That feeling when you search, and search, and search, believing that something you see on social media just has to be from the Babylon Bee.
Realization
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Category Archives: Big Activism
Long Time No See
A friend of the blog emails re “PETA”:
If it weren’t for stupid stunts like this, I’s almost forget they exist.
The inevitable counter effort to re-rename it “Spam Lake“ would be epic.
Grab Your Popcorn
I’ve got a few friends who could qualify as “transgender”. I’ve always done my best to treat them with compassion and respect, the way we’re supposed to treat human beings.
That part is not open for debate.
But there are a few points open for legitimate debate – and the reason we know this is that the trans “movement” – I’ll just call it Big Trans from now on – works so very hard to suppress that debate. In my forays into looking into how Big Trans behaves on social media, I’ve found no group able to mobilize so much frothing ire so fast – not union goons, not Big Karen, nobody. Their “allies” certainly pull their weight in trying to shut down the conversation as well.
Now, there’s a backlash – some parents of putatively trans children are pushing back against the logrolling disguised as “support” that their children, often deeply vulnerable, receive
This piece – first of a four-part investigation – is very long, and so far utterly worth a read.
The Usual Suspects
Trump supporters on the Mall
“Trump Supporters” who stormed the Capitol.
We’ve seen the horned-hat guy before:
Wasn’t there a famous incident a centuray ago, a fire blamed on innocent people which gave a certain politician the excuse to seize power?
Are we absolutely certain the troublmakers were ordinary Trump supporters, same as the rest of the crowd outside, and not infiltrators hoping to cause a backlash against President Trump and his supporters protesting the stolen election
Joe Doakes
Whether the riot was launched by provocateurs or not, plenty of Trump supporters did participate with great glee. There’s a dilemma, of course – if there’s one thing we learned during the Tea Party, at gun rights and pro life and tax-protest rallies, it’s that conservatives need to behave impeccably, because the media and the Dems oppo research staff (pardon the redundancy) will pick over every utterance, visual and thought for wrongthink).
(If there’s another thing we learned it’s that the left’s slander machine and control of the administrative state makes perfect behavior irrelevant. Lefty social media today is awash in claims that the Tea Party was racist, violent, and a tool of the Koch Brothers, who (we’re told) bought all of American politics for a few years).
But whoever turned the demonstration into a riot, and whatever the reasons, the left is responding to last week’s events with a technique they’ve mastered; not wasting a crisis. Whoever did what, it will be spun relentlessly to their advantage.
When I Ask If There’s Any Slice Of Modern Life…
…that Big Left isn’t going to profane and politicize…
…the answer is “Mitch, please”. Andrew Zimmern has a show on the slate discussing food and…
…wait for it…
politics.
I’ll echo this tweet in response:
Inorganic
Hard as this may be to believe, it appears Greta Thunberg = sixteen year old autistic Swedish child and professional climate scold – just may not be the mind behind her presence.
“All it took to exploit the bug was opening a target page and checking the edit history of a post. Facebook mistakenly displayed the account or accounts that made edits to each post, rather than just the edits themselves,” explained Wired… If you’re one of Greta’s 3 million fans, you might be disappointed to hear that she is likely not the author of all of her posts. According to screenshots shared online, posts that are supposed to be written by Greta may actually have been written by her father, Svante Thunberg, and/or Adarsh Prathap, a climate activist and delegate at the UN’s Climate Change organization—who reportedly founded the page in December 2018.
Five’ll get you ten David Hogg’s social media presence is farmed out, too.
Fair Is Fair
Liberals insist Citizens United was wrongly decided and must be overturned. Really? The Supreme Court made a mistake? A mistaken decision must be overturned?
Okay, I’m good with that. But Citizens United concerns a narrow area of free speech as it applies to political campaigns. Let’s start with cases that have broader societal impact, because the errors those cases cause are much greater.
Miranda v. Arizona
Roe v. Wade
Obergefell v. Hodges
Each of these stole the power of self-government from the states, where it rightfully belongs. Let’s reverse all of them, then we can discuss why Hillary should be exempt from criticism.
Joe Doakes
You notice, over time, how “logical consistency” isn’t much of a prioriity to Big Left.
Re-Education Needed
Target claims it is a corporate leader for social responsibility, even going so far as to have transgender bathrooms, but they pay their workers a pittance.
Evil selfish bastards. Fight for 15!
