The media gets lots of stories wrong, but the Kyle Rittenhouse story (along with the Russiagate hoax, the “fine people” hoax, and the antifa/BLM “mostly peaceful riots” gaslight) is a story that the mainstream media got intentionally wrong to push a particular narrative. (If you haven’t read it already, this previously linked Bari Weiss piece on the trial is the go-to piece for covering media lies.) As the fallout from media lies continues,
Kyle Rittenhouse was found not guilty on all six charges today, already causing a great exploding of heads in the pundit-o-sphere. Unrest wouldn’t be surprising. How could it be otherwise? Colleagues in national media spent over a year telling the country the 18-year-old was not just guilty, but a moral monster whose acquittal would be an in-your-face affirmation of systemic white supremacy.
It used to bother me that journalists were portrayed in pop culture as sniveling, amoral weenies. Take William Atherton’s iconic portrayal in Die Hard of “Thornburg,” the TV-news creep who gasps, “Tell me you got that!” with orgasmic awe when an explosion rocks the Nakatomi building. I got that I’d seen that face on reporters.
But risking the life of hero John McClane’s wife Holly by putting her name on TV, and getting the info by threatening the family nanny Paulina with an immigration raid? We’re bad, I thought, but not that bad. I got that it was a movie, but my father was a local TV man, and that one stung a bit.
MSNBC Thursday pulled a Thornburg in real life. Police stopped a man named James Morrison who was apparently following a jury bus, and said he was acting at the direction of a New York-based MSNBC producer named Irene Byon. Even if all you’re after is a post-verdict interview, if a jury gets the slightest whiff that the press is searching out their names and addresses, that’s clear intimidation. People will worry about the safety of their spouses and children as they’re deliberating. Not that it matters to anyone but the defense, prosecution, judge, jury, and taxpayers, but you’re also putting the trial at risk. I’ve covered plenty of celebrity trials, from Michael Jackson to the Enron defendants, and know the identifying-jurors practice isn’t unheard of. However, in a powder-keg case like this, it’s bonkers to play it any way but straight.
We’ve seen Die Hard-level indifference to social consequence from the beginning of this case. The context of the Rittenhouse shootings involved a summer of protests that began after the police killing of George Floyd, and continued in Kenosha after the shooting of Jacob Blake. We saw demonstrations of all types last summer, ranging from solemn candlelight vigils and thousands of protesters laying peacefully on their backs across bridges, to the burning of storefronts and “hundreds” of car thieves stealing “nearly 80” cars from a dealership in San Leandro, California. When the population is on edge, and people are amped and ready to lash out, that puts an even greater onus on media figures to get things right.
In a tinderbox situation like this one, it was reckless beyond belief for analysts to tell audiences Rittenhouse was a murderer when many if not most of them had a good idea he would be acquitted. But that’s exactly what most outlets did.
This is separate and apart from the question of whether or not you like Kyle Rittenhouse, or agree with his politics, or if, as a parent, you would want your own teenager carrying an AR-15 into a chaotic protest zone. The huge media error here was of the “Walls are closing in” variety, except the context was far worse. The “Walls are closing in” stupidity raised vague expectations among #Resistance audiences that at some unfixed point in time, Donald Trump would be pushed from office by scandal. In this case, the same people who poured out onto the streets last summer were told over and over that Rittenhouse was guilty, setting the stage for shock and horror if and when the “wrong” verdict came back.
Media figures got every element of this story wrong. As documented by TK contributor Matt Orfalea, the Young Turks alone spat out all sorts of misconceptions with shocking inattention: that Rittenhouse was “shooting randomly at people” after falling down, that he’d fired first, that there was no evidence that anyone had raised a gun at him, among many, many other errors. Belatedly, the show conceded some of these problems…
Snip.
Joe Scarborough on MSNBC said Rittenhouse unloaded “about sixty rounds” into the crowd (it was eight), adding in another segment that he “drove across state lines and started shooting people up,” and in still another that he was “shooting wildly, running around acting like a rent a cop, trying to protect property in a town he doesn’t know.” (His father and other relatives live there). John Heilemann on the same channel said Rittenhouse was “arguably a domestic terrorist” who “crossed state lines to go and shoot people.” Bakari Sellers, CNN: “The only person who fired shots that night was Kyle Rittenhouse” (he didn’t fire first, and protesters actually fired more rounds).
In the early days after the shooting, there were widespread reports that Rittenhouse either was a “militia member” or “thought of himself as a militia member,” but these turned out to not be true (he was actually only a member of a Police Explorers program). A well-known politician, squad member Ayanna Pressley, whom I wouldn’t by any means characterize as stupid or generally careless, tweeted a slew of accusations paired with a challenge to media outlets to “fix your damn headlines”
This was followed by other politicians making similar comments. Congressman Ted Lieu in September of last year said Rittenhouse “drove across state lines and he murdered two protesters,” adding, “Americans of all colors and creeds are seeing that racism and white supremacy are problems we can’t ignore.” Stacy Abrams said Rittenhouse was “willing to drive across state lines in order to commit murder.” Of course, the crowning impropriety, already mentioned in this space, was then-candidate Joe Biden putting Rittenhouse in a campaign ad in which he talked about how Trump “refused to disavow white supremacists” in a debate…
Snip.
A scant few outlets bothered to do what The New Yorker did in July of this year, in examining each of these claims one by one. This involved simple things like citing the Anti-Defamation League report covering Rittenhouse:
Quote:
There is to date no evidence that Rittenhouse was involved with the Kenosha Guard or showed up as a result of their call to action. Nor is there evidence of ties to other extremist groups, either militia groups or white supremacist groups. Rittenhouse’s social media accounts provided no evidence of ties to extremism prior to the killings.
The New Yorker also took a sober look at the oft-howled objection that Rittenhouse “crossed state lines,” as if this were somehow an offense in itself (see the Matt Orfalea video above) and quickly determined that news outlets simply didn’t bother to ask a few basic questions about the case:
Quote:
Because he lived in Illinois, people assumed that he had travelled some distance, for nefarious purposes, and had “crossed state lines” with his rifle. (The Rittenhouse apartment was a mile south of the Wisconsin border, and Rittenhouse had been storing his gun in Kenosha, at the house of a friend’s stepfather.)
Because of all of these simple factual misconceptions that Rittenhouse was a militia member and a white supremacist who’d traveled a great distance to a town to which he had no connection, then fired first and indiscriminately analysts not only pre-judged Rittenhouse’s guilt, but offered advance explanations for any possible acquittal.
Since it was not possible that it was real self-defense, the trial could only be an affirmation of white supremacy’s hold on the judicial system. “I know what white people are willing to do to defend white supremacy,” is how Nation justice correspondent Elie Mystal put it, in a Democracy Now! appearance that casually explained some of Judge Schroeder’s decisions by saying things like, “That’s what racists do.” There’s simply no requirement anymore for substantiating words like “white supremacist” or “racist” in media. We were once terrified to use these words without a lot of backup, but now, we don’t distinguish between a person who attends Richard Spencer rallies and, say, a judge with a “God Bless The U.S.A.” ringtone, or a member of a Police Explorers program.
Pretty much any use of the phrase “white supremacy” in current political context indicates the one using it is pushing a radical left-wing social justice agenda.
Here’s a quick and dirty takedown of various Rittenhouse lies in meme form:
One campaign, titled “CHARGED WITH BANK ROBBERY DURING GEORGE FLOYD RIOT,” has raised $140 of a $40,000 goal for a couple arrested in May last year.
“My girlfriend was released with no paper, but unfortunately they kept me and charged me with bank larceny,” the description reads, adding that the charges have since changed to “attempted bank robbery.”
Another titled “Fundraiser for Tuscon Arrestees” is soliciting donations for 12 people who face felony riot charges. The campaign has so far raised nearly $7,200 of a $12,000 goal.
