Covid is acting exactly like any other respiratory virus.

It bursts onto the scene, kills a bunch of people who have no immunity, then fades into the background as the vulnerable host population dies off and the immune population go on with their lives.

So where’s the big emergency that justifies the dictatorship, again?

Joe Doakes

Title line says it all.

A friend of the blog emails:

So, the St Paul City Council unanimously told MNDOT to take away lanes in areas where POC live because of racism.

CM Mitra Jalali is really proud of the unanimous support. They’re really sticking it to those white supremacist racist highway planners by saying that these poor, mostly Black and Asian communities need to ride busses instead of cars. Wait a minute- what is our city council actually saying here?

It’s saying “we don’t care when you get somewhere – just don’t do it in a car”.

I planned a vacation, leaving January 14 and returning January 21. I
went on-line two weeks early, January 6, to request the Post Office hold
my mail. Had to create an on-line account to submit the request. Had
to verify my identity to create the on-line account using multi-factor
authentication. But not by email – not available – nor by text message – their system doesn’t work with my phone. By mail.

The authentication code to establish the on-line account so they could
accept the on-line request to hold my snail mail arrived in my mailbox
on Saturday, January 23, two days after my scheduled return.

You want to know why people despise the Post Office? It’s not the
workers – they’re standard issue government employees following the
rules laid down by management because the workers have no authority to
deviate from the rules and independent thought is punishable by
dismissal. It’s the bureaucracy: the stunning idiocy of the
regulations, the stubborn adherence to 19th Century service and delivery
guidelines, the utter failure to recognize what needs to be done to make
the Post Office relevant and competitive in 2021.

It’s sad, because the Post Office is one of the few activities the
federal government is constitutionally authorized to do. It’s a shame
they do it so poorly.

Joe Doakes

Nothing to add…

“Protect” Minnesota has a new executive director.

We’ll come back to that.

Modern American “progressivism”, like all its many forebears in the past 200 years, has been all about rallying people against boogeymen. From “monarchists” in the French Revolution, to “Wreckers” in Stalin’s USSR to the Wobbly’s “Bosses”, up through “the patriarchy” and “the man” and “counterrevolutionaries” in Red China and San Francisco in the sixties and seventies, and if you have a hard time distinguishing between ’em, join the club.

Today, the boogeymen…er, boogiepeople on the left are pretty much all the things that people who are included are told to be “anti”. “Anti-Racism” “Anti-Misogyny” (not just sexism, anymore – it’s the more active, more malevolent noun these days), “Anti-Fascism”, “Anti-Transphobia”, and on and on – all of which sounds like good things to be “anti”…

…and, unsurprisingly, when you dig into the “Root Causes” of all those nouns, all things trace back to “Western Civilization” in all its particulars: the Judeo-Christian value on the individual and their worth, value, rights and responsibilities and potential of each and every person, as a person with a mind, a point of view, and at the end of the day an indivisible soul of personal, societal, political, intellectual and metaphysical worth.

Those aspects of humanity are anathema to progressivism in all its flavors. The focus is on the group – the Marxists “classes”, the Nazi’s irreducible focus on race, the modern academic Left’s obsession with a byzantine network of intersectional identity groups. The individual is nothing but a vote (for now), an appetite, a widget to be moved through the production line of life (like Obamacare’s awful caricature of Progressive humanity, “Julia”). Progressivism is “Materialist”. Souls, individual intellects and thoughts and reams, all are ephemeral; humans are widgets that consume and produce, and whose worth and value (to those in power) is expressed via their membership in the collective.

Those widgets have a term. “Bodies”. Not people. Not brains. Not souls.

Bodies.

Anyway – “P”M has a new director. And unlike the dotty, dizzy neverending font of comedy that was Heather Martens, or the serial fabulist The “Reverend” Nancy Nord Bence, the new director presents us with a few surprises.

She’s “a gun owner herself” – which might be seen in several ways. Is “P”M moderating? Are they realizing that the culture war has slipped far enough away from them, especially over this past year, that they have to start speaking to people who need to be convinced?

