Category Archives: The Second Civil War

Poll: MItch Berg Thinks 41% Of Americans Are Overly Optimistic

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Rasmusson poll says 59% of Americans think “Trump Haters” will resort to violence:

And, added Rasmussen, 31 percent believe “it’s likely that the United States will experience a second civil war sometime in the next five years.”

The new polling evidence of fear in the country over political division follows the harassment of three top Trump aides, including spokeswoman Sarah Sanders, ordered out of a southern Virginia restaurant, and senior adviser Stephen Miller whose condo drew protests from liberals.

It also follows a call by liberal California Rep. Maxine Waters to bring pressure to Trump officials when in public and urgings from legal experts for Trump aides to apply for concealed carry permits and buy guns.

Having seen “Anti-Fa’s” handiwork – un-“othering” political violence for the left – I am becoming more and more inclined to agree.

The Fix Is In

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The sex problem in the Catholic Church was caused by gay priests preying on altar boys.  That’s not pedophilia (dirty old man and young girl), that’s pederasty (gay man and young boy), which is a crime and also a sin.  The behavior went on for years while the Church hierarchy actively covered it up, denied it happened, took the predators’ side against the victims.  The congregation at large believed the people in authority and dismissed allegations as wicked gossip and ridiculous conspiracy theory.

There have been rumors floating around for a couple of years that sex with children is rampant in certain corners of politics.  Bill Clinton rode the Lolita Express (a charter flight to a private island where underage sex is supposedly available).  Anthony Weiner’s texts.  A pizza parlor in New York that sold no pizza but sent a lot of children on deliveries.  Child porn found on computers that also were used to leak classified data.  Celebrity suicides for no apparent reason but who are linked to people accused of promoting child sex.  At this point, the politicians deny it happened.  The FBI seems to be covering for certain well-connected people.  The media dismisses the allegations as wicked gossip and ridiculous conspiracy theory.  And ordinary people still believe the people in authority.

I’m getting a sick feeling in my stomach.

Joe Doakes

My big worry is that we – all of us – are getting so desensitized that the level of what it takes to shock us is approaching meaninglessness.

Censorship

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Perhaps I’m not prominent enough a conservative for anyone to bother with censoring, but I haven’t been affected yet; my Facebook account remains untouched, my Twitter account (which I don’t use for much, as I hate Twitter with an abiding fury) hasn’t gotten messed with (other than continued stalking by a dissociative old duffer, which isn’t “Censorship” so much as “low comedy”), and generally things are OK.

Knock wood. know people like me are getting more and more rare in the world of conservative social media.

Primer

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Interesting explanation of what’s wrong with Commerce Clause case-law precedent, written in a way that even I can understand the problem.

TL;dr version: the basic idea was sound but it’s been stretched out of shape to suit passing fads.

And that’s what’s wrong with this ruling by the appeals court in an Oregon baker case.  The court assumed the stretched-to-fit Commerce Clause interpretation was correct, so the anti-discrimination law protecting gays was valid, and therefore the baker was subject to that general law.  Having made the fatal assumption, the court was able to conclude the baker was not targeted for his religious beliefs.  Yes, but if the underlying assumption is wrong, then the baker’s First Amendment religious freedom should trump the federal government’s interest in regulating people who produce goods that could conceivably travel in interstate commerce.

I know, it’s complicated.  We all prefer simple soundbites.  But this is worth the effort to understand.  And Williamson does a good job helping with that.

Joe Doakes

The greatest achievement of the Establishment was convincing everyone that government is so complex, only government people could do it.

Tarred

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The good news?  You’ve got people on the left defending free speech on campus, and defending it well, as Charles C. Cooke notes in the National Review about a piece in New York Magazine by Jesse Singal:.

But there’s still a bit of fact-checking to do, as Cooke notes – in this case, quoting Singal:

“The existence of white nationalist Richard Spencer, and other bigoted far-right figures like him, poses a genuine challenge to public universities. Conservative student groups invite these sorts of figures to speak fairly often, and the courts have consistently held that public universities can’t really interfere with such events.”