The “Tia Pugh Legal Defense Fund” is raising money for a 22-year-old Alabama woman arrested for criminal mischief and inciting a riot. The fund has just fallen about $50 short of a $3,000 goal.
Rittenhouse, however, was unable to collect donations from the website because the then-17-year-old shooter was charged with a violent crime.
The Norfolk Virginia Police Department fired Sgt. William K. Kelly III for donating anonymously $25 to Kyle Rittenhouse’s defense.
The department only found out because a hacker group released the information of the anonymous users.
A jury found Rittenhouse not guilty on all counts.
Kelly wants his job back.
A lot of the left-wing response to the Rittenhouse verdict is that “juries would never acquit black people who used deadly force in self-defense.” A tiny problem with this argument: It’s not true.
Jaleel Stallings was acquitted of multiple attempted murder charges related to him shooting at several St. Paul police officers last summer. He [reasonably] claimed self-defense and that he had no idea these guys were cops. https://t.co/8DPWDdRIut
Timothy Simpkins, an 18-year-old who shot three people with an illegally possessed gun at a Texas high school, is literally out on bond right now and claiming he shot in self-defense. Honestly, he has a viable claim wrt to the intended target. https://t.co/A591OzmE36
Tony Bristol, a nightclub security guard, was acquitted after claiming self-defense in the shooting deaths of two unarmed patrons. https://t.co/Zqd3Ek3F1A
One rare Democrat not joining the irrational “Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist murderer” mob: Tulsi Gabbard.
The jury got it right—finding Rittenhouse not guilty on all charges. The fact that charges were brought before any serious investigation is evidence that the government was motivated by politics, which itself should be considered criminal. pic.twitter.com/4pf8Ct3TkE
104 years ago today the Battle of Cambrai was fought on the western front in France during World War I, marking the first mass use of tanks in battle. Though the British offensive thrust failed to reach their main objective, the battle did see tanks successfully break the deadlock of trench warfare.
A few takeaways:
Crewing a British Mark IV tank was absolutly miserable, between lack of suspension, lack of exhaust (carbon monoxide poisoning was common), hot exposed engines that crewmen could be tossed into at any time, and mechanical noise so loud that commands had to be given via signal flags or hand signals. It was still far preferable to attempting to charge out of trenches against machine guns over hundreds of yards of no man’s land.
Lead tanks pulled the huge thickets of barbed-wires away from the enemy lines using anchors.
Norman Margrave Dillon was the reconnaissance officer who picked the path out for the tanks. He lived to 1997!
“Every tank that was available to the Tank Corps attacked at once. There were no tanks in reserve.”
The tanks achieved their initial objectives and had to wait 15 minutes for the artillary barrage to lift.
The commander stopped then for a smoke break, only to find that all his troops were looting!
Flesquires Ridge is when the tanks finally ran into heavy enemy resistance. Their own infantry had fallen back due to exhaustion, and the tanks had to fall back because they were running low on fuel.
Another set of tanks reached their canal bridge objective just as the Germans blew it up.
Despite the failure to reach the main objective, the five miles the tank corp advanced was one of the largest western front successes up to that time, and the first successful attempt to breach the Hindenburg Line.
There weren’t enough infantry to exploit the success, and the cavalry were never ordered to exploit the breakthrough.
Half the tanks were out of action by the end of the first day.
Though the British Army was unable to exploit the initial success, Cambrai secured the future of the Tank Corps and gave the world its first glimpse of the potential effectiveness of mechanized warfare.
Kyle Rittenhouse found innocent, vaccine mandates are halted, Kamala is sinking, and the media continues stinking. Plus two scoops of Joe Rogan. It’s the Friday #LinkSwarm!
If you got your facts about the Rittenhouse case from the mainstream media, then just about everything you know is a lie.
Here is what I thought was true about Kyle Rittenhouse during the last days of August 2020 based on mainstream media accounts: The 17-year-old was a racist vigilante. I thought he drove across state lines, to Kenosha, Wisc., with an illegally acquired semi-automatic rifle to a town to which he had no connection. I thought he went there because he knew there were Black Lives Matter protests and he wanted to start a fight. And I thought that by the end of the evening of August 25, 2020, he had done just that, killing two peaceful protestors and injuring a third.
It turns out that account was mostly wrong.
Unless you’re a regular reader of independent reporting — Jacob Siegel of Tablet Magazine and Jesse Singal stand out for being ahead of the pack (and pilloried, like clockwork, for not going along with the herd) — you would have been served a pack of lies about what happened during those terrible days in Kenosha. And you would have been shocked over the past two weeks as the trial unfolded in Wisconsin as every core claim was undermined by the evidence of what actually happened that night.
This wasn’t a disinformation campaign waged by Reddit trolls or anonymous Twitter accounts. It was one pushed by the mainstream media and sitting members of Congress for the sake of an expedient political narrative—a narrative that asked people to believe, among other unrealities, that blocks of burning buildings somehow constituted peaceful protests.
CNN and Rep. Ayanna Pressley examples snipped.
But just as in the cases of Covington Catholic’s Nick Sandmann or Jussie Smollet or the “Russia-collusion” narrative, almost none of the details holding up that politically convenient position (boys in MAGA hats are bigoted; racism is as much a blight as it has always been; Trump conspired with Putin) were true.
Take each in turn:
First, the idea that Kyle Rittenhouse was a white supremacist.
There was zero evidence that Rittenhouse was connected to white supremacist groups at the time of the shooting. He was a Trump supporter, yes, though he wasn’t old enough to vote. He was an admirer of police and firefighters, also true. He was a lifeguard. He’d been part of a “police explorer” program, and was also a firefighter/EMT cadet with the fire department in Antioch, Illinois, where he lived with his mom and two sisters.
That Rittenhouse had no connection to Kenosha.
In addition to having a job in Kenosha, Rittenhouse testified that much of his family lived there: his father, his grandma, his aunt and uncle, and his cousins. He also testified that on the morning of the shootings, he went downtown with his sister and friends to see the damage done by rioting the night before, and spent about two hours cleaning graffiti off of the local high school.
That Rittenhouse drove across state lines with a gun that night to oppose the protests.
This was a line that we heard constantly—never mind that Antioch, Illinois, is about 20 miles from Kenosha, Wisconsin. As the trial has shown, Kyle Rittenhouse did not travel to Kenosha to oppose protesters. He testified under oath that he had traveled to Kenosha for his job the night before the shootings, and was staying at a friend’s house.
So what about the gun?
Rittenhouse didn’t bring the gun to Kenosha. The gun was purchased for Rittenhouse months earlier by a friend and stored in Kenosha at the home of that friend’s stepfather, as then-17-year-old Rittenhouse was too young to purchase it.
But it was illegal for him to even have the gun given that he wasn’t yet 18 years old, right?
That is not true. Under Wisconsin law, 17-year-olds are prohibited from carrying rifles only if they are short-barreled. The weapon Rittenhouse was carrying was not short-barreled. Which is why, during closing arguments, the court threw out the charge.
He was out there looking for a fight, and he got one: He killed two people and severely wounded a third.
Unless there’s evidence we haven’t seen, there’s no clear indication that Rittenhouse sought to kill anyone. What we know is that he showed up with a first aid kit and an AR-15-style rifle. Video evidence, and Rittenhouse’s own testimony, indicates that he offered medical assistance to protestors and ran with a fire extinguisher to try to put out fires—and that later, after being pursued, he killed two people, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, and severely wounded a third. Both video evidence and the only living person that Rittenhouse shot that night, Gaige Grosskreutz, undermined the idea that Rittenhouse was simply an aggressor looking for a fight. During cross examination Grosskreutz acknowledged that Rittenhouse shot him only after Grosskreutz had pointed his own gun at Rittenhouse. Here’s how it went down:
Defense attorney: When you were standing three to five feet from him with your arms up in the air, he never fired, right?
