an impeachment inquiry, and no matter how far the matter proceeded — even if the rest of the House refused to take it up — this would at least make the point that judges who overstep their lawful authority may pay a price for failing to uphold the Constitution.

 

Category: Constitution, Donald Trump, Immigration

Rule 5 Sunday: The Humiliation Of Roger Goodell

Posted on | February 6, 2017 | 4 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

I’m almost sorry I missed this Super Bowl. Unlike many such games in years past, this one was actually a good game, with Tom Brady leading the Patriots on a 28-3 run to tie the game in the fourth quarter and win it in overtime. As Mary Katherine Ham tweeted,


Yes indeed. The man who did so much to ruin professional football for its fans this year was publicly humiliated by Pats fans in Houston, as he so richly deserved. But enough of The Man Who Tried To Ruin The NFL; let us instead celebrate the New England Patriots and their fearless leader, Tom Brady, who is no doubt reclining on his enormous bed of money and enjoying the glorious naked body of Mrs. Brady, better known as Gisele Bundchen.

Gisele Bundchen, hard at work.

As usual, we lead off with Ninety Miles From Tyranny and Hot Pick of the Late Night, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns, followed by Goodstuff and burlesque legend Sally Rand. Animal Magnetism checked in with Rule Five CalExit Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL’s herd of heifers this week included Tennis Sisters, Tamron Hall, Atlanta & New England Cheerleaders, Andie MacDowell, Pan Am, Big Bang Theory Cheesecake Factory, Sarah Ryan, and Women of Black Sails.

A View From The Beach brings us Kelly Gale, Maryland Lawmakers Weigh Ray Ban, Reason #5420 Trump Was Elected, Around The World in 2:12, Women: DIY, Sydney Leathers Boyfriend in Deep Doo Doo, Another Version of Insanity, I’m Ready For Spring Break, But Will The Deer Hold Still While She Warms Up?, and “Highway to Hell”.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Deena Dill, his Vintage Babe is Cher, and Sex in Advertising is covered by Lady Gaga. At Dustbury, it’s Suzanne Pleshette and Gabrielle Anwar.

Thanks to everyone for their links!

Visit Amazon’s Intimate Apparel Shop
Amazon Fashion – Jewelry For Women

Category: Rule 5

Ivy League in Crisis: Student Suicide Epidemic at Columbia University

Posted on | February 5, 2017 | 1 Comment

Death by elite education:

A disturbing wave of seven suicides and likely drug overdoses has swept through Columbia University so far this school year — and students say fiercely competitive academics and inadequate campus counseling programs are in large part to blame.
The student deaths include three in January alone — two of whom police suspect OD’d, plus an exchange student from Japan who killed herself by leaping from the seventh-floor window of her Broadway dorm.
The four other student suicides came once a month, from September through December, The Post has learned.
They include a promising 21-year-old journalist, a 29-year-old Navy veteran, a Moroccan student and an 18-year-old freshman from Brookfield, Missouri, named Taylor Gilpin Wallace.
“You don’t know how badly I want to jump out that window right now,” Wallace, who would be Columbia’s October suicide, said in a Facetime call from his John Jay Hall dorm room to his mother in Missouri — days before quitting school, moving back home and hanging himself in his basement.

(Hat-tip: Legal Insurrection.) Different people have different motives, so it would be unwise to get too specific in speculating about the causes of this phenomenon. However, we can say generally that highly intelligent people are often also very sensitive people, and many students have difficulty dealing with the competitive pressures experienced on the scholastic fast-track that leads to an elite school like Columbia. If you were always the smartest kid in school, and spent your adolescence grinding away to maintain perfect grades in advanced-placement honors classes — which is how you get into an Ivy League school — you may well experience your first “B” grade as emotionally traumatic. To attend your dream school, only to discover that collegiate life isn’t what you’d hoped it would be, must be a painful disillusionment for many students. And then you have the situation described by Taylor Wallace’s mother:

“You have a child who comes from Middle America. He was surrounded by kids who had a social life. He just didn’t connect with the kids. He was popular at home, but not at Columbia. He just felt like he didn’t fit in.”