In 2010, Target found on the hard way that there is no “progressive enough” when dealing with the Big Left’s mob; that a decade and a half of prostrating themselves to the howling mob didn’t protect them when the howling mob needed a kick toy.
Will they need to be educated again?
Tipping Point
Seen on (and observed about) a snowflake protest sign:
You guys, the campus socialists might have one-upped Westborough Baptist 😂 pic.twitter.com/SGcTNfJ9OP— Daniel G. Weldon II 🌴☀️ (@DanWeldonFL) April 24, 2019
It’s an astute observation – but Big Left’s control over the entire education system is a lot more dangerous than Westboro, even with their platoon of carnivorous attack lawyers.
What’s The Fastest Way To Get National Media Coverage?
Easy.
- Be a loser living in their mom’s basement, or a preacher of some obscure separatist sect back in some holler in the Appalachians, or to pick a current example, the “editor” of a newspaper with a circulation roughly that of this blog’s daily readership. Then…
- Express some form of sympathy for the Klan, or the Nazis, or any other white supremacist group
- Watch the media beat a path to your door.
The media is, of course, trying to “de-normalize” opposition to the Big Left – to create the impression that the people #TheResistance is resisting really are the deplorables really are the cartoons Obama and Hillary described.
Our media have to crawl way up into “the woodwork” to create the impression that racists are “coming out of the woodwork”.
But let’s be fair – it is more honest than the Southern Poverty Law Center’s approach, which is to just lie about it.
Why Does Governor Walz Hate The Environment And Want Rural Minnesotans To Die Flaming Deaths?
Governor Walz provides the service for which Big Environmental paid good money.
Notwithstanding the fact that the Enbridge pipeline would replace hundreds / thousands of derailment-prone tanker cars and crash-able «trucks that currently transit populated areas and sensitive environments with a pipeline that will be gallon-for-gallon vastly safer for both people and the ecology; Walz knows who he’s working for.
Arguably the bigger crime? The twaddle he plopped out there to justify “his” decision.
I’ll add some emphasis:
Gov. Tim Walz will continue pursuing a court appeal started by his predecessor that could block Enbridge from building a controversial $2.6 billion oil pipeline across northern Minnesota.
Under former Gov. Mark Dayton, the Commerce Department appealed the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission’s (PUC’s) decision to allow Enbridge to build the pipeline, a replacement for its aging and corroding Line 3. Last month, the Walz administration said it would review the appeal.
“By continuing that process, our administration will raise the Department of Commerce’s concerns to the court in hopes of gaining further clarity for all involved,” Walz said in a statement. “As I often say, projects like these don’t only need a building permit to go forward, they also need a social permit. Our administration has met with groups on all sides of this issue, and Minnesotans deserve clarity.”
“Social permit”.
That is two steps from fluent Duckspeak.
Following it up with a platitude like “Minnesotans deserve clarity” adds rhetorical insult to Orwellian injury.
Governor Walz; your leash is showing.
Open Letter To The Entire US Senate GOP Caucus
To: Entire US Senate GOP Caucus
From: Mitch Berg, Cranky Peasant
Re: A Big Lie
Senators,
Confirm Brett Kavanaugh. Now.
The allegations against him are of a piece with nearly every leftist narrative today – utter crap. It’s transparent BS. Like most lefty memes – “gun violence”, the “War on Women”, the $15 minimum wage and on and on, it is largely a set of chanting points that aren’t intended to convince the intelligent. They are intended solely to leverage the tribalist ignorance of the masses of entitled would-be elitists who make up Big Left’s voting bloc; they don’t fact check jack; they hear things on the media, and the left’s alt-media, and parrot it like the obedient little schnauzers most of them are.
Confirm Brett Kavanaugh. Now.
Nothing reinforces a tactic like success. If Big Left manages to scuttle Kavanaugh, you can expect every single conservative – I almost added “male” to the list, but as we saw with Sarah Palin and MIchele Bachmann, the left hates conservative women even more – will meet the same scabrous, defamatory treatment.
Every one.
Confirm Kavanaugh. Now.
And if Big Left tries to call out the schnauzers of “The #Resistance”, then yes, let’s meet them – in court if they choose wisely, at the barricades if they don’t.
But confirm Kavanaugh. Now.
If you fail to do this, you will get brutalized this November.
And you will have it coming.
Confirm Kavanaugh. Now.
The Real #Resistance
Silicon Valley – and its various satellites around the country, including whatever software design culture that exists in the Twin Cities – has trended left of center for a long, long time (although not forever; it used to be fairly libertarian – a change that’s been a net loss for everyone).