Grosskreutz: Correct.
Defense attorney: It wasn’t until you pointed your gun at him, advanced on him with your gun—now your hand’s down pointed at him—that he fired, right?
The Court ordered that “Enforcement of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s ‘COVID-19 Vaccination and Testing; Emergency Temporary Standard’ remain[] stayed pending adequate judicial review of the petitioners’ underlying motions for a permanent injunction.” It further ordered that “OSHA take no steps to implement or enforce the Mandate until further court order.”
Behind this language lies a forceful critique of the Biden mandate. The opinion is here.
One of the factors a court considers in deciding whether to issue a stay is the likelihood that the party seeking it will prevail on the merits. The petitioner must make a strong showing of likelihood of success.
The Fifth Circuit found that the petitioners in this case made that showing. This finding means that the Biden administration almost surely will lose in the Fifth Circuit when the court makes its definitive ruling on the merits.
The court cited a “multitude of reasons” why those challenging the mandate will likely succeed on the merits. The first one, which it described as “obvious,” is this:
The Occupational Safety and Health Act, which created OSHA, was enacted by Congress to assure Americans “safe and healthful working conditions and to preserve our human resources.” See 29 U.S.C. § 651 (statement of findings and declaration of purpose and policy). It was not—and likely could not be, under the Commerce Clause and nondelegation doctrine—intended to authorize a workplace safety administration in the deep recesses of the federal bureaucracy to make sweeping pronouncements on matters of public health affecting every member of society in the profoundest of ways.
Furthermore, the “sweeping pronouncements” implicit in OSHA’s order are badly flawed. For example, the court noted that the mandate is both over-inclusive and under-inclusive. On one hand, it covers employees in nearly every industry regardless of their risk of exposure (there is “little attempt to account for the obvious differences between the risks facing, say, a security guard on a lonely night
shift, and a meatpacker working shoulder to shoulder in a cramped warehouse”) and “doesn’t exempt those with natural immunity.” On the other hand, it arbitrarily excludes employers with fewer than 100 workers.
Fatally to the mandate, the court found that its promulgation “grossly exceeds OSHA’s authority.” It noted that OSHA’s statutory authority to establish emergency temporary standards “is an ‘extraordinary power’ that is to be ‘delicately exercised’ in only certain ‘limited situations.’”
And, miracle of miracles, OSHA announced that they will actually heed the court’s opinion and suspend vaccine mandate enforcement. A federal agency heeding a rational federal court decision shouldn’t be a surprise, yet here we are.
How unpopular is Kamala Harris? Democratic Media Complex house organ CNN published a scathing hit piece on her.
Worn out by what they see as entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus, key West Wing aides have largely thrown up their hands at Vice President Kamala Harris and her staff — deciding there simply isn’t time to deal with them right now, especially at a moment when President Joe Biden faces quickly multiplying legislative and political concerns.
The exasperation runs both ways. Interviews with nearly three dozen former and current Harris aides, administration officials, Democratic operatives, donors and outside advisers — who spoke extensively to CNN — reveal a complex reality inside the White House. Many in the vice president’s circle fume that she’s not being adequately prepared or positioned, and instead is being sidelined. The vice president herself has told several confidants she feels constrained in what she’s able to do politically.
Wait, the warm bucket of spit feels “constrained”? Do tell…
And those around her remain wary of even hinting at future political ambitions, with Biden’s team highly attuned to signs of disloyalty, particularly from the vice president.
Worn out by what they see as entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus, key West Wing aides have largely thrown up their hands at Vice President Kamala Harris and her staff — deciding there simply isn’t time to deal with them right now, especially at a moment when President Joe Biden faces quickly multiplying legislative and political concerns.
The exasperation runs both ways. Interviews with nearly three dozen former and current Harris aides, administration officials, Democratic operatives, donors and outside advisers — who spoke extensively to CNN — reveal a complex reality inside the White House. Many in the vice president’s circle fume that she’s not being adequately prepared or positioned, and instead is being sidelined. The vice president herself has told several confidants she feels constrained in what she’s able to do politically. And those around her remain wary of even hinting at future political ambitions, with Biden’s team highly attuned to signs of disloyalty, particularly from the vice president.
Social justice “first woman of color” blather snipped. But lets skip down to where Team Harris gets all snippy over a potential rival:
Last month, White House aides leapt to the defense of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who was being hammered with outrage by Fox News host Tucker Carlson and like-minded online pundits for taking paternity leave after the adoption of his twins in September. Harris loyalists tell CNN they see in that yet another example of an unfair standard at play, wondering why she didn’t get similar cover any of the times she’s been attacked by the right.
“It’s hard to miss the specific energy that the White House brings to defend a White man, knowing that Kamala Harris has spent almost a year taking a lot of the hits that the West Wing didn’t want to take themselves,” said a former Harris aide, reflecting conversations last month among several former aides and current allies.
(Imagine there’s an animated hissing cat gif here.)
Anyway, it’s worth reading the whole thing to read how incompetent she and her staff seem at just about everything, and to tote up all the petty slights to Harris, who was only there to bring in black votes in (and didn’t do a great job of that), and now she’s completely disposable.
Despite ending her lackluster campaign for president with a mere 3 percent support among the Democratic electorate, Harris was nevertheless the most obvious pick within the narrow bucket to which Biden had been confined. (Never mind that the apex of her support during the primary campaign came when she savagely attacked Biden on the debate stage, essentially calling him a racist for opposing busing during his time in the Senate, and that she repeatedly said she believed women who had accused Biden of sexual misconduct.)
The simple fact is that Harris is not a good national politician. She is ineffective and unlikeable at best, and, at worst, so unpopular that she’s actively damaging to the administration, likely why Psaki has had to turn to absurdities in an effort to defend her. (Democrats have developed a nasty habit of responding to voters who don’t like them by accusing said voters of racism.)
In Harris’s case, these excuses are because the truth hurts. She has little to no sway with key votes in Congress. She has next to no relevant policy or diplomatic expertise. These facts shouldn’t come as a surprise, seeing that she holds her office not because of her popularity or any relevant skillset but primarily because of her identity.
Had she not been picked as Biden’s running mate, she would’ve remained in a far more advantageous position, keeping a comfortable position in the Senate that would be nearly impossible for her to lose. She was already a media darling, popular among progressives for her supposed ability to “own” conservative nominees during hearings. Rather than winding up in a position with little chance to showboat or collect media accolades, she might’ve remained right there, where her lack of popularity with the national electorate was essentially irrelevant.
In a backwards way, Harris finds herself holding a position in which she’s ill-equipped to succeed precisely because of identity politics, which motivated Biden to pick a running mate so ill-suited to the job.
How unpopular? 28% approval. Usual poll caveats apply. So her numbers might not even be that high!
That America’s voters disdain Harris as much as they obviously do gives me an extraordinary amount of hope for our future. In December of 2019, I celebrated Harris’s departure from the presidential primary with a “good riddance” that turned out to be woefully premature: “May Harris’s failed attempt,” I hoped, serve to “destroy her career and sully her reputation for all time.” Alas, the first part did not happen; on the contrary, Harris was springboarded up to within a heartbeat of the most potent office in the land. But the second part? Well, I got that in abundance. We are now ten months into this baleful presidency, and already Harris is the most unpopular vice president in history. And they say Christmas doesn’t come early!
Harris’s apologists like to insist that she is as unpopular as she is because she’s a non-white woman. But this explanation gets the cause of the disapproval backwards. Kamala Harris isn’t disliked because she’s a non-white woman; Kamala Harris was chosen as vice president because she’s a non-white woman, and she’s disliked because she has nothing to recommend her beyond those facts. In the highest of high dudgeon, her defenders will propose that this is Joe Biden’s fault, for not “using” Harris correctly in her role. But this too is unjust. In truth, there is no good way to “use” Kamala Harris, because Kamala Harris is a talentless mediocrity whose only political flair is for making things worse than they were before she arrived.