That’s a major reason I would oppose any of my children attending an elite private university like that. Annual tuition at Columbia is $55,056, and most of the students come from wealthy families. These are the kids of bankers, CEOs and big-time lawyers, in some cases the third or fourth generation of their family to attend an Ivy League school. They arrive on campus with plenty of spending money, the freshman class includes at least a half-dozen classmates from their private East Coast prep school, and on weekends, they jet off to their folks’ beachfront condo in Florida. These rich kids set the social tone at schools like Columbia, and this tends to make Ivy League life miserable for the poor nerd trying to scrape through on scholarships, work-study jobs and student loans.

If you don’t believe me, believe the Harvard Crimson:

The median family income for Harvard undergraduates is $168,800—more than three times the national median, according to a recent study.
The national median household income in 2015 was $55,775, according to Census data. . . .
Among the twelve “Ivy League and selected elite colleges”—which also include M.I.T., Stanford, Duke, and the University of Chicago in the study—Harvard had the eighth largest proportion of students from the top 1 percent, with 15.1 percent of its undergraduates coming from households making over $630,000 per year.

So if you’re a middle-class parent and your kid is a small-town high achiever — Taylor Wallace was a football star and valedictorian in high school — you might want to think twice before sending them to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Duke, Oberlin, etc. Any student with the grades to get into an Ivy League school can go to a state university and excel. He’ll find a lot more middle-class kids he can fit in with, and a lot fewer snotty prep school kids than he’d rub elbows with at Columbia. After your son’s successful career at State U., maybe he’ll become a millionaire, and then he can send your grandchildren to Cornell in appropriate style, but otherwise, just leave the elite schools for the rich kids, most of whom are degenerate atheist swine. The Ivy League Is Decadent and Depraved.

 

Category: Education

Screaming NYU Protester Woman Identified as Anti-Trump Porn ‘Artist’

Posted on | February 5, 2017 | 6 Comments

 

The highlight of Thursday’s protest against Gavin McInnes’s appearance at New York University was a woman who screeched at the police:

Who’s protecting NYU from this bulls**t? Why are you here? You’re not here to protect these students from Nazis. No, you’re not! This is completely f***ed up. And these students had to f***ing face them on their own. You should be ashamed of yourselves! You should be standing up to those Nazis! You should be protecting students from hate! This is hate! These are f***ing assholes . . . you are a joke. You’re grown boys! You’re grown boys . . . and I’m disgusted! I’m a professor! How dare you! How dare you f***ing assholes protect neo-Nazis? F*** you! F*** you! F*** you! These are kids who are trying to learn about humanity! They’re trying to learn about human rights and against racism and xenophobia and LGBTQ rights, and you’re letting these f***ing neo-Nazis near here! You should kick their ass! You should! You should be ashamed of yourselves! You should! F*** that s**t. F*** that s**t. It’s not up to these students to kick the ass of a neo-Nazi! They don’t have to raise their fist! They were taught to be peaceful! F*** you! F*** you. I’m a professor. God f***ing damn it … you’re here to protect neo-Nazis! So f*** you! God f***ing damn it! Those kids should not have to take fists up to neo-Nazis, and you’re putting them in that situation! Go to hell. F*** you NYPD!

Click here to watch the video of her unhinged meltdown.

In case you lost count, that was 16 F-bombs in less than two minutes, and she twice identified herself as a professor, prompting curiosity as to whether she taught at NYU and what subject. However, online investigators say she is in fact an artist named Rebecca Goyette, an adjunct professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

 

Professor Boyette’s online biography:

Rebecca Goyette creates persona-based works that poke holes in Puritanical sexual mores. . . .
Situated within a largely queer, fantasy paradigm, her work is able to embrace a fruitful multiplicity of sexual desire and engage a panoply of non normative gender roles. . . .
For Goyette, sex is one gateway into the rich territory of psychology and human interaction, into the remotest ranges of the subconscious mind.