And she’s apparently incredibly famous, since she apparently just goes by “Rashmi”. I’ve turned “Protect” Minnesota’s website, Facebook feed and other social media upside down, and not been able to find any reference to a last name, which is Seneviratne, by the way.

But even during the reign of the serial fabulist the Reverend Nord Bence, “Protect” MN wasn’t nearly extreme enough in its hatred of guns and (law-abiding) gun owners, enough for some people.

“P”M spawned a breakway group, “Survivors Lead” – basically a woman, Rachel Joseph, with a long history of progressive activism and a story; an aunt who was murdered, according to Ms. Joseph’s story, by a gun.

Quick aside: I don’t minimize anyone’s trauma over having a loved one murdered. But in the many times I’ve heard Ms. Joseph’s story, she’s never once mentioned a perpetrator, someone actually holding and using the gun that killed her aunt; that persons evil motivation, the legal fallout from the murder, whether that person was sentenced or not. It’d be wrong to crack wise – “what, did the gun animate itself?” – but omitting a perpetrator, his/her motives and the like from the conversation is incredibly intellectually dishonest.

Anyway – “Rashmi” and her apparent moderation are not going over well with “Survivors Lead”:

The extreme heckling the not-as-extreme about getting less extreme. That qualifies as “dog bites man”, at the very most.

Rather less so? There followed some more, er, ethnically pointed traffic on one social media feed (from which I’ve long been blocked) or another.

After which “P”M – operating through its usual social media persona, the omniscient third person that used to be Martens and Nord Bence – responded:

On the one hand, watching the agents of Big Left eating each other is one of my favorite spectator sports.

And if the biggest semi-organic anti-gun group in MInnesota (shaddap about Moms Want Action already) is pivoting from pushing Linda Slocum’s gun grab bill to highlighting the inequity of gun control (“Race, class and geography all play into who gets to have a gun and who doesn’t” – which is something every Second Amendment activist has known for 50 years) and speaking in the first “person” to the prudence of victims of violence to arm up, then in culture war terms that’s the sound of the first tank crossing the pontoon bridge at Remagen.

But…”white bodied privilege?”

What the flaming hootie hoo?

I thought for a moment – is this a shot back at the Rachel Dolezals and Elizabeth Warrens of the world, with their flip-flopping identities, by “actual” “people of color”, reinforcing the idea that while you might “identify” with one degree melanin or another, your apparent appearance still wins out in the great privilege lottery (which will, I suspect, get pilloried hard by the Trans crowd, for whom perceived identity is everything? I’ll let the fight that one out).

But no. It’s much less hilarious than that.

It’s “inclusion language” – slang or argot that one class of people use to track who is in, and who is “out” – to be sure. That’s part of it, and people are noticing:

Referring to people as bodies is a reminder, writer Elizabeth Barnes says in an interview, that “racism isn’t just about the ideas that you have in your head.” Barnes is the author of “The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability, The Girl Behind the Wall.” In intellectual discussions, theories about social oppression sound almost disembodied; “we talk about prejudice,” Barnes says, “like it’s just a matter of ideas.” The point is to emphasize the physical violence done to black people through slavery, lynching, and police brutality. In the case of women, the term “bodies” highlights “what happens to women’s bodies in health care contexts, in sexual contexts, in reproductive contexts.”

But behond that?

It’s a nod to the materialism of the left – that the mind, the thoughts, the indivisible soul of the indivisual human being is not merely irrelevant, but inconvenient to the obsession with identity.

Your melanin defines you.

In some ways its a cheap ad hominem – “of course you’d think that, you are (add a reference to your target’s melanin, or lack thereof)”. But pointing logical fallacies out to the foot soldiers of Big Left is a little like arguing salinity with sharks; it’s just part of the water they swim in.

So – gun groups eating each other? Good.

The debate contributing to the ongoing hijacking of the language? Bad.

The whole thing participating, in its own little way, in the further erosion of one of the ideals that’s made Western Civilization the most successful, and humane , civilization in human history?

Worse.

