It may perhaps be a sign of a shift in the perceptions of the GOP’s likely behavior in 2024 – but Big Media is already calling Ron DeSantis not only “Hitler”, but even worse than Trump:

I noted on the show a few weeks ago that Democrats referring to Republicans as “literally Hitler” goes back to Harry Truman; he was literally the first candidate who could refer to a Republlican (John Dewey, in this case). I remember it picking up with Reagan – but it was already old hat by then.

Now, the best response to this sort of thing is mockery and laughter.

How best to do this? That’s my project for this month.

Remember when Ron DeSantis sent fifty migrants to posh, leafy Martha’s Vineyard?

And the American left wrenched their shoulders out of socket patting themselves on the back by feeding them before having the hired help bus them to a nearby military base?

Maybe it’s time for some of them to start ponying up. Yuma, Arizona’s hospital is stretched beyond its capacity treating migrants:

An Arizona border hospital has been left with $20 million in unpaid medial services from the massive influx of illegal immigrants over the past six months.

Yuma Regional Medical President Dr. Robert Transchel joined “Fox & Friends” Friday to discuss how the migrant crisis has burdened hospitals as experts warn the end of Title 42 will escalate border crossings.

Transchel said anyone coming to the hospital receives the “same level of medical care” regardless of immigration status, including surgeries and intensive care.

“People always think they’re coming in with coughs and colds, but that’s not really the case,” Transchel said. “You have individuals come in that need dialysis, that need heart surgery, that need cardiac catheterization. We’ve had women come into our labor and delivery unit that have delivered infants that need to be in the neonatal ICU for sometimes months at a time.”

Maybe James Taylor and John Kerry can write some checks?

I listen – as rarely as I can – to NPR’s “On the Media”. The show is basically an unthinking cheerleader for America’s “elite” media.

And their latest theme is participating in the war on “Nostalgia” – particularly, against the notion of looking to the past for lessons that might help with the present and the future.

The first segment was keynoted by a fellow – some sort of historian – who declaimed in an adenoidal ,mid-Atlantic voice no different than a thousand others on NPR “What does nostalgia for the fifties get you? It gets you dead, sooner! The life expectancy was 66 years! Now it’s 78!”

That’s right – if you think society could gain by returning to some of the social and moral stanards of the past, you also have to roll back science! And bring the Klan back too!

Not really exaggerating that last bit – because nostalgia isn’t just wanting to derive some wisdom from another time. Nosirreebob, it’s bringing Hitler back to life!

You’re not learning from the past. You’re begging to repeat it, all of it, especially the worst of it.

We can not defund NPR fast enough.

Badthink is the new…badthink.

Or to put this in terms any Second Amendment activist can relate to, “Don’t be paranoid. Nobody’s coming for the language itself”.

Pathologizing freedom of conscience by speciously linking it to objective evil?

Demonizing dissent?

Oh, yeah – and just flat out lying…

…to gull the gullible – a population the Democrats count on growing to supermajority levels.

I hope you all had a happy, blessed, gratitude-heavy Thanksgiving.

I hope you did not spend the day alone in a New York apartment, sitting on your toilet, hunched over your smartphone, obsessively typing bilge out onto social media.

Like this guy seemed to:

Only to be reminded that graywashing American history is how authoritarianism thrives.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving.

I have so much for which I should be grateful – and I’ll be going through the list, as far as I can, tomorrow.

But I’m going to jump the (if you’ll pardon the expression) gun, and say I’m thankful I’m not that this grift.

Whoah – did I say grift? I meant, “dinner party“:

Jackson and Rao are the founders of an organization called Race2Dinner. For $5,000 the two women will attend your eight-person dinner party and bring along “Lisa Bond, our Resident White Woman.” For that price, they will berate you about your racism. They will share their own experiences with racism, which sometimes don’t sound like actual racism. But if you object or even if you agree, they will tell you that’s what white women do and you’re part of the problem. The two have a lot of observations about “what white women do.” White women are mean to each other, for instance. When they are accused of racism white women accuse black women of being “angry” or “crazy.” White women also say they’re not racist. White women like dinner parties. And they like to say they’ve donated money to the ACLU. If you suggest that black women may be mean to each other or that they may like dinner parties, you’re also a white supremacist. Because how would you know? Don’t say you have black friends because that too would be a sign of white supremacy.