There’s just one thing wrong:

Having read this, you could be forgiven for thinking that “conservative student groups” have invited ”white nationalist Richard Spencer” to speak on campus, and that they have done so “fairly often.” This isn’t correct. Richard Spencer has indeed spoken on college campuses recently. But, invariably, he has invited himself.

After which the conservative groups do what they do – defend actual free speech, including the stuff that everyone hates, which is indeed why we need “Free Speech” in the Constitution in the first place.

So there’s that.

But there’s one other problem:  Singal refers to Spencer et al as “bigoted far-right figures”.   And he’s far from alone.

Thing is, as Michael Knowles points out in this superb Prager U video, the “Alt-Right” is not right.  It repudiates, in fact, much of what American conservatism believes:

To sum up, the “Alt-Right” – or “Alternative to the Right” – believes in:

  • Relentless identity politics, just like Big Left does, only in  its case the identity is “White”.
  • Atheistic.  Christianity important to the alt-right only as a motivator for Western European civilizzation – but rejects faith as a moral, ethical or spiritual force.
  • A disdain for the value of the individual in favor of the primacy of the group.

Conservatism is focused on the individual, and the presence of a stable, higher order (even conservative atheists – they exist – generally believe in some sort of higher moral order).

I know, I know – they christened themselves “Alt-Right”, sparing the media the trouble of doing it for them.

Gathering Squall

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Latina singer, in the habit of telling whitey to move to the back of the hall and “brown” people to come to the front at her concerts, finds some that…well, don’t:

As she has done before, last month, Lido Pimienta, a Colombian-Canadian singer, asked audience members of color to move to the front and white members to move to the back. Unlike other times she has made that request, some white members refused to act in accordance with her request, including a white female volunteer who was reportedly there to photograph the show.

By the way – according to the media, it’s not “people sick of stifling political correctness acting out on it”.

On, no.

Inevitably, it’s…

Although Billboard could offer no details regarding the alleged racism, festival officials claimed the photographer and several white members of the audience reacted with “aggressive” and “overt racism” after Pimineta requested “brown girls to the front.”

According to the National Post, Allie O’Manique, who shares management with Pimienta, said the female photographer would not budge from her position near the stage, prompting anger from some crowd members. O’Manique, whose version of events was confirmed by Festival spokesman Trevor Murphy, said that Pimienta “just kept saying, ‘Move to the back’ … finally after saying it about 10 times — and the woman refused to move — [Pimienta] said, ‘You’re cutting into my set time, and you’re disrespecting these women, and I don’t have time for this.”

So responding to racism is “racist”, now?

Hunch:  You’re going to see a lot more of this.

(And call me a “language-ist”, but using “disrespect” as a verb gets you pelted with rhetorical rocks and garbage in my world).

Why Johnny Can’t Read

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News Flash:  The citizens, taxpayers and parents of Osseo, MN have discovered what the parents of Saint Paul, Edina and some other Twin Cities’ area communities have found out:  focusing to exclusion on “white privilege” as the reason for the achievement gap doesn’t actually change, or even affect, the achievement gap.

Unlike other Twin CIties communities, Osseo’s actually been able to do something about it; they’ve bagged their contract with Pacific Education Group – the company that has turned privilege-shaming into an eight-figure business model – the company:

In 2012, the Osseo Area School District hired Pacific Education Group (PEG) to help with the high suspension rate amongst its non-white students and achievement gap issue the schools faced. Last year, the school board cancelled its contract with the racial equity consultants after abiding by its suggestions for five years and watching the racial achievement gap grow.

Wait – grow, you say?

What is clear for Osseo according to statistics obtained from Minnesota’s Department of Education, math scores for black students in the School District have steadily declined, dropping from 33 percent in 2014 (which was above the statewide level) to 29 percent in 2017. In the same time period, math scores for white students remain largely unchanged at 73 percent. In reading, black students maintained a 36 percent proficiency in the same time period, while the gap with their white counterparts grew from 73 percent in 2014 to 74 percent in 2017.