Well, her subconscious mind is definitely a non-normative panoply, eh?

Works in Professor Goyette’s “queer, fantasy” oeuvre include “Lobstapussy,” “F–k Platter,” “Ghost Bitch” and “Masshole.”

 

It appears that “non-normative” is a synonym for crazy and, if you suspect that Professor Goyette’s mental illness is hereditary, you might not be surprised to learn that she claims to be the descendant of a woman who was hanged as a witch in Salem in 1692:

Goyette, haunted by the horrific tale of her ancestor’s death, has long dreamed of making an artwork in her honor. Her summer exhibition at Freight and Volume marks the realization of said dream. Of course, as those familiar with Goyette’s radical feminist practice might have anticipated, this will be no orthodox tribute. Rather, to honor her martyred ancestor, Goyette made a pornography. . . .
The Salem witch trials, Goyette explained in an interview with The Huffington Post, were fueled, above all else, by an erratic hatred and fear of feminine power. A panic had spread amongst the Puritan pilgrims, who became suspicious of sexuality, empowerment, and the other, leading little white men in tall black hats to accuse over 200 individuals of witchcraft, when their only crime, much of the time, was standing out.
Though the trials officially ended in 1693, the odious assumptions that permitted them still persist today, manifested in various forms of sexism, xenophobia and racism. “Donald Trump is the perfect pilgrim,” Goyette said, “he’s spewing all kinds of hate. He has the freedom to do whatever but he imposes arbitrary rules onto everyone else.”
Goyette believed the best way to send a big “f–k you” to pilgrims past and present, who go to wildly unconscionable lengths to silence otherness in all its forms, was to make an irreverent, nasty, hilarious, empowering feminist porno.

How many times must we refute this feminist myth of witchcraft as “empowerment”? After feminists seized upon this theme in the 1970s, they enjoyed several years of unimpeded myth-making, with Mary Daly, Andrea Dworkin, Barbara Ehrenreich and others cobbling together a narrative composed of a cherry-picked selection of fact woven together by theories of women’s intuitive nature and male oppression. Feminist “research” included picking through 19th-century works by such authors as the anti-Catholic French writer Jules Michelet (La Sorcière, 1862) and the anti-Christian suffragette Matilda Joslyn Gage (Woman, Church and State, 1893). Michelet was the primary source of the claim that witches were skilled practitioners of the healing arts, possessed of an arcane knowledge of herbal medicine, who were wrongly persecuted by an envious Catholic hierarchy. Gage was the source for the claim that 9 million women were killed during three centuries of witch hunts. There is no actual evidence for Michelet’s claim, however, and reputable historians now estimate the actual number of witchcraft executions in Europe as 100,000 or less, and at least a quarter of the victims were male, so that Gage’s number was a 90-fold exaggeration.

Unfortunately, by the time serious scholars began debunking these feminist claims in the 1990s — I highly recommend Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft — the mythology of the witch as an “empowered” woman had acquired a vast bibliography produced by Women’s Studies professors. Long on theory and short on facts, this ideological myth-making had taken root in academia, so that every October, we find journalists cranking out Halloween-themed articles that recycle the feminist witch narrative.

This is not merely coincidental to Rebecca Goyette’s insane rage. Her “art” is a sort of pornographic “queer, fantasy” cosplay, with her “non-normative” expressions of perverse sexuality intended to challenge the alleged misogyny and “puritanical” fear of sex that are peddled as historical truth by the feminist witchcraft myth:

Goyette addresses the seeds of hatred and fear that have prevented America, in her opinion, from becoming truly great. She does so in a feminine language all her own, where trauma and desire are not mutually exclusive, but wound up in the same, messy psychosexual playground.