Questioning whether spending $5,000 to have people call you names is also “white supremacy,” and the authors explain, “we are tired of it.” The fact that you are complaining about the price is evidence that you “see this work as charity. You doing us a favor. … White supremacy culture has you believing that you are doing us a favor by even caring about racism or antiracism. This results in your incessant demands that we educate you—on your own racism, on a system you created to harm us for your benefit. For free.

On the one hand, it sounds as hellish as the left tells us Thanksgiving with one’s family ostensibly is.

On the other hand, if I had a lot more money than bills – or friends who’d be willing to pitch in – I think it’d be fun to pony up, invite the ladies, and watch the sparks fly.

I’m going to guess most of you didn’t know that Sunday was “World Toilet Day“ (I personally celebrate the Eastern Orthodox Toilet Day, which is December 3)

Something I didn’t know about the humble toilet; to at least one part of Big Left and, to at least one part of Big Left, it’s a social justice issue:

So, if you’re having trouble keeping this straight – and if you’re sane, you should – let me break this down for you:

Separate, safe toilets for women are in essential to human dignity – except in the United States, where they are a sign of toxic bigotry.

I hope that’s clarified things for you.

Shooting at an LGBTQetcetc club in Colorado over the weekend.

While the perp was apparently “on the radar” (in a state where the progressive prosecutor ensures there are no consequences for being there), expect this atrocity to be used less for gun control and more to demonize any criticism of LGBTQetcetc activism of any kind in any place – pushing the notion of “stochastic terrorism”:

“Stochastic terrorism” is just a silly concept that dovetails with “words are violence” and opens the gate for any favored group to shut down all debate because the very existence of the debate will drive people to violence. Of course, no one, at least no sane people, believes it exists, but it is a handy cudgel with which you can belabor your opponents.

“If you say you disagree with me, it must be because you want me dead”.

That’s how society gets to Orwell’s “Duckspeak” – when it becomes impossible to commicate in any but the most innocuous terms without fear of some consequences, rational or not.

Hard to live in a civil society with that hanging over every social question.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Liberals call for Covid Amnesty.   They say Conservatives should forgive
Liberals for all the bad things resulting from government’s response to
Covid.  They say none of those bad things are Liberals’ fault because
They Didn’t Know.

Nonsense.  We knew when the Diamond Princess docked in February 2020
that Covid afflicted mostly old people with existing co-morbidities.  We
knew the death rate was 2% of those affected while the death rate of the
entire cruise ship population was 14 out of 3711 or .3%.   And that’s
using the phony numbers from counting all respiratory illness deaths as
Covid deaths.  Covid was never a threat to the population at large – it
was never more than a bad flu – and we knew it early on, which is why we
learned to elbow bump and wash our hands while singing the alphabet song.

Yes, but Liberals were forced to impose lockdowns, mask mandates and
school closings because all the best scientists said so.  If there were
alternatives, They Didn’t Know.

Nonsense.  The Great Barrington Declaration was signed in October 2020
by some of the worlds leading experts in epidemiology to codify in a
simple statement what medical and statistical experts had been saying
since the panic began.  Lockdowns, mask mandates, and school closings
were never the correct way to respond to the outbreak – traditional
responses were the correct way – and we knew it within a few months.

Yes, but those people were outliers, malcontents, reactionaries and
nay-sayers.  Liberals were forced to rely on government bureaucrats and
computer models because Liberals had no other source of information. 
Liberals were left with no choice but to implement lockdowns, mask
mandates and school closings to avoid the looming surge of infections
and resulting hospital overloads.

Nonsense.  Governor Walz announced his lockdown based on computer
modeling that was proven wrong within two months.  There was no surge
and hospitals were not overloaded but instead laid off staff for lack of
business, keeping beds open for Covid patients who never arrived.  The
models were worthless and we knew it long before school resumed.  Nurses
knew it too but danced in the hospital to prove how much smarter they
were than those of us watching.  They had time to dance.  They had no
patients.

Yes, but lockdowns, mask mandates and school closings were necessary to
prevent the virus from spreading until we had a safe and effective
vaccine, which was not generally available to the public until after
President Biden took office.  Liberals had no choice but to enact
temporary stopgap measures to keep the public safe.