That’s changed, of course; when James Damore was fired at Google for the high crime of pointing out the patently obvious about Google’s internal political culture – think Arthur Miller’s The Crucible – it surprised absolutely nobody that’d been following the way the Bay Area’s software development culture has been evolving.
An engineer at Facebook has started a conservative group. Which is big news. David French notes:
…the internal conservative revolt at Facebook may — just may — represent one of the most consequential news developments of the year. A senior engineer named Brian Amerige posted a short statement on Facebook’s internal message board. It began with words that will ring true to employees at hundreds of major American corporations and academic institutions:
We are a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views. We claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology. We throw labels that end in *obe and *ist at each other, attacking each other’s character rather than their ideas.
We do this so consistently that employees are afraid to say anything when they disagree with what’s around them politically. HR has told me that this is not a rare concern, and I’ve personally gotten over a hundred messages to that effect. Your colleagues are afraid because they know that they — not their ideas — will be attacked. They know that all the talk of “openness to different perspectives” does not apply to causes of “social justice,” immigration, “diversity,” and “equality.” On this issues [sic], you can either keep quiet or sacrifice your reputation and career.
Amerige invited colleagues to join a group called “FB’ers for Political Diversity” and — as the New York Times reports — more than 100 employees have joined. It’s a small fraction of the Facebook workforce, but it’s enough that it can’t be easily squelched.
Indeed, the Times reports that angry colleagues have already tried to appeal to Facebook to shut down the group. So far, they’ve failed
This is something I wrestle with daily – at work (I work at a place with a bit of a political monoculture, as luck would have it, and suffice to say I’m not in the majority) and elsewhere in my life (I’ve changed my church affiliation, and the world of dating is rife with people who just can not tolerate the idea of being around someone whose politics challenge their own). Like most conservatives, I want my politics to stay in my mind, my news, and at the polling station; I don’t want it to eat my entire life.
Which is of course what Big Left wants, and needs; to divide and conquer an inchoate mass of individuals.
And so this is something to follow – and, let’s be honest, emulate in our daily lives.
Much more to come.
Collision In Intersectionality
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Minneapolis Gay Pride parade started late. Gays were blocked by Blacks, protesting a shooting. Their lives matter, you see, whereas gay lives . . . .
By adopting the tactic of hijacking other people’s events solely to generate publicity, BLM has turned into the Westboro Baptist Church. Their protests are no longer persuasive, they’re a nuisance and by blocking the gay parade, BLM is now a hate group.
Calling the Southern Poverty Law Center – update your list.
Joe Doakes
Watching intersectionals argue over public mindshare is a little like watching crabs fighting to get to the top of a bucket.
You’d think in a city the size of MInneapolis, there’d be plenty of bucket for everyone. But no..
Expect A Surge In News About The “Alt Right”
Why, you may ask?
Because it seems to be collapsing.
And Big Left needs a boogeyman to flog (other than the NRA) to turn out the droogs.
What Is It About “Progressive” Non-Profits…
Imagine
Imagine if a conservative group that was as tightly connected with the leadership of the American rights as “Anti”-Fa is to Big Left were to publish something with a tone like this.
And you’d have to imagine it – because nobody this side of Alex Jones does, or would.
Right Now In Berkeley
I just got this from a contact of mine at UC Berkeley:
My contact asked “is that all they could find – one quote from Ben Shapiro?”
It’s Satire
Barely.
Let The Great Retraction Begin
There must have been a poll showing that voters don’t, in fact, thing of “Anti”-Fa / the “Black Bloc” as anything but a bunch of pampered snowflakes; the left is starting to distance themselves from them.
The mayor of Berkeley – which has all but packed box lunches for the Blackshirts in recent months – is suddenly talking…well, as tough as a Democrat is allowed to talk about the children of his pals:
“I think we should classify them as a gang,” said Arreguin. “They come dressed in uniforms. They have weapons, almost like a militia and I think we need to think about that in terms of our law enforcement approach.”
Arreguin said that while he does not support the far right, it was time to draw the line on the left as well, especially on the black-clad activists who showed up in force and took over both the protests and the park, and played a part in Sunday’s violent clashes.
Word has it the Blackshirts plan on “demonstrating” this Sunday at/around the State Fair. It’ll be interesting to see if the City of Saint Paul – which has, in the past, “stood down” for the children of their political superiors – will do anything.
Charlottesville Was Just The Middle Of The Story
Even Orwell couldn’t keep up with this vision of today’s American left.
