Further proof that not only was David Gilmour the brains and heart and (along with Mason and Wright) talent of Pink Floyd, he was the leader of the band who wasn’t a complete cretin.
Not that most of this blog’s readers are especially fooled – but in case anyone was still of the impression that abortion activists want the procedure to be “safe, legal, rare, and to protect women who have been raped or in medical danger“:
I first saw that, and figured “it’s just some sort of sock puppet”.
No, it’s a blue check, meeting this is the official “women’s march” organization.
You know, if I ran a republican supporting PAC, this tweet (and many like it that pop up occasionally online) would make a dandy ad to put up against all of those gauzy, soft focus DFL PAC ads.
Pro choice man shoots pro-life woman in Michigan.
Richard Harvey, age 74 of Ionia, Michigan, apparently shot Joan Jacobson, an 84-year-old woman who was gathering signatures:
Jacobson was canvassing against a statewide proposal to enshrine abortion rights in Michigan’s constitution. Harvey’s wife, Sharon Harvey, supported the proposed amendment known as Proposal 3. Jacobson told The Detroit News Wednesday that Sharon Harvey became angry during their conversation, yelled at her and told her to leave their property…”I realized that I saw a man, and the man was standing right beside her,” Jacobson said. “And the next thing I knew, I heard a shot and I felt some pain. I was just stunned. The pain was in my back, and it was very severe.”
Her husband told the Grand Rapids TV station he used a .22-caliber rifle and fired a warning shot.
Not sure who Mr. Harvey’s lawyer is, but he has apparently given a statement to… local media:
“She (Jacobson) is still ranting and raving and she’s got this clipboard,” Richard Harvey told WOOD-TV. “She’s waving it around. I’m thinking she’s going to smack Sharon with it. So without thinking, I went to club it away with the rifle and my finger was still in the trigger guard.”
I can’t imagine Mr. Harvey is going to claim self-defense, but if he does, I don’t imagine “84-year-old woman with a clipboard“ will do much for his “reasonable fear of immediate death or great bodily harm“ claim.
And Mr. Harvey is certainly a poster, er, child for trigger discipline.
Les comically? Along with the Cayler Ellington case (of which more tomorrow), that’s two cases of people arguably inflamed by try ballistic politics, killing or nearly killing people they disagree with, since President Biden labeled Republicans “fascists“ a few weeks ago.
Fences are useless, until they are mandatory.
This is Giorgia Meloni, the new prime MInister of Italy.
The media is referring to her as “Far Right” – or, in moments of revelatory candor, “Fascist”.
Check out the speech. You be the judge – while you still can.
And remember – if William F. Buckley, Jack Kemp, Barry Goldwater, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Lech Wałęsa and Newt Gingrich were coming onto the scene today, they’d all be called “fascists” too.
How do we know that?
Because they said it back then, too.
Governors Abbot (TX) and DeSantis (FL) sendig illegal immigrants to New York, DC and – major kudos to DeSantis here – the epicenter of Urban Progressive Privilege, Martha’s Freaking Vineyard.
The Vineyardians are not amused:
The bleating of the likes of Fernandes (to say nothing of NYC Mayor Adams and DC Mayor Bowser) is pure Berg’s Seventh Law: Big Left’s notion of “helping” illegals is like the PJ O’Rourke’s recounting of Tipper Gore’s account of a drive with the Gore kids through a blighted part of DC; the kids observations prompted Tipper to…
…start a group to plug for public funding for more homeless charities.
The squirming, deflection and projection is glorious.
“But Mitch – those are human beings!”
To me? Yes.
To you? Maybe.
To Big Left’s pols? Not in the least. They are votes and news cycles on the hoof.
What about this time 21 years ago, Americans were united in a way they had not been since the VJ day; President Bush’s popularity rating was climbing towards 90% faster than an F//15 scrambling to find a bogey.
And we were pretty sure we knew who the enemy was.
I have a hunch that if 9/11 were to happen today, the leftist dominant culture in our country would ruefully admit we deserve – – unless it happened in red America in which case it would be positively celebrated.