And her staff knows it. “Kamala Harris’s communications director Ashley Etienne is leaving the vice president’s office after reports staff are in-fighting and her boss is being sidelined.”
want to thank the Democrats for giving me, a trial lawyer living in Los Angeles, exactly what I need – a big, heaping tax cut. In their reconciliation bill, there are plenty of giveaways for lay-abouts, losers, and grifters, but also for us living by the beach getting hit with huge state taxes rendered un-deductible by that evil Donald Trump, notorious friend to the rich who he…shafted. Anyway, the Dems are going to wrong this right and fix this manifest justice, though – they are going to make essentially all the money I hand over to the socialist clique that runs the formerly Golden State (and it is a lot) deductible once again.
Cool. Well, for me and other lawyers and similar blue state swells.
People often ask me why I stay in California, to which I reply, “I don’t explain myself to people – buzz off.” But if I were to explain myself to people, I would point out that despite being awash with Californians, California has beautiful weather, my family is nearby, and here I get to be part of the feudal aristocracy sucking the life from working people to fuel my extravagant lifestyle.
See, California was designed for lawyers and similar high-status low-lifes, and the beachside communities where the petty royals dwell do not experience a fraction of the hellish nightmare you see on TV. Oh, what you see is real, just not for those in the Birkenstock nobility. You see videos of hordes of hobos leaving their junkie spoor on the sidewalks and that happens, just not to the people that Prince Gavin of Newsom cares about. I don’t think he cares about me personally mind you, but he cares a lot about my ZIP code.
You can drive ten minutes from my castle and be worried about someone stealing your hubcaps. Once you start heading east over the 405 (That’s I-405 to people who don’t live in LA) real life comes and bites you hard, and the farther east you go, the harder it bites. The roads are trash – gee, I sure expect the infrastructure bill will totally make them nice again – and the schools are cesspits of violence and commie indoctrination, but the peasants just need to accept their lot in life and not complain. Their bitching would ruin our wine tasting.
Of course, I might have more sympathy for these poor devils if they had not lobbied so hard for the role of “Serf #3” in California’s production of “Game of Bums.” They voted for this. They got this. It’s all theirs.
“It’s Not Just White People: Democrats Are Losing Normal Voters of All Races.” Results from a focus group of Virginia voters “who voted Democrat, Democrat, Republican in the last three elections.”
When asked which party had better policy proposals, the group members overwhelmingly said Democrats. But when asked which party had cultural values closer to theirs, they cited Republicans.
The biggest disconnect came on education. Barefoot found that school closures were likely a big part of their votes for Youngkin and that frustration at school leadership over those closures bled into the controversy, pushed by Republicans, around the injection of “critical race theory” into the public school setting, along with the question of what say parents should have in schools. One Latina woman talked about how remote school foisted so much work on parents, yet later Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee and former governor, would insist that parents should have no input in their children’s education. (That’s not exactly what he said, but that’s how it played.) As she put it: “They asked us to do all this work for months and then he says it’s none of our business now.”
The anger they felt at Democrats for the commonwealth’s Covid-19 school closure policy became further evidence of a cultural gap between these working people and Democratic elites, who broadly supported prolonged school closures while enjoying the opportunity to work remotely. Those with means decamped: Enrollment in Fairfax County schools dropped 5 percent, and fell by 3.9 percent and 3.4 percent in Arlington and Loudoun counties, respectively. Those who were left behind organized parent groups to pressure the schools to reopen. Though the groups tended to be nonpartisan or bipartisan at the start, Republican donors and conservative groups poured money and manpower into them, converting them into potent political weapons that blended anger at the closures with complaints about Democratic board members prioritizing trendy social justice issues — all of it aimed at the November elections.
“They keep saying ‘a strong return to school,’ but there’s no details,” said Saundra Davis on Fox News over the summer, co-founder of one large group, called the Open Fairfax Public Schools Coalition. “Their attention is on other things, like their pet projects and social justice issues, and the kids have been left to flounder and there’s still no plan for fall.”
“You’ll be surprised to know I’m a Democrat,” she said. “I’ve tried to warn them that there’s a bipartisan tidal wave coming their way. They don’t look us in the eye, they don’t write us back. If we can’t recall them one by one, there’s an election in November.”
Ignore the parts where the writer regurgitates Democratic Party talking points (“for the portion of the Republican base heavily predisposed to racial prejudice,” “Few people read the full 1619 Project put out by the New York Times in 2019, which is a rich tapestry of thoughtful essays and reporting about the role of slavery in the development of the United States.”) and pay attention to what the focus group members of all races are saying. “The Democratic problem with working-class voters goes far beyond white people.”
Evidently one American sport is willing to stand up to China: Women’s tennis.
The head of the Women’s Tennis Association Steve Simon has said he is willing to lose hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business in China if tennis player Peng Shuai’s safety is not fully accounted for and her allegations are not properly investigated.
“We’re definitely willing to pull our business and deal with all the complications that come with it,” Simon said in an interview Thursday with CNN. “Because this is certainly, this is bigger than the business,” added Simon.
“Women need to be respected and not censored,” said Simon.
Peng, who is one of China’s most recognizable sports stars, has not been seen in public since she accused former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli of coercing her into sex at his home, according to screenshots of a since-deleted social media post dated November 2.
Her post on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, was deleted within 30 minutes of publication, with Chinese censors moving swiftly to wipe out any mention of the accusation online. Her Weibo account, which has more than half a million followers, is still blocked from searchers on the platform.
The mother of a Virginia girl who was raped by a classmate inside a school bathroom reportedly said that she and her husband had been pressured to keep quiet about the incident — and had no clue the 15-year-old boy was then transferred to another school until last month.
“We were silenced for many months,” Jessica Smith told the Daily Mail in her first interview since her daughter was raped at Stone Bridge High School in Loudoun County in May. “We were told not to say a word that could jeopardize our daughter’s case.”
The boy was found guilty last month of the sexual attack, which sparked a heated confrontation between the victim’s father and school board members.
There seem to be no crimes the left wing won’t condone in their quest to impose “Social Justice” on resisting Americans.
While talking with Joe Rogan, Dr. Peter Attia tells a story about woke ideology in a medical school Urology lecture. It’s remarkable. pic.twitter.com/mftjjNZww1
“A Virginia university has placed an assistant professor on administrative leave after the educator sparked heated backlash for saying it isn’t necessarily immoral for adults to be sexually attracted to children.” Allyn Walker, step right up, you’re the next contestant on The Perv is Wrong!
This week marked the 50th anniversary of the world’s first microprocessor, the Intel 4004. There have been a lot of milestones on the road to the high tech world we live in today, but that was one of the biggest.
The rare good kind of irony: A team of firefighters was practicing water rescue when a car drove into the water and they had to perform a real water rescue.
The federal government is pretty clear on this point: If you accept federal money, you can’t discriminate on the basis of race for education under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There are other laws that prohibit it, and a fairly extensive number of post Brown vs. Topeka cases that all say the same thing
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The answer to the above seems to be “Answer Cloudy, Ask Again Later.” But Bill Melugin, who did a lot of solid reporting on the Del Rio crossing crisis, is reporting a lot of activity there:
La Joya is in Hidalgo County in the Rio Grande Valley, a much more densely populated part of the border than the Del Rio sector. Thanks to disasterous Biden Administration policies, illegal alien apprehensions hit a new October high.