No huge surprise – it’s pretty much true everywhere.

The surprise?  We’ve actually found a school board that’ll tell the Emperor he’s walking around naked:

“The problem is hard to fix when you have good teachers who are thinking about quitting, but you can’t help them because you’ve been sworn to not reveal their names,” Gerhart told Alpha News. “We have a staff that is currently about 80% white, so in effect we are using taxpayer money to systematically shame 4/5ths of our staff for simply being born.”

Gerhart describes an environment where teachers were afraid to step forward – teachers who were physically and verbally threatened and abused on a daily basis by their students.

The problem, of course, is that like most “progressive” “efforts”, the end results end up being indistinguishable from Stalin’s CHeKA, or the Spanish Inquisition:

“PEG has instilled a culture of fear among a number of teachers,” Gerhart states. “PEG likes to talk about having ‘courageous conversations,’ however in reality they have a number of ‘protocols’ in place that you have to agree and adhere to before taking part in the ‘conversation.’  These protocols frame the context of the discussion before the conversation even takes place, in essence disallowing true discussion much less debate or disagreement. If a person does not agree to these basic protocols, it is regarded as evidence of that person’s inherent racism. And remember, according to PEG, all white people are inherently racist no matter what, so a number of our teachers simply keep their mouths shut for fear of being labeled “racist” and getting fired or bullied out of their jobs.”

The “Conversation” is always defined by them.  Which means it’s never a conversation.

Congratulations, people of Osseo.  Your elected officials have exhibited just the faintest shred of courage.  It almost beggars the imagination.

 

 

Now Passing Looking Glass

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The school bus company requires boys to sit on one side of the aisle, girls to sit on the other side, most likely the result of insurance company lawyers trying to avoid claims of inappropriate touching, sexual harassment or sexual assault occurring on the bus while under the driver’s control which would make the school bus company likely to get sued for failing to protect the students.
Two girls choose to sit on the boy’s side of the bus and won’t move back.  The driver puts them off the bus.  Outrage occurs because the girls claim to be pre-operative transgender boys.  They look like girls, they dress like girls, they act like girls, they flirt like girls . . . but in their secret innermost thoughts, for today anyway, they’re boys.  So asking them to sit on the girls’ side of the bus is a hateful act of gender discrimination . . . which makes the bus company likely to get sued for failing to protect those students.
Thus we see the problem with attempting to establish rules for ordering society based on subjective, secret, ever-changing and unverifiable criteria, rather than based on objective, obvious, easily established criteria.
Joe Doakes

What “duckspeak” is to language, our “elites'” current conception of “gender” is to biology.

Tribes

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The Big Media complains that America is just too tribalistic.

And I have to ask myself – why, oh why?  Why does half of America seem to hate the other half with a fury beyond Dodgers vs. Yankees?

Stephen Colbert’s contribution to civil, de-tribalized discussion in this country. Yes, he’s “Sieg-Heil”-ing Trump.

Why on earth would half of America distrust the other half?

Blackshirts of “Anti”-Fa in masks attacking unarmed Republican demonstrators.

Why would half of America think the other half is not only imposing itself on the rest of the country, but doing it on behalf of ideas that have failed miserably?

The book that asked “why don’t Red states vote for their ‘best interests'” – like the people of Baltimore, Newark, Trenton, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, New Orleans, Stockton, Saint Louis, Camden and Minneapolis did.  Notice the cover, by the way; like any good delusional, the author thinks the donkey is carrying the elephant.  

Why, oh why?

 

Bring The Backlash

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Engineering school is not exempt from Social Justice Warriors.

Purdue is shifting from teaching engineers how to build a bridge, to teaching them how to feel about bridges.

I’m sure that will be enormously helpful when the next I-35 disaster occurs.