A new article in New Yorker chronicles the “Cultural Revolution” – the Chinese Communist Party’s revolving round of purges that wracked China in the decade before Mao’s death in 1976.

Tell me – what does this scene look like?

Red Guards—a pseudo-military designation adopted by secondary-school and university students who saw themselves as the Chairman’s sentinels—soon appeared all over China, charging people with manifestly ridiculous crimes and physically assaulting them before jeering crowds. Much murderous insanity erupted after 1966, but the Cultural Revolution’s most iconic images remain those of the struggle sessions: victims with bowed heads in dunce caps, the outlandish accusations against them scrawled on heavy signboards hanging from their necks. Such pictures, and others, in “Forbidden Memory” (Potomac), by the Tibetan activist and poet Tsering Woeser, show that even Tibet, the far-flung region that China had occupied since 1950, did not escape the turmoil. Woeser describes the devastation wrought on Tibet’s Buddhist traditions by a campaign to humiliate the elderly and to obliterate what were known as the Four Olds—“old thinking, old culture, old customs, and old habits of the exploiting classes.” The photographs in Woeser’s book were taken by her father, a soldier in the Chinese military, and found by her after he died. There are vandalized monasteries and bonfires of books and manuscripts—a rare pictorial record of a tragedy in which ideological delirium turned ordinary people into monsters who devoured their own. (Notably, almost all the persecutors in the photographs are Tibetan, not Han Chinese.) In one revealing photo, Tibet’s most famous female lama, once hailed as a true patriot for spurning the Dalai Lama, cowers before a young Tibetan woman who has her fists raised.

Does it remind you of…:

• A “Struggle Session” at in the humanities department of an exquisitely expensive private university – like Hamline or Saint Thomas?
• A Pacific Consulting Group workshop on cis-privilege
• An “Anti”-Fa coffee shop after hours?

Hah, silliy peasants. It reminds the New Yorker of…

Trumpism!

Why did a rich and powerful society suddenly start destroying itself?

The Trumpian assault on the West’s “olds” has long been in the making, and it is, at least partly, a consequence of political decay and intellectual ossification—akin to what Mao diagnosed in his own party. Beginning in the nineteen-eighties, a consensus about the virtues of deregulation, financialization, privatization, and international trade bound Democrats to Republicans (and Tories to New Labour in Britain). Political parties steadily lost their old and distinctive identities as representatives of particular classes and groups; they were no longer political antagonists working to leverage their basic principles—social welfare for the liberal left, stability and continuity for the conservative right—into policies. Instead, they became bureaucratic machines, working primarily to advance the interests of a few politicians and their sponsors.

In 2010, Tony Judt warned, not long before his death, that the traditional way of doing politics in the West—through “mass movements, communities organized around an ideology, even religious or political ideas, trade unions and political parties”—had become dangerously extinct. There were, Judt wrote, “no external inputs, no new kinds of people, only the political class breeding itself.” Trump emerged six years later, channelling an iconoclastic fury at this inbred ruling class and its cherished monuments.

I suppose in the interest of intellectual self-review, I need to ask – is it gaslighting? Or is it just the sort of stupendous self-unawareness that seems to be a condition for joining today’s “elites”?

Point toward the “lack of self-awareness” thesis – they don’t seem to realize this sort of cultural slander is how we got Donald Trump in the first place.

(Hat tip to regular commenter Max Overlord)

…can happen two ways.

We accept our differences and find our common ground.

Or we silence dissenters and pretend we’re one big happy family.

At the moment, the American body politic has chosen its option. And it ain’t pretty.

…we’d need a leader to stand at a dais and demand that a leader “Tear Down This Wall” in this country in my lifetime.

But here we are.

Guess we know what “Build Back Better” really means, now.

And when the media says Biden is a “return to normal” – almost in sync, almost like there’s still some back-channel communication going on – I do not recall Trump walling off the White House.

National Guard troops brought to DC, used as props for the Inauguration, abandoned when no longer useful but not sent home. Democrats act crassly, media fails to notice.