The Biden Administration’s refusal to secure the border is one of the many reasons Hispanics are switching to the GOP in record numbers. One sign of that is state Rep. Ryan Guillen (who represents part of the Valley) just switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party:
After much consideration and prayer with my family, I feel that my fiscally conservative, pro-business, and pro-life values are no longer in-step with the Democrat Party of today, and I am proudly running as a Republican to represent House District 31. pic.twitter.com/CRKOhVnSG4
Was thinking about doing separate posts on several stories, and decided to shove them all into a roundup on the fight against Social Justice Warriors/Critical Race Theory/wokeness/etc. Because I’m just not doing enough roundups these days…
The Scottsdale Unified School District has elected a new interim president after allegations against President Jann-Michael Greenburg that he had distributed a “dossier” on some parents, including photos and personal finances.
The SUSD board voted 4-1 at a Monday night meeting to elect Patty Beckman as interim president as parents gathered outside to call for Greenburg’s resignation.
Don’t let the left gaslight you on Critical Race Theory.
The reality is that Critical Race Theory is being effectively smoked out. There was a time not so long ago when people actually tried to defend the use of CRT, like Marc Lamont Hill during his interview with Christopher Rufo.
But now the playbook has changed. CRT is simply too toxic even to try to defend. This is why the National Education Association scrubbed Business Item #39 — which supported the use of CRT in K–12 schools across America — from its website in July. This is why the Biden administration removed the link to University of Georgia professor Bettina Love’s Abolitionist Teaching Network from the Department of Education’s website, claiming that the connection to the radical group (which aims to “disrupt Whiteness” in schools) was a mistake.
Snip.
[Defending CRT] would be to defend the “Color Line” exercise, a teacher training activity developed by Glenn Singleton’s Pacific Educational Group, which aims to help white educators identify their so-called “white privilege” so they can understand how this privilege is perpetuating white supremacy culture in K–12 schools as well as the rest of America. According to University of Alabama history professor David Beito, this exercise is a Maoist-style scheme that “publicly humiliate[s] dissenters by having them wear signs around their necks expressing shame for their ‘incorrect thoughts.'”
It would be to support forcing third-graders to deconstruct their racial identities and rank themselves according to their power and privilege. It would be to teach educators that babies show the first signs of racism at three months old and that White children “remain strongly biased in favor of Whiteness” by age five. It would be to argue that the United States was founded on a Eurocentric, White supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal, homophobic, and anthropocentric paradigm brought from Europe. It would require teachers to locate themselves on an “oppression matrix” and accept that White heterosexual Protestant males are inherently oppressive and therefore must atone for their “covert White supremacy.”
It would be to defend turning MLK’s “Dream” on its head, replacing judging a person by the “content of character” with judging a person by the color of his skin. It would be to defend replacing individualism with identity-based tribalism, with teaching children that race is the most important determinant of success, that meritocracy and American exceptionalism are evil, and that systemic racism is so deeply ingrained in our institutions that you are no longer the captain of your own ship.
In other words, it would be to defend the indefensible.
Throughout election night, as it became clear Republican Glenn Youngkin would win the Virginia governor’s race, numerous left-leaning media commentators insisted that critical race theory isn’t being taught in Virginia public schools.
Various media personalities—some professing to be on the news side, others on the opinion side—repeated the assertion both before and after the election results came in.
But a simple Google search would have shown these pundits that public documents from the Virginia Department of Education repeatedly mention the phrase “critical race theory,” as well as produced news stories about teacher training by consulting firms associated with critical race theory.
Christopher Rufo, a contributor to City Journal and Fox News, is among those who have reported on the documents, as well as on Virginia counties implementing critical race theory into their curricula.
In 2015, then-Governor McAuliffe's Department of Education instructed Virginia public schools to "embrace critical race theory" in order to "re-engineer attitudes and belief systems." They explicitly endorse CRT—he can't wiggle out of this one with word games. pic.twitter.com/aLV4LGYFZJ
Right now, on its website, the Virginia Department of Education recommends "Critical Race Theory in Education" as a "best practice" and derives its definitions of "racism," "white supremacy," and "education equity" explicitly from "critical race theory." pic.twitter.com/QVSJVpju2A
McAuliffe is playing a linguistic shell game to obfuscate about critical race theory. But the reality is that Virginia Department of Education promotes all of the *concepts* of critical race theory: "systemic racism," "white supremacy," "white privilege," "white fragility," etc.
How about firing anyone who won’t sign on to the racist, anti-American ideology of Critical Race Theory? Shockingly, that is now happening, all across corporate America. The current message is: believe in CRT, or more likely pretend to believe, or you are fired.
The Upper Midwest Law Center, on whose board I serve, is representing several individuals who have been fired or demoted because they disagreed with Critical Race Theory. One of those plaintiffs is Chuck Vavra. Vavra was an engineer at Honeywell, which imposed mandatory Critical Race Theory-based training on its employees. The “curriculum” called America irredeemably racist and asserted that all whites are the same, and insisted that whites admit their inherent racism and status as evil oppressors, while blacks were characterized as victims, good people but intrinsically unable to lead successful lives due to white racism.
Vavra objected to this bizarre Marxist world-view. The result? Honeywell fired him.
It is notable that the “training” insisted upon by Honeywell was not a matter of compliance with federal civil rights statutes or other laws, nor did it have anything to do with Vavra’s job duties as an engineer. It was simply an effort to impose fealty to an extreme left-wing, anti-American agenda as a condition of employment at the company.
In the safe & suburban Central Texas city of Round Rock, a group of parents, staff, and students are raising red flags over the potentially dangerous environment at their local schools—and so far, district officials have only disregarded them.
Round Rock Independent School District is situated in the northern suburbs of Austin, in a community long considered safe from the craziness of the state’s notoriously liberal capital city. Yet, based on a series of tips, Texas Scorecard has interviewed a handful of individuals experiencing a free-for-all locker room rule in the district’s schools; many of these individuals even know of school plans to place boys in girls’ hotel rooms during school trips.
To protect the minors and their families from harassment or punishment, this report will refer to these students, parents, and responsible staff by pseudonyms.
Two female high school students—referred to as Heather and Lauren—told Texas Scorecard about their first experiences in the troubling series of events.
“I became aware of it about a month ago when I was getting dressed for school [in the locker room] out of my sweaty gym clothes, and I had just taken my shirt off,” said Heather, “when I noticed someone who looked a lot like a dude standing there using the sink and stuff. And I got really scared because I didn’t know that they were a biological male … so I quickly put my shirt back on then I immediately left with all my stuff.”
Lauren relayed a similar story. “I remember I was going in [to the locker room] and I was getting changed when, out in the open, I saw an individual walk in who I know is a biological male,” Lauren said. “It just kind of really caught me by surprise; it caught me off guard. So, I just quickly got dressed and just got out really quickly.”
Snip.
Soon after, several parents got involved; for the sake of this story, we’ll refer to them as Crystal and Julie. They first sent an open records request to the district, asking for their bathroom/private facilities policy (with no response as of yet). They then sent their questions up the district food chain, first to a teacher (who replied they did not have the power to fix the situation), then to a high school principal, the school board, and finally the superintendent and his leadership team.
“At Stone Bridge High School in Loudoun County, Virginia, where the school board’s policy on ‘gender expression’ provides a similar environment as presently experienced at RRISD schools, a ninth-grade girl was allegedly raped in a school bathroom by a so-called gender-fluid male student wearing a skirt,” wrote Julie to the school board.
“Please take the time to craft, with parent input … a district-wide policy and action plan to address this dilemma.”
Only two of the seven school board members—the same two who were the only ones fighting for parental rights and transparency in the district’s other recent tumultuous events—responded.
“Yesterday Trustee [Mary] Bone and I both inquired to the superintendent, in writing, about this,” wrote RRISD Trustee Danielle Weston. “I seek to protect our students’ safety and do not want what happened in Loudon County to happen here.”
Meanwhile, the parents and Lauren were able to meet with one of the district’s high school principals, who actually confirmed they will allow anyone inside any private room, including boys inside the girls’ dressing rooms.