DFL comms dweeb is triggered by…
…a baby?
If this thread – full of DFLers triggered by the sight of a live baby – isn’t enough to get you to drag every citizen in your house to the polls this November, I’m not sure what is.
The new head of Planned Parenthood Twin Cities is Ruth Richardson.
Who also happens to be a Minnesota state representative:
Wonder if she plans on recusing herself from votes on Planned Parenthood funding if the media would say anything about it even if she didif the media would say anything about it even if she did or BWAHAHAHAHAHhHhaaaaa sometimes I say the dumbest things.
So what would you do if you met an SS stormtrooper, in mid-depredation? One of the people who conquered Europe and ran the concentration camps? An actual “fascist”?
We’ll come back to that.
Boogie Man
So what defines an authoritarian, whatever label (“fascist”, “Nazi”, “Communist”, “Banana Republic”, and on and on?).
Here’s one trait.
Remember when this scene, from 1984, seemed fictional?
Authoritarians, from the Pharoahs to Kim Jong Un, knew that total authority rested on having a boogeyman – simultaneously the nadir of depravity and an existential threat – to divert the attention and energy of the people.
(Funny bit of trivia – at the 2008 Republican National Convention in Saint Paul, Democrats tried to capture the magic of the scene from the movie. Didn’t work.)
Staring At The Social Ceiling
Remember that old trick from junior high, where you’d stare up at ceiling until other people started staring up with you to see what you were looking at?
“White Supremacist” groups have been shedding members at the rate of an order of magnitude per generation: they had millions of members in the 1920s (they the KKK drew 50,000 to a rally in Rocherster Minnesota in the ’20s), to hundreds of thousands in the ’60s, to tens of thousands in the early 80s (which saw the last great spasm of militant violence from those groups – the Posse Comitatus, the Alan Berg murders, and of course Oklahoma City).
Notwithstanding that, about the time Barack Obama got elected, Big Left started chanting “there’s going to be a wave of white supremacist/ultra-right terror that’ll dwarf 9/11. Any day now”.
And they’ve done their darnedest to tell that story – from portraying 100 doughy losers parading with tiki torches while outnumbered 10 to 1 in Charlottesville a “White Supremacist Uprising”, to shaking and baking more “right wing attacks” from the ether…
…almost as if they’re trying to goad someone into doing something as stupid and destructive…
…as the stuff “Anti”-Fa and BLM have been doing nationwide for the past couple of years.
But it’s not just about deflection.
It’s about making your side think the other side is just a little less noble, worthy and human than the people on your side.
All You Others
Which is what we’re getting from Democrat politicians. Last week, New York governor Kathy Hochul told all 5.4 million Republicans in her state to leave (she later clarified that to say she only wanted to expel the leaders and politicians that oppose her).
Charlie Crist, taking the next step on his road toward being the Harold Stassen of the deep south, told Republican voters to take their votes elsewhere, for their “hateful” act of (checks notes) supporting Ron DeSantis. .
Which is mostly par for the course, these days.
What, Are You Gonna Cry? Huh?
The propensity for bullies to try to goad their opponents to strike first, so they can appear to be defending themselves, is pretty much bully human nature. Extremists benefit from extreme responses; among the biggest supporters of German president Von HIndenburg’s “Hitler Cabinet” were the Communists, who bet long (and, while ultimately mistakenly, not without good reason) that promoting extremism in their opposition would benefit them.
But as we wait for the “President”‘s speech on “the soul of the nation” tomorrow, the chanting point has been deafening.
If brains were gasoline, Eric Swalwell couldn’t drive a Vespa around the inside of a Cheerio. But that’s the nice thing about being a “useful idiot” – being an idiot won’t count you out of the job:
Doesn’t he sound like that red-faced bully in sixth grade?
Speaking of sixth grade: don’t some of them sound like they learned “debate” from the mean girls in junior high?
Just some schmuck lefty who’s not the definitive opinion of the whole left?