Republicans act classy, media fails to notice.

I wonder how many of those troops were Georgia military who voted 100% for Joe Biden – according to the official count.  I wonder how many of them will vote Democrat next time around?

Joe Doakes

I’m just hoping it matters, myself.

Decades ago, in an effort to keep housing “affordable”, the city of New York imposed rent control. No existing rental unit could increase its price, absent jumping throught a Byzantine series of bureaucratic hoops.

The “market” responded to the bureaucratic muddling – at first, creatively. The rent control stayed with the the renter. When the renter died or moved, the rental rate could move with the market. But the “ownership” of the rental could be passed down through any semblance of the original renters families – so children, nephews and nieces, stepchildren, further-order descendants, and utterly phony descendants – a fraud that was almost never investigated. Also, renters (and their descendants) could, and did, sublet, and even subdivide, apartments, renting the spaces out at much better than market rates and making a tidy profit on the deal. People are pretty creative when it comes to skirting rules, and New York City government is equally thud-witted and uncreative at creating the rules people skirt. It became almost

The second-order consequences were less salutary. While rents were frozen, utilities and property taxes were not – so landlords got squeezed hard. Landlords with sufficient means sold their properties to “co-ops”, or went condo, or found the few available loopholes – and there were very few, since the powers that be (and are) in New York treated landlords as a populist enemy to be demonized for political gain. The less affluent landlords fell behind on taxes. Squeezed by the city to pay up, repairs sufferend. Eventually these landlords stopped repairing their properties in less desirable areas, which quickly became even less desirable; vast swathes of Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Harlem fell into deep blight, with block after block of apartments abandoned…

…in a city with an “affordable housing crisis” where even in the 1980s, it was impossible to find a place to live for under $2,000 a month in 1985 dollars (which is $4,500 to 5,000 today).

Of course, all that blight begat crime. By the late ’70s, much of New York was a shooting gallery, wit over 2,000 dead per year.

Of course, there is a lot of money in New York, and a lot of people want to be there, so the real estate didn’t sit idle for too long – begetting the third-order consequences: developers moved in, took over the blighted, abandoned real estate, and built it back up. Of course, given New York’s regulatory “zeal” and astronomical taxes, it wasn’t just any developers. It was the ones with enough money to do the building, to navigate the bureaucracy (read “Money”) and pay the taxes (read – “keep the money coming”). The up-front costs were high – and the rest was even higher.

So after decades of “rent control”, one can not live in a decent place on Manhattan with an income of less than $500,000 a year.

I write this to highlight the path that the Minneapolis City Council – known among those in the know as “the dumbest city council between Chicago and Los Angeles” – is drooling to drive Minneapolis down.

Neo-populist progressive economicallly-illiterate stupidity – a barrel that, in Minneapolis, has no bottom.

Kind of a good news, bad news situation here. But maybe not in the way you think.

A teachers union president in Washington State refers to reopening schools as a “white supremacist” initiative.

The good – or “good” – news: this is an example of the type of rhetorical, social and policy overreach one can expect when “progressives” – in this case invariably white, middle-class, and visibly “progressive” – find themselves in power. This statement – literally, “wanting your kids back in schools, and wanting some sense of stability and normalcy for their mental health, at a time when teenage suicide is exploding all over the country, is racist” is the very definition of “2+2=5” – mental health is mental illness, concern for kids is a pathology, truth is lies. (And the ability to say it without having ones own peers pelt one with rocks and garbage is Urban Progressive Privilege).

ut another way, evil – no scare quotes. Inverting moral truth and moral falsehood is as textbook a definition of venial evil as exists.

That’s the “good” news.

The bad news? About half the country, as this is written, doesn’t know any better, or just doesn’t want to think about it that hard.

I was debating whether to call this episode….

…”Peak ‘Urban Progressive Privilege” – 100+ overschooled/badly educated, middle-on-up class, likely 20/30-something junior members of “the elite” media who have experienced so little struggle and dissonance in their lives that they consider publishing a Ben Shapiro column a mortal threat, and feel entitled enough to whine about it in public.