“That is what I’ve been told from [the legal department], that every student is permitted to use a restroom if they choose to,” the principal said.
“So this policy comes from legal?” asked Julie.
“Mhm,” the principal replied.
Later in the conversation, Julie asked who in the district is creating the policy.
“So does legal have a policy in place?” she asked.
“No there’s no policy in place,” the principal replied. “The policy is this: Every one student at a time, every situation one at a time. And if the student chooses to use the restroom [of their choice], they’re going to be allowed to use that restroom.”
The principal then suggested if they wanted to feel safer, the biological female students could make their own adjustments. He said they could go to a different locker room, change in a bathroom stall, go home, or even change inside a pop-up tent in the bathroom.
You will be made to care, and you will be made to conform. How many fingers, Winston?
Texas Republican Gubernatorial challenger Don Huffines says that the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services is using Critical Race Theory in training.
Speaking of CRT in Texas, a pro-Critical Race Theory parent in the Fort Worth Independent School District told school board meeting attendees that “he has 1,000 soldiers ‘locked and loaded‘ for those who ‘dare’ question the need for race-based curricula.” Yeah, we saw some of those “soldiers” on display in Kenosha. They did not impress… (Hat tip: Gail Heriot at Instapundit.)
In a sequel sure to be every bit as beloved as The Hangover Part III, failed Senatorial and Presidential candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke has announced that he’s running for high office yet again, this time for Texas Governor.
For months, Texas Democrats have failed to field a single serious candidate to challenge Governor Greg Abbott’s reelection bid. But today, Beto O’Rourke is announcing in Texas Monthly that he is entering the 2022 gubernatorial race. The former three-term congressman from El Paso who had run losing bids for U.S. Senate against Ted Cruz in 2018 and for president in 2020, is not expected to face any serious challengers for his party’s nomination. He will seek to become the first Democrat to win statewide office in Texas since 1994, ending the longest statewide losing streak in America for either party.
It will be an uphill battle. Abbott, who has raised more money than any governor in U.S. history, had $55 million in his campaign treasury as of July 15, the last time he reported the size of his war chest. While polling has found that Abbott is not as popular as he once was, O’Rourke’s numbers are worse. A University of Texas poll conducted in October found 43 percent of Texans approved of the job Abbott is doing and 48 percent disapproved, but only 35 percent of respondents had a favorable opinion of O’Rourke against 50 percent who had an unfavorable view.
At this point O’Rourke is anything but a fresh face. But before we enumerate O’Rourke’s many negatives, let’s give Bobby Francis his due and list the assets he brings to the race:
First and foremost, he does the work. He’s an indefatigable campaigner who constantly gets out and meets potential voters. Given the fact that so many high profile statewide Democratic candidates have not done that over the last twenty plus years (I’m looking at you, Ricardo Sanchez), it’s no small thing.
His previous campaign organizations have tended to be more notably competent than other high profile Texas Democrats. (I’m looking at you, Wendy Davis.)
His “hyerpscale” outreach, IT, data and comms teams were particularly praised.
He has a high national profile, generating a ton of positive MSM press.
He has an huge, national list of previous contributors to raise money from.
He still has those “boyish, Kennedyesque good lucks” reporters love to swoon over.
He’s facing an incumbent whose popularity has taken a hit.
He currently has no serious competitor in the Democratic Party primary, allowing him to focus on the general election fight.
However, O’Rourke has an even more daunting list of disadvantages for this race:
See all those positives above? He had all those for his Senatorial and Presidential races as well (save the no serious competitors bit for the Presidential run), and it wasn’t enough to propel him to victory. In the heavyweight class, O’Rourke’s record is 0-2.
In his Senatorial run in particular, he has just about every single thing going his way (a clear nomination path, a midterm election with a polarizing Republican in the White House, an incumbent (Ted Cruz) damaged by his own unsuccessful run, and more fawning political coverage and money than any Democratic senate candidate in the history of the Republic), and it still wasn’t enough to win Texas.
In his presidential run, O’Rourke moved so hard left on a range of issues, from gun control to open borders to taxes, that he’s all but unelectable in Texas.
As I mentioned before, the very issues Abbott is must vulnerable on are the ones where O’Rourke doesn’t have the standing or positions to challenge him:
Border security? While the Rio Grande Valley is in the midst of a Republican upswell over the issue, Beto wants to tear down the border wall.
Ice storm? Beto wants to keep pouring money into the same green energy boondoggles that couldn’t keep the lights on.
If anything, Biden’s disasterous open borders policies have made Democrats even more unpopular in the Valley than they were in 2020.
Indeed, the 2022 electoral environment looks to be much more challenging for Democrats than 2018. Supply chain issues and inflation have ordinary Americans furious at a Democratic Party that promised a “return to normality” in 2020. Right now, Republicans a 10 point lead in generic ballot questions, the largest since they’ve done polling on the issue. All polls should be taken with a grain of salt, but those are substantial headwinds.
When O’Rourke and Abbott were both on the ballot in different races, Abbott got 600,000 more votes than O’Rourke. That’s an awful big gap to make up in a favorable year.
The issue that Democrats are most fired up about, abortion, didn’t seem to help Wendy Davis in 2014. Any single-issue pro-abortion voter was already backing O’Rourke over Cruz in 2018, and it wasn’t enough.
O’Rourke still has a reputation as an intellectual lightweight.
Very, very few American politicians have lost two profile races in a row only to go on to win a third. Richard Nixon is the only one that comes to mind, but 1968 was a long time ago.
Having hoovered up record amounts of cash only to lose two previous races, donors may be hesitant to keep throwing good money after bad. As a commenter here observed, “Beto Campaigns in Texas are where progressive money goes to die.”
With less than a year before election day, O’Rourke’s official entrance to the race is later than typical for a winning candidate. A relatively minor point, but O’Roruke may regret dithering for a couple of months rather than campaigning and fundraising.
Could the dynamics of the race change to be more favorable to O’Rourke? Sure. Things change all the time. If one of Abbott’s challengers catches fire, he might be forced to spend time and money on a runoff. Abbott could suffer a gaffe or high-profile medical problem. (Unlikely; Abbott has previously been a pretty hardy campaigner (wheelchair not withstanding), and he’s the sort of careful, polished politician that doesn’t tend to make gaffes.) The economy could improve. Inflation could indeed prove transitory, as it was 1980-1982. I rather doubt those last two, because the people in charge seem hellbent on making everything worse and Paul Volcker is dead.
In 2018, O’Rourke ran the most competitive statewide campaign any Democrat has run this century…and it wasn’t enough. That’s probably more of a ceiling than floor, and O’Rourke’s floor may turn out to be a lot lower than observers thought when he was a fresh-faced newcomer…
Relatively cheap, quickly deployed swarms of autonomous drones are probably going to be a major factor in short- to -medium-term warfare. There will probably be (at least) two different types of autonomous drones: Suicide drones for hard targets like tanks, and anti-personnel drones using light weapons. The later could either return to base, or just fall to the ground for later retrieval and refurbishment when their fuel or power run out.
Both will pick out targets using AI.
I’m not much interested in the central question posed by the following video (are drone swarms technically WMDs), mainly because China doesn’t give a rat’s ass about international law. But it shows a variety of different drones being developed in various countries:
Speaking of China, here’s a short video on China deploying drones via a MRLS:
The advantages of functional drone swarms for armored or naval warfare should be obvious. If you can kill a $10 million Abrams or Type 99 tank and crews with a $100,000 drone, that’s a clear win. Whether such drones can overcome current active protection systems like Trophy is an open question. And Germany’s Rheinmetall just released a video of an anti-drone platform shooting some down:
The problem, of course, is that their system hasn’t demonstrated any autonomous mode, and real battlefield drones will probably quickly adopt a variety of evasive maneuvers rather than hovering nicely in a row to be shot.