Too many good quotes to even pick one. Just read it.
I’m Not Saying The Strib Editorial Board Seeks A Totalitarian Government.
I’m just saying that in the future, if some future wannabe despot wants to take over this country, suspend the Constitution and crush our freedoms without firing a shot (up front, anyway), he’ll need a society full of people who “think” like the Strib editorial board to have a chance of succeeding. r
They want the President to stop having rallies like last week’s event in Phoenix – for everyone’s best interest:
These campaign-style rallies serve little practical purpose with the next presidential election not until 2020. Instead, they unnecessarily stoke anger and division at a volatile time, with the rally locations attracting the violence-prone on all sides of the political spectrum.
Well, no. For the past year and a half, they have drawn unstable, violence-prone, Urban-Progressive-Privilege-sotted “Anti”-Fa blackshirts. Lately, to be sure, they’ve drawn people on the other side who’ve come to aggressively defend themselves. What, you expect people to stand still while they’re being gassed and clubbed for exercising their rights?
Clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters have already left one woman dead. It is only by the grace of God that more people didn’t die in Charlottesville. Or that violence didn’t spiral out of control during another gathering last Saturday in Boston.
Excluse my middle English, but bullshit. All the violence in Boston was on the left. Thousands of drooling scumbags descended on an expressly peaceful event that specifically excluded and condemed “white supremacists”. Boston was a monument to the spoiled entitlement of Big Left and its idiot children – which is why it’s disappeared from the media.
It’s just common sense to let these tensions settle down and, until then, not offer up another obvious gathering point for extremists itching for action. President Trump should have recognized this before Tuesday’s rally, but making his way through the large, tense and often heavily armed crowd in Phoenix should have really driven that point home. Thankfully, there were no serious injuries Tuesday, but the event clearly strained local law enforcement’s capacity.
Look at the bright side; being a Red area, at least the cops in Phoenix showed up.
My suspicion; Big Media is decreasingly able to cover up the depravity of its nephews and nieces in the extreme left.
News Conferences I’d Love To See. And Participate In.
SCENE: Press conference where a Free Speech Rally is being announced for the Minnesota state capitol grounds. A group of reporters is questioning the organizers of the rally – Madison JAMES, Tyrone JEFFERSON, and Jorge WASHINGTON.
WASHINGTON: …So to sum up, we will hold our Free Speech rally at precisely noon. We have our permit, and we are ready to stand up for the free speech rights of all Minnesotans and all Americans.
JEFFERSON: Even those we don’t agree with.
JAMES: We’ll now take questions. (Sees hands rising, points to a sallow endomorph in his late forties with severe acne). Yes.
REPORTER 1: I’m Edmund DuChey, from “MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com”. So your rally of Nazis and White Supremacists…
WASHINGTON: Yeah, you can stop right there. As noted before, this rally specifically denounces the American Nazi Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and everyone who would actively curtail the rights of others based on their ethnicity, religion or anything else.
JAMES: And we’ve specifically disinvited them from the rally, and are ready to enforce that.
JAMES: Next question.
REPORTER 2: Walter Lennon-Marks from Minnesota Public Radio. I notice that you have not disinvited people who plan on carrying firearms, concealed or openly, from the rally.
JEFFERSON: That’s correct.
LENNON-MARKS: Don’t you find that intimidates other speech?
WASHINGTON: I find that it most definitely intimidates those who would threaten our rally with violence like “Anti”-Fa did in San Francisco.
JEFFERSON: Or those who would act on those threats, as “Anti”-Fa did in Boston, and clearly plan to elsewhere. Inducing them to keep their speech non-violent is a feature, not a bug.
JAMES: Next question?
REPORTER 3: Yes – Yvette Stahlen from the Star Tribune. Why do all three of you make the scare quotes with your fingers whenever you say the “anti” in “Antifa?”
WASHINGTON: Because they are “against fascism” in exactly the same way the Bloods are against the Crips, or the Gambinos were “against” the Luccheses. These are two sides of the same noxious, anti-democratic, anti-freedom, pro-totalitarian coin.
STAHLEN: But my editors’ oldest daughter is a member of Antifa, and has been ever since zhe graduated from Oberlin.
WASHINGTON: (Walks down from the stage with a microphone, hands it to STAHLEN). Here.
STAHLEN: What do you want me to do with this.
WASHINGON: Drop it for me. I couldn’t possibly have ended this better than you did.