Is it “peak”?

If I say so, there will be another, worse example tomorrow.

This next two years, at the minimum, are going to be for Urban Progressive Privilege what 1977 was to white polyester suits and mens necklaces.

To: The above-mentioned Swath
From: Mitch Berg, irascible, deplorable peasant
Re: Your Offensive

I couldn’t help but notice this from (where else) NPR the other day:

Oh, I can help.

For starters, you can beg for forgiveness for having appropriated a bit of culture – the term “Resistance” – you never earned.

For starters, you were a bunch of entitled, white, upper-middle-class plush-bottom yoonoos whose “resistance” involved posting irate Instagram selfies while running between your morning frappuccino and your Pilates class, appropriating a term that people who fought against real Nazis, who risked their lives and those of their families and friends during a war in which millions like them vanished without a trace. My contempt for y our self-aggrandizing drama should be apparent on this count alone – but if you’d like, I can be clearer.

Beyond that? Calling yourself a “resistance” is a little like Colin Kaepernick pleading “oppression” between meeting with his financial planner and running to a CNN interview. You people are part of the class that controlled much of the most powerful parts of society – the media, the bureaucracy, the educational-industrial complex…NPR, for that matter.

Just stop.

That is all.

A friend of the blog emails:

The number of words that have totally lost their meaning over the last couple of weeks is astonishing. Coup, treason, sedition, insurrection and now unity. What’s next.

Anyone’s guess.

They join other terms – “white privilege”, “white supremacy”, “ Anti“ – pretty much any western virtue…

…where we turn over control over “concern about the deficit and national debt” from one party to the other.

UPDATE: Also the date many of us become “domestic terrorists” in the eyes of the ruling party and Media (ptr).

UPDATE 2: On the other hand, today is the beginning of the period where Covid will be recognized as something that, between natural immunity and vaccines, will burn itself out and cease to be a national health crisis.

Big Left has been openly salivating about a “wave of ‘white supremacist terror’ that’ll dwarf 9/11″ for years, now.

No – seriously. Years.

Does it seem like they’re wishing it to be so?

You’re not alone:

Need an Orwell reference? Authoritarians always need a boogieman. And like Orwell’s Eurasia and Eastasia, or Hitler’s “Reichstag arsonists” or the “Polish soldiers who attacked the Gleiwitz radio station” or “Jews”, or generations of Soviet “wreckers” and “counter-revolutionaries”, having a conspiracy to flog can certainly take peoples’ minds off of the bread lines or endless mask mandates, wouldn’t it?

Of course, the Democrats chose half the country for their boogieman.

Seems…self-limiting?

If so, the good guys have two years to prove it.

Kendall Qualls was the GOP endorsed candidate for the 3rd Congressional District seat in this past election.

Having lost that time, he’s on to something potentially bigger – starting a conversation with the black community about…itself.

The DFL’s brain trust needs to stomp on that idea, but quick:

I raise you this, Zach: Imagine an entitled, very very white, middle class member of the ruling political class #progsplaining a black man about how he’s allowed to talk about black history.

This is today’s DFL.

Democrats. after an election when media both mainstream and social worked overtime to install them in office, propose to “rein in the media”:

During a lengthy Instagram Live on Tuesday evening where she revealed that she feared for her life during the siege, the “Squad” member accused the mainstream media of “spewing disinformation” ahead of the deadly riot in which five people died.

“There’s absolutely a commission that’s being discussed but it seems to be more investigating in style rather than truth and reconciliation,” she said.

“I do think that several members of Congress in some of my discussions have brought up media literacy because that is part of what happened here,” Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) went on.

“We’re going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation,” she said.

So – yet again, while calling all Republicans “Nazis” by implication and association, Democrats act like…

…well, Democrats.

Democracy can’t survive if we can’t trust our institutions.

We’ll come back to that.

Steamed

In Tom Wolfe’s 1987 satire Bonfire of the Vanities, a young black man is run over by a car driven y a millionaire bond trader. A Bronx DA and couple of New York cops investigate.