OK – how about the President’s press secretary?
And this, er, person:
Berg’s Seventh Law alert; who said anything about a civil war?
And this next bit, from Brandon – is it yet another senile rant, or does he actually think that “right wing Americans” are killing cops?
Or does he just want his dumber, less critical supporters to think it?
Well, clearly Big Left wants people to think someone’s itchin’ to do some killin’:
(Note: not gonna say “this didn’t happen” I am going to say it happens all the time, and like Ilhan Omar’s “death threats” just in time for the state fair last year, calling them out, especially on the part of an intentional incendiarist like Swalwell, is more a matter of political optics than actual law-enforcement. I’m going out on a short little limb to suggest this is but one of many threats people on all sides of the aisle get – but this one happens to fit a narrative. Prove me wrong)
Now, it may well be that “bloodshed is coming”. We’ve already had a couple of examples – although neither this nor this are the examples Swalwell is thinking of.
But the larger point is, Big Left is trying to make half the nation into “boogiemen”.
“But the right does it too! What about Willie Horton? What about Reagan’s ‘welfare queens'”?
Say what you will about both of them; nobody ascribed their traits to half of the entire electorate.
Big Left is “othering” half the population; social media is a “90 Seconds Hate” that never ends.
Why?
You Travel Back In Time And Meet Teenage Hitler…
To answer the question from the first paragraph – what do you do if you meet an actual SS Stormtrooper?
Because the “fascist” of cultural lore was an enemy of humanity. There is no “semi”-concentration camp guard, is there?
You do what our grandparents did at Normandy or Bastogne or Saint Lo? You attack and destroy them. Right?
They are making about half the population into boogiemen so the other half doesn’t see them as human beings with political differences, but rather as villains to be feared, hated, subjugated, destroyed metaphorically or literally.
Let’s see if that’s part of Biden’s speech about “the nation’s soul” later today.
President Brandon and a cavalcade of lesser flaks have been referring to about half the population as “Fascists“, and people who want to destroy democracy.
Remember this?
In 2020, a group of activists tore down a statue of Christopher Columbus on the Capitol mall in Saint Paul.
Although the entire episode was carried live in TV, only one person was arrested; that person was “sentenced” to teaching elementary school kids about the evils of Columbus, which is a little like sentencing drunk driver to teaching mixology to high school kids.
This happened, even as the person in charge of the Capitol Architecture Commission, Peggy Flanagan (have you heard she’s Native American?), had the power in her hands to remove the statue via due process – which is slow and boring, compared to having your activist buddies do it for you.
And lefty social media was clogged with addlepated lefties nodding and going “rules, schmules; at least it’s gone”.
One needn’t imagine what’d happen if some non-DFL group decided to tear down a statute of their bete noir; I’ve thought about how fun it’d be to rip down the statue of noted authoritarian socalist Floyd Olson. I don’t suspect I’d get “sentenced” to teaching high school kids about the evils of socialism.
This episode highlights three facets of the sort of authoritarian government that is, in fact, the sort of “fascism” that Big Left is trying to paint the right with:
“But Trump did all those things!”
Are you sure you want to make “our leadership is doing the same thing the person we call ‘literaly Hitler’ did” your lede?
Just A Note Before We Go
We’ve talked about four attributes of authoritarian government – defining boogeymen, circumventing the rule of law, and making one’s ends justify one’s means.
There’s one more; wrapping ones side in some larger cause, be it “history” or nationalism or, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess, “the soul of the nation” – about which President Brandon will be talking today.
So that’ll be the next part.
“Trans woman” crushes female opponents in AAU hoop match
Do you know what some of these women’s teams need to do to be competitive? Have five trans women on the team!
Last week, President Brandon accused Republicans of being “Semi-Fascists”.
To be fair, it sort of sounded like one of his “is he senile, or just not very bright” moments:
I could go either way, to be honest.
But it got me thinking about a couple of things.
What’s In A Word
The left has been devaluing the term “fascist” since I was in high school, and long before, if I recall.