Nonsense.  There was never any compelling evidence that lockdowns, mask
mandates or school closings prevented the virus from afflicting those it
targeted most – the elderly frail population – and considerable evidence
that warehousing sick elderly with healthy resulted in killing far more
of them. Controlling for age, existing illness, and quality of medical
care, there is very little difference in Covid mortality between states
like Minnesota (strict restrictions) and Florida (few restrictions). 
There is substantial difference in economic difference and, I suspect,
in education outcomes.

The blogger Sundance writing at Conservative Treehouse coined the phrase
“pretending not to know” to explain why Liberals keep doing things which
Conservatives can plainly see are wrong, but never expect to be held
accountable for the consequences.  That’s what’s happening with Covid
Amnesty.  Liberals are pretending they didn’t know so they shouldn’t be
held to account.

They knew.

And did it anyway.

And we’re never going to forgive the damage they’ve done.

Now, let’s talk about the election.

Joe Doakes

Forgiveness without atonement is meaningless.

And that’s what those asking for the “amnesty” are trying to sideslip.

No amnesty. As noted elsewhere, I’ll settle for a Truth and Reconciliation commission.

I’ve always detested “Generational” politics. Among all the things that divide us as a nation, artificial, externally-defined demographic trends have to be the dumbest of all.

Still, a huge chunk of the population perceives them – and perception is reality.

David Hogg – like many “prog” human message bots before and many more to come – repeats a set of chanting points that years of indoctrination have inflicted on a disproportionate share of Generation Zs:

Among all the ideas that are sapping the vitality of American civilization, there may be few more corrosive than the devaluation of the term “right”. To much of GenZ, the term is interchangeable with “virtues” at best, “stuff we want” at worst.

The notion that inalienable rights come with ineluctible responsibilities eludes many of all generations – but Millennials and Zeepers appear to be the most vocal in imposing their misapprehension on the world.

So if you’re a Zeep and reading this:

• There is no more “right not to be shot” (or to “Go to school and survive”) than there is a “right not to have a car crash” . There is a right to live – with a concomitant responsibility and moral imperative to see to your safety, and the safety of those you’re responsible for (a responsibility that law enforcement at Parkland fell dismally short at).
• You desire peace and tranquility – but it’s not an inalienable right. It can, indeed, be taken away arbitrarily and horrifically. One has a responsibility as an adult to maintain both of them – neither is guaranteed in anyway in the real world.

Hope that helps.

How do you upstage a 900 pound gorilla?

By upping the ante on the gorilla’s battle:

And now there are two serious GOP candidates for President other than Trump.

Gen Z has a shockingly high suicide rate:

The new data suggests Gen Z – or the generation of Americans born during 1997 onward – might be seeing a mental health crisis even worse than that faced by the older millennial generation.

Since 2014, millennials (or people who turned 23 to 38 in 2019) have seen a 47% increase in major-depression diagnoses. “Deaths of despair,” or dying from suicide, alcohol, and drugs, increased in the millennial population in the last 10 years, and they are more likely to report feeling lonely than other generations.

While the article doesn’t break suicide out by sex, men in general are four times more likely to commit suicide than women, and I’m seeing no reason to think GenZ men are any different.

Let’s get this straight – bad things happen when you raise a generation of men disproportionately without fathers?

When you pathologize and medicate boyhood traits ’til boys check out of higher education – men are now 40% of college students, headed toward 33% at this rate, which in turn limits their potential for a life partner, since women have an evolutionary preference for men who are more capable of providing, not less?

While labeling male traits “toxic” and actively demonizing them?

Or while mocking and taunting them – look at who plays the buffoon in most advertisements today; while it’s mostly white men, black men are moving into the role more and more. It’s not hard to imagine an 18 year old, coming into a world with a straitened future, where masculinity is demonized and popular culture seems to be grooming you for a future as an impotent nebbish who will at best be the comic relief for a (inevitably, in pop culture) strong, powerful woman, and at worst a villain in waiting?

Bad things happen to people who grow up that way?

Huh. Weird.

I’m not sure we could have lost a generation any more effectively if we’d sent them to fight in the trenches of Flanders.

Unsurprising on one level, and still a little shocking:

One thing that should help 2024: there’s not going to be another Dobbs decision.

The big Democrat problem with Latino voters?

They keep trying to treat them as a spot on the intersectional checkbox…

…which is not, more and more, how they see themselves.