Welcome to the AI drone arms race. Make your own SkyNet jokes in the comments below.
A school board president in Arizona has been accused of maintaining a secret online dossier containing personal details about parents who opposed mask mandates and Critical Race Theory.
Scottsdale Unified School District Governing Board President Jann-Michael Greenburg’s access to the Google Drive file was revealed after he accidentally displayed the link in a screenshot he sent to a parent in a heated email chain.
The drive contained files labeled ‘SUSD Wackos’ and ‘Anti Mask Lunatics’ among others in a sprawling database tracking the online activities of parents in the district.
The drive was set to public, allowing anyone with a link to view it, and the contents, including the Social Security numbers, financial information and divorce records of parents, quickly set off a firestorm of calls for Greenburg to resign, according to AZ Free News.
Never mind a school board president keeping a “political enemies” dossier on the parents who are his employers; that’s bad enough. But:
If he used district funds to hire a private investigator to investigate parents, he’s committed fiduciary responsibility fraud, and should be fired with cause for that alone.
If he obtained and transmitted federally defined Personal Identifiable Information (in this case Social Security numbers) for unauthorized uses, it’s a strong possibility that he violated one or more federal statues regarding the collection and dissemination of that information, including the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
But keep in mind that I Am Not A Lawyer, and anyone more familiar than I with federal privacy provisions should weigh in below.
More background on Greenburg: He’s a democrat, having donated to the Arizona Democratic Party, unsuccessful Democratic congressional candidate Eric Kurland, and unsuccessful Democratic state senate candidate Seth Blattman. (Note: Ignore the entries for Mark Greenburg on the Open Secrets page; I’m guessing that Open Secrets doesn’t like the hyphen in Jann-Michael Greenburg’s first name, as no results come up when you search on his full name, thus the last name and zipcode search.)
The fact that a school board president would break the law to compile “political enemies” dossiers on parents who oppose Critical Race Theory shows what lengths CRT advocates will go to to keep indoctrinating your children.
It’s going to be a long, hard fight against CRT. Plan accordingly.
Biden takes his Welcome Back Carter cosplay to the next level, fighting the plague of wokeness, and more disasterous Kyle Rittenhouse prosecutor missteps. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
A group of Houthi rebels reportedly stormed the U.S. compound on Wednesday seeking “large quantities of equipment and materials,” according to regional reports translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute. The raid comes just five days after the Houthis kidnapped Yemeni nationals who work for the U.S. embassy. “The alleged raid comes after the Houthis kidnapped three Yemeni nationals affiliated with the U.S. Embassy from one of the employee’s private residences in Sana’a on November 5,” according to MEMRI. At least 22 other Yemenis were kidnapped by the Houthis in recent weeks, “most of whom worked on the security staff guarding the embassy grounds,” according to MEMRI.
The State Department confirmed to the Free Beacon that the Yemeni staffers are being detained without explanation and that the Iran-backed militants stole property after breaching the American facility in Sana’a, which housed U.S. embassy staff prior to the suspension of operations there in 2015.
For a long time now, people have been watching the spectacle of Democrats grinding away at the sausage and fighting for their piece of the pie (to make a metaphoric meal). And it has not been a pretty picture.
The question raised by Tuesday’s debacle for Democrats is: Now that President Biden’s high poll ratings and good will are squandered, how do they turn the mishegoss into a winning message?
There’s some truth in what James Carville told Judy Woodruff: “What went wrong is this stupid wokeness. Don’t just look at Virginia and New Jersey. Look at Long Island, look at Buffalo, look at Minneapolis, even look at Seattle, Wash. I mean, this defund the police lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools.”
There’s also some truth in what Representative Abigail Spanberger, a moderate Virginia Democrat in a tough re-election battle, told The Times’s Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns about the president: “Nobody elected him to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”
Biden has pursued his two bills with Captain Ahab-like zeal; he pines to be F.D.R. and eclipse Barack Obama, who pushed him aside for Hillary.
It’s Dowd and the Times, so I can’t say read the whole thing. But even Dowd can smell a dead fish rotting…
Kurt Schlicter: “Americans Are Waking Up To The Democrat’s Race Hustle.”
he smart, moral transcriptionists of our glorious ruling class have discovered what they contend is a terrible crime of wickedness – those rural monsters out there whose skin tone is pale voted for Republicans in astounding numbers. Blatant “whiteness” they call it, a malady that people who aren’t white can suffer from too. Just ask Winsome Sears. And so can the other minority voters who ditched the Democrat plantation in record numbers. But they also contend that voting for Democrats because of your race is great. If consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, these people are totally hobgoblin-free.
As a normal person, you will observe that this all makes no sense. That’s incorrect, because it makes perfect sense when you understand that all this race hustling is a garbage scam to secure the liberal establishment’s power. It’s morally illiterate, but the moral angle is part of the scam. See, voting for a Democrat or a Republican, to most folks, is just a thing. It’s morally neutral. Now, many vote for a party by habit. Others vote by the individual or by policies. Keeping the former group and coercing the second are the goals of racializing elections in order to cast casting your vote as a moral imperative.
Republican, bad.
Democrat, good.
Dig through the dross of “privilege” and “whiteness” and you get to the crux of the scam. They use race to turn what should be a choice based on rational self-interest into one based on (alleged) virtue. Suddenly, a vote for the Dem is not something Dems need to earn through competence and quality. It is something they are simply entitled to because they are on the side of righteousness. And this is super convenient because the Democrats just suck. They are terrible. Not even a year in and President * has managed to screw up everything his dusty claws have touched.
There were two main reasons that Virginia swung: government overreach from a party that claims to be advocating for middle class freedom, and willful ignorance (i.e. government under-reach) about the state of the economy, and inflation, in our country.
There’s no doubt that a tone of government overreach has grown to a fever pitch since President Biden took office. Whether it is forcing children to wear masks at school, counter-intuitive vaccine mandates which have resulted in the loss of thousands of jobs, or the idea of indoctrinating children too small to even read or write properly with elements of critical race theory, my guess would be that Virginians have simply had enough government in their lives for the time being. And another guess is that the swing state is likely a barometer for a large portion of the rest of the country.
Nearly everything that the Biden administration has done since he has taken office has likely appeared to centrist voters to be counterintuitive: he turned our country’s exit from Afghanistan into a humanitarian and economic travesty, he has pushed a Soviet-style propaganda campaign for vaccination mandates and most recently introduced the bizarre idea of paying $450,000 to the families of illegal immigrants separated at our border.
“It is bizarre,” a family member who voted for Biden said to me this weekend, while discussing Biden’s proposed $450,000 payments.
And therein lies a key axiom: there comes a point where even the most fervent Democrats realize that they have to side with common sense, even if it means disagreeing with the candidate they voted for. I am guessing that this is the principle that helped drive so many anti-Donald Trump voters in Virginia back to the sensibility of conservative government.
A metallurgist in Washington state pleaded guilty to fraud Monday after she spent decades faking the results of strength tests on steel that was being used to make U.S. Navy submarines.
Elaine Marie Thomas, 67, of Auburn, Washington, was the director of metallurgy at a foundry in Tacoma that supplied steel castings used by Navy contractors Electric Boat and Newport News Shipbuilding to make submarine hulls.
From 1985 through 2017, Thomas falsified the results of strength and toughness tests for at least 240 productions of steel — about half the steel the foundry produced for the Navy, according to her plea agreement, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Tacoma. The tests were intended to show that the steel would not fail in a collision or in certain “wartime scenarios,” the Justice Department said.
Snip.
“Ms. Thomas never intended to compromise the integrity of any material and is gratified that the government’s testing does not suggest that the structural integrity of any submarine was in fact compromised,” Carpenter wrote. “This offense is unique in that it was neither motivated by greed nor any desire for personal enrichment. She regrets that she failed to follow her moral compass – admitting to false statements is hardly how she envisioned living out her retirement years.”