If you want to be pedantic about it, in the 1910s Benito Mussolini – at the time a prominent Italian socialist – figured that while a command economy, a welfare state and state ownership of the mean of production might go over just fine, Internationalism – the concept near and dear to socialism that eventually all borders will be rendered moot by the unification of workers around the world – was not going to fly with Italy, which was had been a nation for about fifty years, and had a lot of nationalist energy about it.
And, presto change-o, Mussolini did some tinkering; in founding the Italian “Fascist” Party, he chucked the “internationalism”, and replaced it with a heaping helping of nationalism. The command economy, nationalization of assets and welfare state, of course, he kept – to Italy’s chagrin in World War 2, as the command economy lagged the rest of Europe so badly that the Italian war machine was positively handicapped.
Most “Fascist” movements – the Nazis, Franco’s Falange and so on – repeat that pattern, keeping the small-l socialism, substituting nationalist dogma for internationalist chanting.
Of course, the left’s version of “fascism” is more nearly described as “saying or doing anything I don’t agree with”.
These days, references to “fascism” almost invariably seek to “other” those your crowd wants to erase from the public square;
And we’ve been seeing an awful lot of that, lately.
How much?
More tomorrow.
Drop The F
So as we close in on President Brandon’s “speech about America’s Soul” on Friday near the Liberty Bell, let’s talk about some of the attributes of…
…well, not ‘fascism’, per se. Or at least not only fascism.
Let’s talk, instead, about authoritarianism, by whatever name you want to call it.
About government that:
More tomorrow.
SCENE: At a studio at “Yoicks”, a new streaming service. On one side of the table, Bernie BRICKMAN, head of development for Yoicks, sits, brow furrowed, reading a script. By his right elbow sits Beyonce CAPRIÉ, his assistant.
Across from him is Ashley KLEIN, age 27, graduate of Oberlin’s screen writing program, veteran of the writer’s room at several streamcasts – Cringey, Can You Hang and Millennial Hellscape Bachelorette.
She’s pitching script for a new show…
BRICKMAN: …Sounds Like A You Problem. Cool.
KLEIN: Gen-Z angst and hopelessness meets post-Covid dystopia in a world shaped by Trump.
BRICKMAN: I like it! Let’s see. So we’ve got…
KLEIN: The show follows the ongoing life, love and adventures of Isabella “Izzy” Cohen, 26 years old, from Darien Connecticut, a graduate of a small liberal arts school who works at a social justice non-profit (CAPRIÉ makes a check on a checklist), and as she navigates the modern world of work, love and society.
BRICKMAN: So the cast of characters…
KLEIN: Yep. Roommate Queen Jenkins, her high school and college classmate, valedictorian at both, majored in Afro-American studies, and is the youngest woman on the partner track at her downtown law firm (CAPRIÉ makes another check on the checklist), who’s navigating a complicated relationship with her boyfriend and supervisor, junior partner Geoffrey Belcher, a former Ivy League lacrosse player – which is complicated by her friendly and occasionally intimate relationship her her and Izzy’s other roommate, Natasha Kim, a genderqueer Asian woman of color (CAPRIÉ makes yet another check on the checklist) who works as chef and caterer, and is a closet alcoholic (CAPRIÉ makes another check).
BRICKMAN: And Izzy’s love interests…this Kyle Dershowitz…?
KLEIN: Kyle is sort of a neurodivergent child-man-child (CAPRIÉ makes another check on the checklist), lost in the world, clinging to Izzy as his only real link to the heterosexuality he is so clearly uncomfortable with (CAPRIÉ makes another check on the checklist). He loses his job as an executive assistant to Izzy’s in the first episode, and has to go to work at Natasha’s catering company, and he thinks he’s good at it, but he is just terrible, and realizing that sends him into spiral.
BRICKMAN: I see Dershowitz as sort of a Woody Allen type character…
KLEIN: Yes, only less masculine, especially after Izzy meets her other boyfriend, Tyrone Marley, a Jamaican-American bicycle messenger and rapper (CAPRIÉ makes another check on the checklist). The love triangle is the big conflic
BRICKMAN: And Queen tells Izzy to follow her truth…?