As I explained last April: “Feminists have long understood, far better than most of their opponents, that destroying Christianity is necessary to feminism’s success.” This project seeks to impose on society a new feminist “morality” that is a neo-Gnostic inversion of scripture:

A blasphemous denial of God’s sovereignty and righteousness, Gnosticism rejected the idea of Original Sin and thus rejected also the significance of Christ’s atoning sacrifice. If humans are sinless, we need no Savior, and what is necessary instead is for humans to get in touch with their inner divinity, to “become part of the universal whole by a process of self-knowledge and self-realization,” as Professor Peter Jones explained in his 1992 book The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back: An Old Heresy for the New Age.

Making “self-knowledge” the basis of religious truth, of course, is entirely consistent with the feminist claim that “the personal is political.” The result of this self-obsessed worldview is not only Rebecca Goyette’s obscene adventures in the “messy psychosexual playground,” but also her shrieking irrational rage toward Trump supporters.

In February 2016, Professor Goyette produced “Trump/Palin Performance Art Rally,” a work of political obscenity, and her partner in that performance, artist Brian Andrew Whiteley, subsequently produced a Donald Trump grave stone in Central Park, which earned Whitely a visit from the Secret Service, and also, free publicity.

Did I forget to mention that Professor Goyette’s “Ghost Bitch” exhibit included her fantasies of castrating a certain Republican?

A highlight of the exhibition, the video aptly entitled Ghost Bitch U.S.A., couples Ghost Bitch with none other than misogynistic, fear-mongering (presumptive) Presidential candidate Donald Trump. We see Trump bound to a tree, allowing Ghost Bitch to have his way with him, ultimately leading up to his castration.

 

 

“Fear and Loathing of the Penis” is, as I have said, the psychological inspiration of feminist ideology and, also, bad feminist art.



 

 

Category: Art, Democrats, Donald Trump, Education, Sex Trouble

The Campus Special Snowflake™ Blizzard

Posted on | February 5, 2017 | 1 Comment

We must protect their sensitive feelings:

  • A statue of Christopher Columbus will be removed from the campus of Pepperdine University because about two dozen students protested that the status is “a celebration of genocide and racial oppression.” The statue was originally donated to the school in 1992 — the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage of discovery — by “Italian-American friends” of the university.
  • An email listserv for Women’s Studies academics erupted in controversy over a discussion of pregnancy, with one “transman” demanding that scholars boycott the list. The quarrel on the WMST-L list started when a discussion of an upcoming panel (“Pregnancy Without Women”) was criticized by Australian professor Sheila Jeffreys, a longtime critic of the transgender movement: “Only women get pregnant and it serves women not at all to pretend this is not true!” Grand Valley State University professor Cael Keegan erupted indignantly: “The lack of moderator intervention to stymie these kinds of oppressive, exclusionary assertions is also unacceptable. . . . I no longer have the patience to deal with this this kind of ‘feminism’ or this debate over my own worthiness or materiality as a human being.”
  • Barnard College plans to hire “10 new faculty members from underrepresented groups in 5 years.” An elite private women’s college where annual tuition is $50,394, Barnard’s Task Force on Diversity and Inclusion declared its goal as improving “representation, inclusion, and social justice” on campus.
  • An editorial in University of California-Berkeley student newspaper claimed that the campus riots which caused the cancellation of a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos was a “grand display” of freedom of speech. In a bizarre exercise of pretzel logic, the Daily Cal editorial huffed: “Yiannopoulos and his repulsive demeanor never belonged here. He isn’t a productive member of society, and he certainly doesn’t reflect the type of respectful and educated discourse UC Berkeley promotes.”

So, smashing windows and assaulting people is a “grand display” of free speech, but the urbane British journalist has a “repulsive demeanor”? An elite women’s college is hiring faculty by racial quotas? Saying that only women get pregnant is “oppressive” and “unacceptable”?

If Christopher Columbus had known what a mess Americans would make of their education system, maybe he would have stayed home.