In one part of the story, a huckster minister, clearly modeled after Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton or some such, explains his role in the community to the investigators.

In his metaphor, community anger is “steam”, building inexorably as the heat rises, ready to blow the boiler sky high if something isn’t done. That “something”, naturally, is the good reverend plying his services, as a “steam valve”.

For a price.

The book was head, shoulders and ankles better than the movie – a box office bomb that nearly ended Tom Hanks as an A-lister, thirty years back – but this scene more or less gets the point across:

But remember – they’re the ones that cover the news to the highest of standards.

We’ll come back to that.

Answering Their Master

Republicans since Richard Nixon have known that the media was biased to the left. Over this past twenty years, it’s been almost beyond parody. Over the past five years, literally, parody has been more accurate than journalism.

But there’s a level of parody beyond which even The Onion or The Babylon Bee would feel awkward going. Our “elite” media has no such limits:

More locally? I could go back a bit, to the media’s response to conservative protest and the Tea Party – and that was the least of the problems. The IRS abused its power to try to shut the Tea Party down.

And there was nary a peep from the establishment media. “Law enforcement” under the Obama administration did nothing at all. The agent of the scandal, Lois Lerner, retired with her full government pension and the tacit thanks of the Obama regime.

More recently, there’ve been two episodes that show how very, very unequal we are in this country, depending on your politics.

On March 4, 2017, a group of Republicans held a rally at the Capitol. A group of “Anti”-Fa used a counter-demonstration for a delivery system, violently attacking the Republicans, injuring several.

And how did the justice system in Ramsey County work? Like a fraternity hazing. Without the hazing. The defendants – including the son of Hillary Clinton’s VP nominee, weren’t so much prosectuted as féted. Had John Choi done otherwise, he’d have never done lunch at the Lex again.

More recently? Last summer, a Minnesota state DFL legislative candidate famously threatened brutal violence on a Twin Cities suburb for being home to Bob Kroll.

It passed.

Fast.

This, of course, after a series of citywide riots for whichi justice was slow, dilatory and diverted by stories of “white supremacists with umbrellas” doing improbable feats of mischief.

And, behind it all, a long trail of elaborate rationalizations for the rioting: after centuries of (checks notes) systemic racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, economic and environmental racism and mansplaining, a riot was a positive public health good, to deal with all that built up “steam”.

But only the correct rioting.

Because if Pro-Life Action tried to block a freeway, Jacob Frey would have water cannon and attack dogs out there before the protesters got over the fence. And everyone involved knows it.

As re protesting, there are Two Americas.

But only one America gets to release its “steam” in polite company.

What About

I’ve mentioned this to others in the past week.

Some have said “mind the ‘whataboutism'”.

This isn’t whataboutism.

This is pointing out that when sides perceive, correctly, that the deck is stacked against them, they will find coloring outside the lines more and more acceptable.

Which is the exact rationalization the left uses for BLM’s shenanigans; inequality begets rage!

Well, yeah. It does. As we’ve seen.

But it’s not just the usual enemies.

More tomorrow.

The left’s urge to control thought has gotten to none other than George Orwell himself – a push that is positively…

…well, you know where I’m going.

The piece is an object lesson on how American education has failed society in completely abrogating the teaching of critical thinking. How can we tell?

The gaping irony of this bit, for starters, responding to people who “reduce” Orwell to “tyranny bad, liberty good”:

But Orwell’s book is much more sophisticated. Orwell was interested not just in communicating the badness of totalitarian regimes but also dissecting how they succeed through the manipulation of language.

And in comparing the fascists Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War (on the side of the doomed communists) with Trump supporters, the writer and USAToday participate in the reduction of the language to a tool of political coercion.

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.

I’d like to issue a hearty “welcome” to all of you “progressives” out there who, in view of Twitter’s wholesale de-platforming not only of President Trump but masses of fairly mainstream conservatives, have become zealots for property rights (private and corporate) and freedom of association.

Good for you! It’s a big step!

Now – you and your movement owe a bit of an apology to all those bakers, photographers and florists you’ve been legally harassing for the past decade.