KLEIN: Yes – but the twist is, Izzy has no idea what her truth, or any truth, is (CAPRIÉ makes another check on the checklist).
BRICKMAN: Heavy.
KLEIN: Could get dark (CAPRIÉ makes another check on the checklist). .
BRICKMAN: So, Beyonce – where does that leave us?
CAPRÉ: (Adjusts her glasses) It appears it checks every box on the modern young adult streaming dramedy checklist.
BRICKMAN: Awesome! Let’s talk directors!
And SCENE
With the impending retirement of Dr. Fauci, we are learning more about how much our federal and state public health bureaucracies deceived the public in the interest of “the public good“.
And, perhaps worse, the extent to which it is standard operating procedure:
When experts or agencies deliver information to the public that they consider possibly or definitively false to further a larger, often well-meaning agenda, they are telling what is called a noble lie. Although the teller’s intentions may be pure—for example, a feeling of urgency that behavioral change is needed among the lay public—the consequences can undermine not only those intentions but also public trust in experts and science. During the first year of COVID-19, leaders were faced with an unknown disease amid a politically sensitive election in the era of social media, and the preconditions for noble lies became especially fertile. Not surprisingly, we witnessed several examples. More than anything, these examples illustrate the destructive potential of such lies.
The moment that I realized we were being lied to at the state level? May 11, 2020 Dash the Governors press conference, where the states “healthcare economist“ told a reporter that they had no plans on releasing the code for the “models“ that had predicted between 20,000 and 70,000 deaths in Minnesota by July 2020, because “people might use that to reach different conclusions than we did“.
That is the opposite of science, and a repudiation of any idea of trusting that particular institution.
I stay pretty relentlessly civil, especially when discussing politics. There’s enough pointless anger out there.
But I’m going to say this, and I don’t care what you think about it: If you are part of the lefty social media mob that thinks “Kyle Rittenhouse is a murderer”, you are a flat-earther.
Complicated stuff follows. Stay with me, progressives.
You think someone’s trying to kill you. You shoot them – maybe fatally, maybe not. You’re arrested. The DA presses charges – assault, homicide, whatever.
To even be allowed to *argue* self-defense for assault or homicide, you have to show a judge evidence, to a legal standard, that:
That’s *before* the trial. If your evidence on any of those 4-5 criteria doesn’t stack up, you’ll be a defendant in a murder trial, not a self-defense trial.
Once you’ve gotten past that? On to trial!
And there, if the prosecution disproves any of those 4-5 factors beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury? You’re going to prison – for assault if nobody died, and murder if they did.
That’s a pretty high burden of proof for a “Murderer” to skate past. (Don’t think so? That’s just ignorant.
“But the judge was biased”
No, he wasn’t.
Rittenhouse may not have been a hero [3]. And if you think the whole episode is stupid and unfortunate, I don’t disagree – although in a moral society, the burden should fall on those who set out to damage and destroy others property.
Either way calling Rittenhouse a “murderer” is ignorant at best. And there’s an implied clause after “at best” [4]…
…but again, I try to stay civil.
I try. But I’m only human. It can’t last forever.
[1] And no, doing something you have every legal right to do does not make you an aggressor. Rittenhouse had a right to be where he was, and to carry a rifle. Don’t like it? Take it up with the Wisconsin Assembly.
[2] Where “reasonable” is defined by statute or, much more usually, in a stack of case law references that you have to be a lawyer to understand.
[3]But after seeing the mayhem that the entitled children of the politicalclass got away with scot-free in Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis and Kenosha, it’s not hard to understand why some people think he is a hero.
[4] And that implied clause may or may not but definitely does include the thought that a whole lot of the “Rittenhouse is teh murdererer” crowd think rioting and rioters are justified, which is a pretty problematic view.