 

Category: Education

FMJRA 2.0: Waiting For The Superb Owl

Posted on | February 5, 2017 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Rule 5 Sunday: Making Anime Great Again
Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

The Baylor Varsity Rape Team
The Political Hat
EBL

Feminism Is a Hate Movement
Sparta Report
The DaleyGator
Regular Right Guy
EBL

FMJRA 2.0: Late Night With Crazy Horse Edition
The Pirate’s Cove
Regular Right Guy
A View From The Beach
EBL

The Problem of ‘Racist Facts’
EBL

Has Everybody Gone Insane?
EBL

Police Say ‘Furry’ Freaks Raped Boy
EBL

Democrats Face a Political Math Problem and Also, ‘Phallic Imperialism’
Regular Right Guy
EBL

In The Mailbox: 01.30.17
Proof Positive
EBL

Canadian Terrorist Update
EBL

Trump Nominates ‘Worthy’ Judge; Democrats Go Into Full-On Panic Mode
Regular Right Guy
BPICampus
EBL

In The Mailbox: 01.31.2017
Regular Right Guy
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive

‘Religious Overtones’
Regular Right Guy
EBL

Anti-Trump ‘Resistance’ Protests Led by Convicted Sex Offender Micah Rhodes
Regular Right Guy
EBL

The Pervert Party: Anthony Weiner Could Get 15 Years in Prison for Child Porn
A View From The Beach
EBL

In The Mailbox: 02.01.17
Proof Positive
EBL

How #TheResistance Killed Facebook
Regular Right Guy
A View From The Beach
EBL

Grabbed: Mexican Pimp Extradited to Face U.S. Sex-Trafficking Charges
EBL

VIOLENT BERKELEY MOB RIOT SHUTS DOWN YIANNOPOULOS SPEECH
I Do This Because I Love You
A View From The Beach
EBL

‘Aspiring Serial Killer’ Amy Brown (and Other Reasons to Avoid Online Dating)
EBL

How Feminism Caused the #Berkeley Riot: Understanding Leftist Psychology
EBL
Terrorist Shouts ‘Allahu Akbar,’ Shot After Machete Attack on Louvre Museum
EBL

Shapiro Wins Lawsuit in ‘Clock Boy’ Case
Regular Right Guy
A View From The Beach
EBL

In The Mailbox: 02.03.17
Proof Positive
EBL

Environmentalists Want Your Baby Dead
EBL

Top linkers this week:

  1.  EBL (23)
  2.  Regular Right Guy (9)
  3.  A View From The Beach (7)
  4.  Proof Positive (5)

Thanks to everyone for all your linkagery!


Today’s Digital Deals

Category: FMJRA Award

‘The Idea That People Are Going to Debate Their Ideas Is Outrageous’

Posted on | February 4, 2017 | 3 Comments

 

Thursday night, there was a near-riot at New York University when self-declared “anti-fascists” disrupted an event with Gavin McInnes hosted by the College Republicans. Although it was not as violent as the riot Wednesday in Berkeley that shut down Milo Yiannopoulos’s speech, the NYU event highlighted just how extreme the Left has become.

First, Gavin McInnes is not actually a “right-wing” figure, and he certainly is not a “fascist” in any meaningful sense of that word. He was co-founder of Vice magazine and is known as the “Godfather of Hipsterdom.” He is a comedian, really, a sort of “shock jock” a la Howard Stern, who appeals to a fan base of mostly Gen-X and Millennial guys. McInnes is a libertarian who despises political correctness. The idea that protesting his appearance at NYU was “anti-fascism” is absurd, reminiscent of George Orwell’s quote from Politics and the English Language, “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.” Yet the fact that the accusation is absurd does not make it any less dangerous, because if people act as if it were true, what might they do to the person falsely labeled “fascist”? And what happens to our political discourse if substantial arguments can be disqualified by this kind of pejorative labeling? So even if you don’t like Gavin McInnnes, the fact that self-described “anti-fascists” are attacking him is cause for alarm.