I think the first time I noticed America’s political class divide when I was doing my first talk show, at KSTP, way back when. I made the, um, profound observation that while the American Left had always sought a “class war” in which they – or at least the garden variety of “they” – saw themselves as the little guy revolting against the Leviathan, in at least one contest, the gun control “debate”, they were in fact the patricians, trying to keep the plebs in line.

I was young and naive. Literally every cultural argument breaks down on those lines, down to the rhetoric Big Left uses.

And that class war’s biggest flashpoints in recent years were Brexit in Europe, and Donald Trump in the US. The Big Government response to Covid was an extension of that skirmish.

Which brings us to this weeks’ most interesting story, the argument over the case for or against Amnesty for the culture-war criminals.

Speaking to the case against “Covid Amnesty”, I present this piece from Unherd. Or rather, one part of a huge case for, not “amnesty”, but truth and reconciliation.

It was a salvo in the class war – America’s patrician class’s way of getting the plebs back for Brexit and Trump.

One of many “money” pullquotes:

Public faith in objectively shared political ground was already dissolving while my daughter gestated. If the Virtuals have a problem now, it’s that their counter-volley to Trump and Brexit consumed the last vestige of trust in that shared political ground: our faith in science. And the notion that such ground exists is the sine qua non of Virtual political legitimacy in its current technocratic form.

In this light, Oster’s call for amnesty can present itself as an effort to rebuild the neutral space of shared political endeavour after a period of conflict. But it reads as a continuation of now-familiar efforts to weaponise the appearance of such neutrality and common purpose, in the interests of one side of that conflict.

We all knew every pandemic policy would come with trade-offs. The lawn-sign [the “In This House…” mob – Ed.] priesthood forbade any discussion of those trade-offs. I don’t blame the class that so piously dressed their own material interests as the common good, for wanting to dodge the baleful looks now coming their way. But no “amnesty” will be possible that doesn’t acknowledge the class politics, the corruption of scientific process, the self-dealing, and the self-righteousness that went to enforcing those grim years of lawn-sign tyranny.

The whole thing is worth a read.

Gotta tell you something that bugs the bejeebers out of me.

Governor Walz’s campaign motto in both elections has been “One Minnesota”.

Now, if you’ve studied History *and* German, that slogan sounds all too close to “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer” – “One People, One Empire, One Leader”. It was the motto of…uh, a regime 80 years ago that left behind some apocalyptic historical, social and political baggage.

In 2018, the slogan was merely annoying – one of those things the kids today refer to as “Microagressions”, which is another way of saying “something that people normally suck it up and chalk up to the cognitive dissonance of human communication”.

But after four years featuring the most incredible peacetime seizure of government power in history, and a long spate of politicized violence, not to mention a campaign of “othering” dissenters from the current ruling party as “Fascists” – the same, morally and personally, as the Godwins Law convicts in the second paragraph up above – it’s not hard to wonder if “One Minnesota” is a warm, fuzzy inclusive thing, or a warning that you’re either *with* “One Minnesota” or you’re against it; an invitation, as Elvis Costello put it, “shut up or get cut up”.

The President’s speech in September, referring to half the country as “Facists”, is exactly what regimes do when they want to draw a wide, exclusive “with us or against us” line through society.

I thought about that while reading this blood-curdling story about the Russian war crimes in Bucha – where they “cleansed” the city of Ukrainians accused by their regime of being “Nazis” and “Fascists”.

Today it’s Ukraine – but it’s the same dynamic that happened in Iraq in the 2000s, and Rwanda in the ’90s, Northern Ireland in the ’70s, China in the ’60s, Greece in the ’40s and ’50s, Finland (ffs?) in the 1920’s, even Kansas before the CIvil War; if you were on the wrong side of the “Us vs. Them” line when “Them” came through town, you and your family…died. Horribly. Then and there, bodies dumped in the street as a warning that we’re now living in One Iraq/Rwanda/Ulster/Greece/Finland/Kansas.

Given the rhetoric we are seeing today – I’ll charitable and say “on both sides”, but my heart’s not really in it – a slogan like “One Minnesota” is just too…redolent. That’s a good word.

You indiscriminately refer to your opposition – political, social, whatever – as “Fascists”, “Nazis” or whatever mortal enemy, against whom your society fought a life or death battle in living memory, that your culture recognizes.