Since it’s state fair time Dash the time when at least some people in Minnesota start paying attention to the upcoming elections – let’s make sure we remember: when minutes counted, Governor Klink took days to respond to the collapse of law and order in Minneapolis.
The media is going to focus on cheery stories about food on sticks, and a blijf The Administration in deflecting to happy talk about abortion.
To protect a progressive administration, the rioting is going to get memoryholed.
Let’s not let it get memory holed.
SCENE: Mitch BERG is looking for Gatorade Zero at Cub Foods when Cat SCAT, he designated “fact checker” at the (possibly fictional) progressive blog “”MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com“ and office manager at a small phrenology practice, steps around the corner.
SCAT: Merg!
BERG: Uh, hey, Cat…
SCAT: Shut up. You and other so-called conservatives are spreading disinformation.
BERG: Do tell.
SCAT: You say that the so-called “woke mob” is “grooming” people, especially young children, into transitioning their gender.
BERG: Yep. You know who else says it? The parents of those children.
SCAT: Ack-shyu-ally, before someone can transition, they have to go through rigorous counseling by physician, culminating with a “Letter of Readiness for Surgery” signed by a physician.
BERG: Ah. A legal document.
SCAT: Yes.
BERG: Delivered with all due solemnity.
SCAT: Of course.
BERG: Because science.
SCAT: Uh…yeah?
BERG: Yeah – about that?
BERG: Comments?
SCAT: White supremacy! Racism!
BERG: Of course.
And SCENE.
Many common social-justice phrases have echoes of a catechism: announcing your pronouns or performing a land acknowledgment shows allegiance to a common belief, reassuring a group that everyone present shares the same values. But treating politics like a religion also makes it more emotionally volatile, more tribal (because differences of opinion become matters of good and evil) and more prone to outbreaks of moralizing and piety. “I was thinking about that Marx quote that religion is the opium of the people,” Elizabeth Oldfield, the former director of the Christian think tank Theos, told me. “I think what we’ve got now is [that] politics is the amphetamines of the people.”
Writing for the Atlantic (via MSN), Helen Lewis also noticed something else:
I asked Alex Clare-Young, a nonbinary minister in the United Reformed Church, whether their faith or their gender was more surprising to Generation Z acquaintances. “I think probably being religious,” Clare-Young responded. “I know a lot of LGBTQ+ young people who say it’s harder to come out as Christian in an LGBT space than LGBT in a Christian space.”
Of course it is. In our world, the wrath of the mob is more fearsome than the wrath of God. And you’re more likely to get instant karma if you don’t bow to conventional wisdom. If you see a sign in someone’s yard, proclaiming “In This House We Believe [select platitudes here]”, it’s almost certainly a leftist. I suppose it’s good when they self-identify. But as the old saw goes, the devil is in the details.
California residents continue to vote with their feet. From this NYT article in May,
For the second time in two years, the California Department of Finance has reported a drop in the state’s population.
California lost 117,552 residents last year, driven largely by the Covid death toll and a sharp drop in foreign immigration. This followed a slightly bigger decline in 2020, when the state lost 182,083 residents — the first time in more than a century that California got smaller.
The latest data is further evidence that California, whose identity has been tied to expansive growth going back to the Gold Rush days, is now a state of stagnant growth. That has already resulted in the state losing a congressional seat for the first time in its 170-year history.
This City Journal article found that since 2000, California saw a net loss of over 2.6 million people. Many of those are taxpayers.
The comforting tale that only the old, bitter, and uneducated are moving out simply does not withstand scrutiny. An analysis of IRS data through 2019 confirms that increasing domestic migration is not dominated by the youngest or oldest households. Between 2012 and 2019, tax filers under 26 years old constituted only 4 percent of net domestic outmigrants. About 77 percent of the increase came among those in their prime earning years of 35 to 64. In 2019, 27 percent of net domestic migrants were aged 35 to 44, while 21 percent were aged 55 to 64.