So, she just harmed national security and endangered the lives of American servicemen because she was lazy as fuck. Oh, that makes it all better…
Today was the fifth day of the trial by which ADA Thomas Binger’s is seeking to have Kyle Rittenhouse convicted and sentenced to life in prison for having shot three men (two fatally) the night of August 25, 2020 in Kenosha WI, when the city was suffering a tsunami of rioting, looting, and arson following the lawful shooting of a knife-wielding Jacob Blake by Kenosha police officers.
And it would be hard to fully express what a catastrophe this day was for Prosecutor Binger.
The prosecution’s demise came into the courtroom in the form of its star witness, Gaige Grosskreutz, famously struck in the right bicep as he closed on the fallen 17-year-old with a Glock pistol in his hand.
Grosskreutz is the only survivor from among the three men who were struck by Kyle’s desperately fired rounds, and the only one of Kyle’s attackers available to testify for the State in this prosecution (the fourth primary attacker, “jump kick man,” had the unbelievably good fortune to be missed twice by the 17-year-old, and has since disappeared off the face of the Earth).
Grosskreutz is fortunate that modern American courtrooms don’t do trial by combat, because otherwise he’d have been carried out of the courtroom mortality wounded by his own testimony.
Kasparian said she thought Rittenhouse first chased after Joseph Rosenbaum, sparking the incident that ended with the teen fatally shooting Rosenbaum. However, it was Rosenbaum who chased after Rittenhouse. Moreover, a gun was fired from a third party just seconds before Rittenhouse fatally shot Rosenbaum.
“I was wrong about that, okay, so I want to correct the record,” Kasparian said on her news show. “Look, these details matter, because if you’re going to make an argument that you acted in self-defense, there needs to be some proof that there was an imminent threat.”
Some Rittenhouse trial tweets:
PROSECUTOR: "You decided you needed to run because of the fire?
Text I got from a friend re: The Rittenhouse Judge
“So we’re in essence at a place now where news is so filtered you have to find some random dude in Ohio who posts the entire clip on YouTube sans any commentary, any editing, any title cards, etc to really know what happened.” pic.twitter.com/f92L7lSraZ
These Antifa dumbfucks were literally chasing a guy who was carrying a rifle. Then they threw him to throw ground and tried to shoot him. What did they think was going to happen? pic.twitter.com/4EMJRDM9lN
Why are so many Democrats advocating for Kyle Rittenhouse to be found guilty of murder and locked up the rest of his life? Regardless of the evidence. Why?
I don’t think the progressive out there really understand how much the rioting was a turn off to moderates or just left of center types, and left leaning news media coverage was attempting to gaslight us while we watched it all on tv and social media for ourselves
After you learn you have been duped by the left-leaning press on the Kyle Rittenhouse story, do an Internet search on "Fine People Hoax," first on DuckDuckGo and then on Google. Compare.
Make sure to wear a hat because your head is about to explode.
Based on the absolute ass-kicking delivered to the Democrats last Tuesday in my home state of Virginia, you’d think they’d get the message that maybe its time to move on from their goals of disarming American citizens. Based on the reaction so far,though the Democrats are in deep denial or simply unwilling to waver on their commitment to denying Americans their Second Amendment rights, and disparaging those who exercise them.
Witness the reaction to Republican Winsome Sears winning election as Lt. Governor in Virginia. Sears is the first Black woman to win statewide election in Virginia, but Democrats by and large have preferred to focus on the campaign ad with her proudly holding an AR-15. In fact, Saturday Night Live’s Michael Che declared that the picture was actually good news for Democrats, because “nothing will get Republicans to support gun control faster than this picture.”
Che should come hang out with me in central Virginia sometime. I guarantee that conservative white folks are far more comfortable with Winsome Sears (or himself) owning an AR-15 than his white liberal neighbors in New York City. The “tolerant Left” is never more bigoted than when it comes to conservatives of color, which is evident when it comes to the Left’s collective disdain over Sears’ embrace of the Second Amendment.
Combine the “everyone who disagrees with me is racist” argument with a “and hell yes we’re coming for your guns” and it’s no wonder that Democrats couldn’t even muster 20% of the vote in more than a dozen rural Virginia counties. Heck, my own county, which went for Barack Obama twice before flipping to Trump in 2016, saw Democrats get less than 40% of the vote, which is a big deal. And I know firsthand how important gun control was for many of these voters, who knew that Terry McAuliffe was going to try to ram through his gun and magazine ban if elected. These folks have as much disdain for most Republicans as they do Democrats, but there was no way they were going to sit out this election.
While there are some Democrats sounding the alarm bell, none of them are highlighting the need for the party to ghost the gun control lobby.
Spoiler: Democrats aren’t going to change course because they are radically, institutionally hostile to civilian gun ownership.
“Black Lives Matter Is the Real Domestic Terrorist Threat.” They’re currently threatening to burn new York City some more. “Democrats at the highest levels have been giving BLM cover since the group was founded. They either excuse BLM’s violence as some part of a protracted mea culpa, or they deny that the violence is happening at all.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The current MIT administration has caved repeatedly to the demands of “wokeness,” treating its students unfairly, compromising the quality of its staff, and damaging the institution and academic freedom at large.
We object to MIT’s politically correct measures, including the firing of its Catholic chaplain. In the early days of the George Floyd protests, before the details of Floyd’s death were clear, Father Daniel Moloney sent a letter outlining his thoughts on the event to the university’s Catholic community. It was a sincere examination of conscience from a person whose job it was to examine conscience, yet it prompted his immediate dismissal. MIT’s leadership apparently took umbrage at his statement of these simple facts: that George Floyd “had not lived a virtuous life” (based on his multiple criminal convictions) and that “most people in the country have framed [Floyd’s death] as an act of racism. I don’t think we know that.”
Moloney did not present these statements as justification for Floyd’s death; to the contrary, his letter begins, “George Floyd was killed by a police officer, and shouldn’t have been.” But MIT found the letter intolerable and fired the chaplain. (We are not Catholic, by the way, but believe fairness transcends religion.)
We also deplore MIT’s new mandatory diversity training. In the autumn of 2020, MIT sent an email to new and current students informing them that they would be unable to register for spring classes if they failed to undergo wokeness instruction. In the email, MIT outlined two required trainings: one on “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” and the other entitled “Sexual Assault Prevention Ongoing: Healthy Relationships.” Portions of the training materials are available here. The compulsory videos contain deftly worded but fatuous questions implying that straight white males are at the “intersection” of all oppressive behaviors. Everyone else is an oppressed victim, with extra points for being a member of multiple minority groups. Thus, the concept of “intersectionality” is a kind of conspiracy theory of victimization.
The war against Critical Race Theory Texas classrooms takes a scalp.
The Black principal of a majority-white Texas high school who has been embroiled in a controversy over critical race theory was forced to resign after months of accusations that he indoctrinated students.
The Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District board of trustees voted Monday to part ways with the principal, James Whitfield, who was suspended this year at Colleyville Heritage High School in the Fort Worth area.
The school board had voted in September not to renew Whitfield’s contract, NBC Dallas-Forth Worth reported.
Whitfield is the principles who accused residents of “systemic racism” and demanded students “commit to being an anti-racist.” (Hat tip: Push Junction.)
Enes Kanter refuses to sweep Chinese oppression under the rug:
The genocidal Chinese government and the insecure tyrant behind it all XI JINPING must not be allowed to host the upcoming Winter Olympics.
Toshiba is also breaking itself into three parts, infrastructure, semiconductors and devices. Toshiba used to be one of the top semicodnuctor companies in the world in the 1980s, but I thought they had spun off semi operations as Kioxia in 2018.