 

Second, these protests were organized by Marxist-Leninist radicals. The pre-printed signs with slogans like “Smash Fascism & White Supremacy” were supplied by the Workers World Party, a notorious neo-Stalinist cult. These people are advocates of totalitarianism, and their presence in the anti-McInnes mob was not coincidental. One of the lessons of the 1960s, is that radical movements must either exclude Communists or else they will be controlled by Communists. The story of how the SDS was taken over and destroyed by Marxist revolutionaries, giving rise to the terrorist Weather Underground, is sufficient proof of this rule. (See David Horowitz, Radical Son, also Destructive Generation, by Horowitz and Peter Collier.) Communism is “The Worst Idea in the World,” and whenever I see Commie protesters, it makes me nostalgic for Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, a man who knew how to deal with them effectively.

Third, the problems in academia are exacerbated by the kind of faculty Roger Kimball identified as Tenured Radicals. There was a woman who said she is a professor (although she has not yet been identified) who made a spectacle of herself during the NYU mob scene, screaming at the police: “How dare you, how dare you f–king a–holes protect neo-Nazis. F–k you, f–k you, f–k you. . . . F–k you, NYPD.” How could a professor be so intolerant? NYU Professor Michael Rectenwald, who defended McInnes’s right to speak, said this woman’s attitude represents “a political and historical illiteracy” that is “emblematic of a dogmatic SJW assertion that wants to shut down all expression that they fear.” The claim that McInnes and the College Republicans are “neo-Nazis” is so clearly false that no rational person could believe it, yet some allegedly “educated” people evidently do believe it, and indeed there are professors who act as if “Republican” and “Nazi” are synonyms. This is dangerous.

Finally, it is clear that the Democrat Party no longer believes in free speech or open debate, but are actively working to construct a totalitarian regime with the authority to repress dissent and opposition. For at least three decades, the academic Left has striven to exclude conservatives and libertarians from employment in faculty and administrative positions. Having achieved hegemonic control on campus, the Left is seeking to extend their authority throughout society and realize that they cannot do this if opposing viewpoints are allowed a fair hearing. It is especially important to the Left to defend its totalitarian control of our education system, which is why we see them staging riotous protests to prevent conservatives from speaking on university campuses.

This mood was expressed by protester Mark Phelam, who told Gothamist reporter Jake Offenhartz: “[T]his phenomenon has to be smashed — you can’t allow a mainstream platform for straight up fascists and Nazis, and the idea that people are going to debate their ideas is outrageous.”

What “phenomenon” does he mean? The Republican Party? Support for President Trump? Anyone who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton? To describe Gavin McInnes and College Republicans as “straight up fascists and Nazis” is not merely false, but dangerous. These farfetched claims function as a pretext to justify political violence. Here you have protesters brandishing signs supplied by a genuine totalitarian organization while perversely claiming that anyone who disagrees with them is a fascist who should be denied the right to speak in public. The protester claims it is “outrageous” even to debate Republicans, as if there can be no valid reason to support President Trump. Yet if Gavin McInnes’s ideas are so self-evidently false, why is it necessary to silence him? That is to say, if someone’s arguments can be refuted by facts and logic, then there is no real harm in letting them speak. This is how I deal with feminists — give them enough rope and let them hang themselves. All you have to do is quote them, and anyone with a modicum of common sense can see what’s wrong with feminist ideology. If Gavin McInnes is so wrong, why isn’t the Left offering any actual arguments against him? Why are they trying to exercise a heckler’s veto? What are they afraid of?

“A hit dog will holler,” as folks say down home. Whatever it is that Gavin McInnes represents, the hysterical shrieking reaction of the Left tells you that McInnes hits them where it hurts. Robby Soave of Reason writes: “McInnes, it should be noted, routinely says obnoxious things that deserve criticism. He’s something of a Diet Milo.” This is a rather dismissive remark which, on the one hand, lends aid and comfort to the Left by implying McInnes might deserve exclusion from campus, while on the other hand underestimating the value of McInnes’s provocative style. If he wasn’t saying anything important, if he had no persuasive influence, would McInnes drive the Left into such a frothing rage?



 

Category: Education, Progressivism
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