Joe Doakes

My new theory – and it’s so new, I haven’t even thought it out:  Trump’s presidency is entirely designed to squeeze all of Big Left’s lunacy out into public view, so the public will be so disgusted, the left will be shamed out of power forever.

But a guy can dream.

Turnabout

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Logical argument does not persuade people. We know this from conversations with Liberals in everyday life. They are motivated by rhetorical and emotional appeals.

That’s why this new campaign is so effective.  Somebody borrowed the anti-fascists slogan to use on posters.  The posters have an emotional impact that turns people against the slogan.  “Punch a Nazi” becomes synonymous with domestic abuse.  It makes clear that all people who employ violence are evil-doers.

 

Genius

Joe Doakes

Interesting – just as I opened Joe’s email, I was thinking “perhaps ridicule is the answer to “Anti”-Fa.

But Joe’s right.  It is an ingenious campaign.  Or will be provided that Big Left doesn’t excuse domestic violence “for all the right reasons’ too…

So Much Work To Be Done

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So many statues out there – ergo, so much triggering.

As Big Left prowls the country looking for history that “triggers” them and must be destroyed [1], it’s probably worth pitching in and helping findi more history that needs to be expunged.

Exhuming McCarthy:  much has been made of the statue of Lenin in, where else, Seattle:

... Lenin Statue - "Sunday Strip" - Seattle, WA Visit - Mueckenfett

Leftover “art” from some misbegotten WPA project from hell?

No – a labor of “love” in the full Orwellian sense of the term;  from Wikipedia:

Lewis E. Carpenter, an English teacher in Poprad originally from Issaquah, Washington, found the monumental statue lying in a scrapyard ready to be sold for the price of the bronze; Carpenter had met and befriended Venkov while in Czechoslovakia. In close collaboration with a local journalist and good friend, Tomáš Fülöpp, Carpenter approached the city officials with a claim that despite its current unpopularity, the sculpture was still a work of art worth preserving, and he offered to buy it for $13,000.[1] After many bureaucratic hurdles, he finally signed a contract with the mayor on March 16, 1993.[4]

With the help of Venkov, the statue was cut into three pieces and shipped to the United States at a total cost of $40,000.[1] Carpenter financed much of that via mortgaging his home

The architect of a kleptocratic thugocracy that murdered tens of millions of people over seventy years?  I’m #triggered!  Break out the tow cables and the blowtorches!

But we’re not done expunging Communism’s murderous legacy.   The Minnesota State Capitol is crowded with paintings and sculptures of people who were figures in the “Farmer Labor” Party, and the early years of the merger between them and the Democrats to form the “DFL”.

The Farmer-Labor, as well as the DFL it joined, was expressly pro-communist.  The new party inherited the FLP’s support for the USSR and Josef Stalin.   The infant DFL, in other words, supported the party of the Holodomor, of the Gulag, of the Purge.

It’s time to rid our state of this noxious legacy of genocide.  I suggest a painting-burning and smashing.

Politically Incorrect:   Next, it’s time to address statues and other public art that pays omage to a  Christianist preacher who was a very powerful spokesperson against gay marriage – one whose influence among opponents to gay marriage today is too huge to calculate; one who, were he alive today, would be railing against same sex marriage with a fluency and authenticity today’s speakers can only dream about.

That anti-gay bigot?

What did MLK think about gay people?

Martin Luther King!

His failure to support gay marriage – presaging the mass dissent from most black Christian ministers, even today-

MLK memorial dedicated on the National Mall – Summit County Citizens ...

Can this be allowed?

Continue reading →

Northern Man

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Went to a birthday party this weekend, turns out it was a Klan rally.  Everyone was talking about how much they hate Black voters, how stupid they are,  what their favorite media person called them and how best to undermine their success.  I didn’t know what to say to fit in so I smiled a lot and left early.

Oh wait,  did I say Klan?  Sorry.  I meant Democrat.   It was Trump voters they hated.  Hard to tell the difference when they take their robes off.