(And SCENE)
Charlottesville = Gliwice?
It’s not quite a Berg’s Law, but it’s getting close; if violence breaks out between the left and the right, and the media claims not to know who started it? The left started it. And if they claim the right started it, without absolute dead to rights evidence? The left started it.
Maybe a corollary to Berg’s Seventh Law.
Was Charlottesville painstakingly engineered by Charlottesville’s Democrat government? .
Maybe. I am not quite ready to nail this down into the “Setup” category – I’d like some on-the-record sources.
But as Joe Doakes noted the other day, the “Anti”-Fa had a demonstration permit – that they had to violate to attack the “White Supremacists”, who were apparently in their permitted area. Because that’s why they give out permits for demonstrations; to keep them apart.
So if “Anti”-Fa had a permit, they broke the rules to get to the “White Supremacists”. And if they didn’t, they broke the rules to get to the “White Supremacists”.
Rebooting Berkeley
This email was circulated at Berkeley earlier this week, according to an acquaintance of mine:
“Dear Students, Faculty and Staff,This fall, the issue of free speech will once more engage our community in powerful and complex ways. Events in Charlottesville, with their racism, bigotry, violence and mayhem, make the issue of free speech even more tense. The law is very clear; public institutions like UC Berkeley must permit speakers invited in accordance with campus policies to speak, without discrimination in regard to point of view. The United States has the strongest free speech protections of any liberal democracy; the First Amendment protects even speech that most of us would find hateful, abhorrent and odious, and the courts have consistently upheld these protections.But the most powerful argument for free speech is not one of legal constraint—that we’re required to allow it—but of value. The public expression of many sharply divergent points of view is fundamental both to our democracy and to our mission as a university. The philosophical justification underlying free speech, most powerfully articulated by John Stuart Mill in his book On Liberty, rests on two basic assumptions. The first is that truth is of such power that it will always ultimately prevail; any abridgement of argument therefore compromises the opportunity of exchanging error for truth. The second is an extreme skepticism about the right of any authority to determine which opinions are noxious or abhorrent. Once you embark on the path to censorship, you make your own speech vulnerable to it.Berkeley, as you know, is the home of the Free Speech Movement, where students on the right and students on the left united to fight for the right to advocate political views on campus. Particularly now, it is critical that the Berkeley community come together once again to protect this right. It is who we are.Nonetheless, defending the right of free speech for those whose ideas we find offensive is not easy. It often conflicts with the values we hold as a community—tolerance, inclusion, reason and diversity. Some constitutionally-protected speech attacks the very identity of particular groups of individuals in ways that are deeply hurtful. However, the right response is not the heckler’s veto, or what some call platform denial. Call toxic speech out for what it is, don’t shout it down, for in shouting it down, you collude in the narrative that universities are not open to all speech. Respond to hate speech with more speech.We all desire safe space, where we can be ourselves and find support for our identities. You have the right at Berkeley to expect the university to keep you physically safe. But we would be providing students with a less valuable education, preparing them less well for the world after graduation, if we tried to shelter them from ideas that many find wrong, even dangerous. We must show that we can choose what to listen to, that we can cultivate our own arguments and that we can develop inner resilience, which is the surest form of safe space. These are not easy tasks, and we will offer support services for those who desire them.This September, Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos have both been invited by student groups to speak at Berkeley. The university has the responsibility to provide safety and security for its community and guests, and we will invest the necessary resources to achieve that goal. If you choose to protest, do so peacefully. That is your right, and we will defend it with vigor. We will not tolerate violence, and we will hold anyone accountable who engages in it.We will have many opportunities this year to come together as a Berkeley community over the issue of free speech; it will be a free speech year. We have already planned a student panel, a faculty panel and several book talks. Bridge USA and the Center for New Media will hold a day-long conference on October 5; PEN, the international writers’ organization, will hold a free speech convening in Berkeley on October 23. We are planning a series in which people with sharply divergent points of view will meet for a moderated discussion. Free speech is our legacy, and we have the power once more to shape this narrative.Sincerely,Carol ChristChancellor”
In between the lines, it looks like the Chancellor is trying to reboot Berkeley’s policy to disallow violent suppression of dissenting opinions. This is a marked contrast from the University’s behavior over the winter.
Of course, the real bellwether would be “how do the campus’s tiny conservative minority fare in day to day interactions”. That’s the part I’m most intrested in.
But it’ll be interesting to see if this announcement is followed up with effective execution – and if any other schools follow suit.