As an unscientific experiment, I looked up U-Haul rates for a 10′ truck, picking up on September 6, both leaving and going to California, with Texas and Florida as the other ends of the trip.
from Los Angeles, California…
Los Angeles to Dallas – $2,701
Los Angeles to Miami – $4,416
to Los Angeles, California…
Dallas to Los Angeles – $1,296
Miami to Los Angeles – $2,760
from San Francisco, California…
San Francisco to Dallas – $3,350
San Francisco to Miami – $4,902
to San Francisco, California…
Dallas to San Francisco – $1,462
Miami to San Francisco – $3,065
It’s 60-100% more expensive leaving California than going to California. What might that say about demand in California and which direction trucks are going, and where they’re staying?
The tech and entertainment industries can survive longer because so many of their dollars come from outside the state, but as crime and lawlessness and leftist policies drive out more and more people, eventually the California tax base won’t support the status quo. Then we can sit back with some popcorn and watch the fireworks.
We are living in a meritocracy that is utterly lacking in merit. And our betters know it. If the current leadership in Washington were confident in their abilities and in their support, you would not see FBI raids on political opponents and political show trials on national television.
You are under no obligation to like the Bad Orange Man. Likely a plurality of the regular writers of this feature are, if not actively anti-Trump, certainly Trump-skeptical. We all know him and, in a better world, he’d be back on television pretending to fire C-list celebrities.
We don’t live in that world. We have a hopelessly corrupt federal government and, at least in Minnesota, a kleptocratic political machine built for the amusement of the parlor pinks who support them. These are the same people who especially enjoy voting for Ilhan Omar, because doing so is brave and transgressive. Ask the local gentry and they will say it’s elementary.
If you’ve read The Great Gatsby, you’ll recognize the type — there are plenty of Tom and Daisy Buchanans in the world. They like what they like and they don’t like arrivistes from the outer boroughs. And they don’t care about the damage they leave in their wake, because they are, in the main, immune from the consequences. We send people like Betty McCollum and Vin Weber to Washington to dance for the Buchanans and, if their performances pass muster, they get to stick around long enough to make bank. And when the spirit moves, the politicos send us back a percentage the money they extract from all of us. And for the most part, those of us who follow politics pretend the labels our dancers wear really matter.
This construct has lasted a long time, at least 90 years and arguably all the way back to Grover Cleveland. All of it is getting shaky now, though. And in Joe Biden, we have the decrepit embodiment of the rot that has been building since the one-time Garanimals customers started learning their Gramsci alongside the trust-fund swells.
It can’t continue. And our betters know it. They are showing force, but they are not confident. They may be able to gaslight their way past November, but the reckoning draws near.
Roughly a fifth of American adults don’t want to have children:
Our estimate of the number of childfree people is much higher than past national studies, which placed the percentage between 2% and 9%. This likely happened because our measurement focuses on a person’s desire to have children, not their ability. This is important because a person can be childfree whether they are biologically capable of having children or not…Our findings depart from research conducted in the 1970s, which found that childfree adults tended to arrive at their decision later in life after postponing parenthood for many years. Earlier decisions may reflect changing norms toward parenthood and an increasing recognition and acceptance of a childfree lifestyle.
Before you ask? The study does in fact distinguish between people who haven’t decided yet, and those who can’t have children for medical reasons.
The bad news: this means 20% of Americans aren’t going to be bringing anyone into the world to take care of them – literally, financially, politically any other way – when they get to the stage of their life when they need help. Someone else’s kids will be taking care of all that – from paying Medicare taxes to literally changing their diapers.
The good news: They are disproportionally, although not completely or overwhelmingly – in Blue America.
Now, last month I was reliably informed that an “activist” Supreme Court had banned abortion.
So this just can not be: a referendum to repeal Kansas’s constitutional protection of abortion failed, and failed hard, yesterday.
Why, it’s almost as if all the Dobbs decision does it require pro-choicers to do what us Second Amendment activists have been doing for fifty years; go out and convince voters, and elect legislators, create a cultural push in favor of, uh, killing babies throughout all nine months of gestation and beyond.