Joe Doakes

The most gleefully racist person I ever personally met was a DFL organizer from the East Side.  No, I don’t transfer his behavior to all DFLers – but if I did, boy, would I think DFLers were racists.

Still, you get some urban progressives talking about Republicans, and it’s hard to use a term other than “bigotry”.

All The Lies The Democrats Demand Be Printed

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The NYTimes lied about Republicans, guns, Sarah Palin, and pretty much everyone in their editorial about the Hodgekinson attack – down to making up facts from thin air 

Davie French unravels the Times’ depraved attack on truth:

Let’s be blunt. In its zeal to create moral equivalencies and maintain a particular narrative about the past, the Times flat-out lied. There is simply no “link to political incitement” in Loughner’s murderous acts. The man was a paranoid schizophrenic who first got angry at Gabby Giffords years before Palin published her map.

This is, of course, part of an ongoing pattern of slandering everyone to the right of Martin O’Malley:

Let’s not forget, this is the same editorial board that, one year ago, laid blame on Republican Christian politicians for an Orlando terrorist attack by a confessed Islamic jihadist. Omar Mateen swore allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, but the Times editors believed (again, without any evidence) that he was inspired in part by Republican objections to granting men access to women’s restrooms. The editorial board should retract its editorial and apologize.

And would someone – Pat Kessler?  Bob Collins?  Erik Black?  Cat Richert? Nina Totenberg? – finally let slip the dogs of our mainstream media’s vaunted “fact-check” industry?  We’ve got a chain of howlers here:

In addition to lying about Palin, the Times couldn’t resist yet another nonsensical attack on gun rights — claiming that “studies” have shown that armed citizens would “probably” kill or wound innocent bystanders in the effort to stop the killer. Which studies? In fact, we have considerable real-world experience showing that armed citizens can stop mass shootings without harming innocent civilians.

We do, indeed.

As Dennis Prager says, the Second Civil War has been underway for some time, now.  Until Wednesday, it largely wasn’t a shooting war.

French also notes how Sarah Palin likely has a decent defamation case against the Times, even though she’s a public figure.  I hope she does.  I’ll contribute.

Hate Crime

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Big Left has been warning us that there’s a wave of ideological hate crime just around the corner, and that  you gotta watch out for those crazy right-wingers.

It’s a Berg’s Seventh Law occurrence, of course.

A gunman attacked a Republican congressional baseball practice this morning.  His mission?  “Kill as many Republicans as possible”.

Shortly after the shooting Wednesday morning at a congressional baseball practice, Rep. Mark Walker (R-N.C.) told NBC News that it appeared the “gunman was there to kill as many Republican members as possible.” Walker, who was at the practice for the upcoming annual congressional baseball game in Alexandria, Virginia, confirmed he was “shaken but okay.”

“Punch a Nazi”.

“Anti-Fa”.

Hello, Liberals – when so much of your side is awash in demented hatred (the real thing, not the “disagreement with our narrative is hate” thing that so many of you jabber about), and given the instability wrapped in entitlement that so many people on your side have, what do you think is going to happen?

Be careful out there, Real Americans.  It’s gonna get worse before it gets better.

UPDATE:  While Berg’s 19th Law is still in effect (“Nothing the media writes/says about any emotionally charged event – a mass shooting, a police shooting, anything – should be taken seriously for 48 hours after the original incident.  It will largely be rubbish, as media outlets vie to “scoop” each other even on incorrect facts”), the shooter’s Facebook page indicates he is a Sanders supporter.

UPDATE 2:  The WaPo has ID’ed the shooter as a 66 year old Illinois man.

UPDATE 3:  As usual, many on the left are acting like poo-flinging baboons.

UPDATE 4:  James Hodgkinson is the name, and this is from his Facebook page:

Apparnetly “& Co” is “All Republicans”.

Clearly, we need universal background checks for Democrat voters buying guns.