Something causes the gloves to come off. Angry tweets – aimed at people who’ve had that label from that mortal enemy piled onto them – turn to angry words, to angry actions…

…and eventually, to mass murder.

But after the rhetoric of the past few years, escalated over the past few months, it’s not hard to see it happening in a place like

Democrats, learning Twitter banned discussion on politically fraught topics at FBI request: “Hey, it’s a private company. They can do what they want!”

Democrats, being asked to pay $8 a month for their precious blue checks: “Musk is STIFLING FREE SPEECH ZOMG!!! REEEEEEEEE!!!”

Shot: Kamala Harris denies supporting the MN Freedom Fund, a group that opposes cash bail by bailing out “indigent” often-violent offenders, with occasional disastrous results…

…after gleefully supporting it two years ago:

“He who controls the past, controls the future. He who controls the present, controls the past”.

Chaser: Ellison runs away from the “Defund” movement he and his son championed last year.

A friend of the blog emails:

These people see downtown Target locking down everything and see it as corporate greed.

I hear about it and think of failed policies that create a mass of poverty stricken people who have fallen morally into the way of a Les Miserables story, where stealing is justified. It of course is justified by the very same people upset by the Target locking down basic supplies. It’s a cycle, which will continue to infinity until the cycle is somehow broken. 

We have an entire generation of over-schooled, under-educated people who think of the world in terms of corporate black hats and social justice white hats.

A friend of the blog emails:

Certain people in the media know who [Umbrella Man] is and won’t reveal it.

Do you think he’s connected or related to a well known DFL elected official or donor?

It’s starting to look that way.

If Big Leftymedia felt that the identity could impugn the GOP before an election, or reinforce the “the whole right is a bunch of wytespremecists” narrative, we’d hear about it at the top of every newscast for the next three weeks.

When people stop trusting the media to tell the stories impartially, democracy takes a hit. And anyone who trusts our media to tell the story impartially is an irredeemable pollyanna.

Parents shut down a Dearborn, Michigan school board meeting over the distribution of “woke” books:

A school-board meeting in Dearborn, Mich. was shut down earlier this week by hundreds of protesters opposing the circulation of LGBTQ books across the city’s public-school system.

Viral videos recorded by a Detroit Free Press reporter circulated on Twitter showing pandemonium breaking out at the meeting Monday night. Many of the protesters carried signs in English and Arabic: “Keep Your Dirty Books in the Closet,” “Stop Grooming Our Kids,” and “Homosexuality Big Sin,” some read.

Darn those redneck fascists with their signs in English and…

…uh, what now?

Ooof. A protected class going after a couple of protected classes. That’s gotta be awkward.

Wonder what Rashida Tlaib has to say about it?

Some Brits have had enough of wokies blocking the already-impassible London streets.

And it’s glorious.

Check the guy at 1:14:

And the people who come off the sidewalk to help.

There is hope.

When pop culture went through a phase of giggling at videos of school kids “ducking and covering” to practice for nuclear attacks?

I have a hunch that people in the 2040s are going to do the same with video of some of today’s dimmer, more dissociative bulbs:

That is to say, if they stop winning all the elections.

If I were on the Nobel Committee, this simple meme would be my nomination for the Nobel Prize for Literature this year:

It’s simple, and it sums up the modern culture war to a “T”.

We warned you that if marriage got redefined to something other than “a guy and a gal” to “two people getting together to enjoy the legal benefits of a contractual status”, there was literally no logical or moral reason that couldn’t be extended to two or more people – or not necessarily people at all”.

“That’s never gonna happen, and you’re paranoid and weird”, they said.

Of course we were right:

But remember – nobody’s coming for your guns, there’s no such thing as election fraud, there’s no way January 6 was a shake and bake…

Yesterday, just in time for midterms, President Brandon “pardoned” all people in federal custody for marijuana possession charges, and urged states to do the same.

Mentioned in the closing seconds of NPR’s report on the subject: the number of people in Federal custody solely for marijuana possession is…

(checks his notes)

…zero.

Literally nobody will be affected by this bit of campaign fluffery.

But if campaigns are to be fluffed, Peggy Flanagan will be there:

It must be a month before a hotly-contested election: the Flanagan/Klink administration is making noises about legalizing weed.