Which, to some extent, is what happened in Kansas. Sort of:
The result is bad news, but supporters of the abortion license are giddily overreading it. The instant line is that the result shows that a backlash to Dobbs will be powerful this November. And it’s true that the referendum appears to have driven turnout in the state. This suggests to me a few potential advantages for pro-abortion Democrats this fall. They can do very well in places where a pro-life referendum is on the ballot, especially one that can be presented as effectively banning abortion without exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape; and maybe also in some places where legislators are on the verge of enacting such bans (or can be presented as being on the verge of it).
Will they be as successful in turning out their vote in the many places where those conditions are not present? Tuesday night’s result in Kansas will yield Democratic confidence about the answer to that question. It could turn out to be overconfidence.
And even in Kansas, I think pro-lifers ought to come back in a few years with another ballot initiative, this one establishing a gestational limit on abortion: at fifteen weeks, for example. There is no reason pro-lifers should take this deeply disappointing vote as the last word anywhere.
I said “sort of”:
There are two takeaways from this:
August 1, 2025: “Residents of Manila garbage dump: “Californians go home! You’re ruining everything!”
Former Trump hand Michael Anton, writing for Compact, offers a bracing view of the various pathologies of Trump haters, whose numbers are legion, at least among the chattering classes. I am going to pull a few quotes; this article is a festival of pull quotes, truly a “read the whole thing” special. But a few of Anton’s observations deserve particular consideration, to wit:
Complaints about the nature of Trump are just proxies for objections to the nature of his base. It doesn’t help stabilize our already twitchy situation that those who bleat the loudest about democracy are also audibly and visibly determined to deny a real choice to half the country. “No matter how you vote, you will not get X”—whether X is a candidate or a policy—is guaranteed to increase discontent with the present regime.
All along the Potomac, you can sense it: oh boy, here comes the hoi polloi. The whole point of the current January 6 show trial is to demonstrate, beyond question, that your concerns do not matter. Stay outta the 202, y’all. The enmity Anton describes began before Trump — before the MAGA hat became the visible headgear from hell, the tricorner hats of the Tea Party were not a source of great amusement to our betters, but rather an unwelcome interruption to the exciting new world on offer. The concerns of those citizens mattered not at all then and little has changed.
The Tea Party did not last; it was leaderless by design and easily coopted and dispersed by the professional Republicans who serve as junior partners in the Beltway ecosystem. So nothing changed. What did change? This time the hoi polloi had a herald, who happened to be a publicity hound from Queens.
Why did Trump get the gig? Why wasn’t the herald someone more housebroken, like Marco Rubio or “Jeb!” or John “Daddy Was a Postman” Kasich? Amazingly, it was because a carnival barker like Trump was more credible than the other worthies in the field were. Back to Anton:
The regime can’t allow Trump to be president not because of who he is (although that grates), but because of who his followers are. That class—Angelo Codevilla’s “country class”—must not be allowed representation by candidates who might implement their preferences, which also, and above all, must not be allowed. The rubes have no legitimate standing to affect the outcome of any political process, because of who they are, but mostly because of what they want.
What Tea Party/MAGA types want isn’t hegemony over their betters. Rather, they want to be left alone, without the ministrations of those who have plans for how they ought to live their lives. Can’t have that, of course. And if you are old enough to have had friendships of over 30 years, you understand and have likely experienced the following:
People I have known for 30 years, many of whom still claim the label “conservative,” will no longer speak to me—because I supported Trump, yes, but also because I disagree on trade, war, and the border. They call not just my positions, but me personally, unadulterated evil. I am not an isolated case. There are, as they say, “many such cases.”
Kevin Williamson and the NR gang, pick up the white courtesy phone. Then Anton gets to the nub:
How are we supposed to have “democracy” when the policies and candidates my side wants and votes for are anathema and can’t be allowed? How are we supposed to live together with the constant demonization from one side against the other blaring 24/7 from the ruling class’s every propaganda organ? Why would we want to?
I am not sure we can. There’s more, a whole lot more, at the link. Consider it carefully, as we are in a dangerous moment.
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