But baby steps! You can do it!

…I hereby nominate Twitter:

Bonus question – which late-night host or CNN “personality” will be the first to parrot this?

On the one hand, Democrats have (aside from any contrariness Joe Manchin may express) complete control of Federal government for the next couple of years.

What does this mean for law-abiding gun owners?

Well, they are certainly floating the trial balloons already. And Biden (and, perhaps more importantly, Harris) were pretty clear during the campaign: they want to ban “assault weapon”, clap arbitrary limits on magazine sizes, and make it possible to register guns and allow pretty much anyone with a personal beef to get your guns confiscated.

It’s in their DNA, of course. But I suspect there’s going to be a certain urgency about it.

For one thing, even before 2020 there was a solid case to be made that gun culture” is winning the culture war.

And while the mainstream media will never dig into it, there’s a solid case to be made that gun ownership and the culture that goes with it broke even farther out of its traditional white/male/30-60/rural niche and went even more widespread in society.

“First-time gun buyers favor Biden over Trump,” the Dallas Morning News reported of pre-election Texas survey results. “In fact, 51% of first-time purchasers surveyed favored Biden, while 43% favored Trump.”

As you might expect, this complicates matters for Democrats who have long used gun restrictions as an easy way to bash political enemies while doing minimal harm to their own constituents. With gun ownership becoming a nonpartisan taste, restrictive laws threaten to inconvenience and anger supporters as much as opponents.

Sure enough, “Americans’ appetite for gun control is the lowest it has been since 2016,” according to Gallup. And while a large majority of Democrats still favor tighter restrictions, support has declined even in that group by five points. New gun owners, along with long-time shooters, are likely to respond to stricter gun laws with prickly defiance.

And this bit here – which is something I’ve been hoping would evolve for a loooong time:

“Previous studies have proposed two sides of gun culture: one focused on recreational use and a second on self-defense. But the new BU study identifies a third mentality, made up of people who view the defense of the Second Amendment as necessary to freedom in the United States,” Boston University (BU) announced last summer. “This so-called ‘gun culture 3.0’ has increased the most in states that have strengthened their gun laws to the greatest degree, suggesting it may be triggered by perceived threats on individual liberty by the government.”

So my thesis – call it aspirational, if you want, because you’re not wrong – is that the Progs who now control the wheels and levers of federal government need to make their move now, because they may not get another chance.

And given that depending on Joe Manchin’s sympathies (and perhaps a few other relatively moderate Dems in the Senate), the difference between a bill being “Law” and “Oppo research ready for the 2022 campaign to extinct every non-metro anti-gun candidate between the Hudson and the Sierra Madre” might be one vote? That might just moderate the push.

I’m hoping not, of course – I want the progs to put their cards on the table, and have it blow up in their faces in two years.

I was against it back when many of you were for, or at least pretty blasé but tacitly approving of, it.

Oh, I’ll have much more to say about it next week – and most likely on tomorrow’s show as well.

(H/T to

A friend of the blog emails:

I would love it if the pandemic caused developers to incorporate more parking into their apartments. The sky is the limit- we don’t have to use more land just to build out parking. I think of the benefits this could have on lower and middle class neighborhoods in regards to snow plowing, if people actually had space to put their cars. Of course, elite ruuing class liberals look at an article like this and laugh at the poor. They say, “I got my parking garage, and I got you a bike lane, what’s your problem?” Oh, on opportune days, they ride their bicycles and opine about the freedom bicycles give, ignoring the car they have tucked away at home. I would wager that most in this article even supported policies that took away parking and allowed development without adequate parking for tenets. Will they relate their support/votes with problems affecting them?

I’ve written in the past, during my years as a single parent, that a transit and bike-centered lifestyle is pretty much unsustainable, even in the urban core, for middle class people, to say nothing of the “working class”.

Being “able” to go without a car, in this age of fluid jobs and multiple careers and services that families need increasingly centralizing rather than moving closer to people, is perhaps the ultimate sign of disonnected “privilege”.