But only to Lefty super-genii.

Why is it that reporters keep scratching their heads about Venezuela’s descent into extreme poverty and chaos? The cause is simple. Socialism. End it and you will end the misery.

Here is how the Times explained the reason for Venezuela’s dire situation: “The growing economic crisis (was) fueled by low prices for oil, the country’s main export; a drought that has crippled Venezuela’s ability to generate hydroelectric power; and a long decline in manufacturing and agricultural production.”

There’s no mention — not one — of the fact that Hugo Chávez tried to turn Venezuela into a socialist paradise, policies that his successor Nicolás Maduro has continued. The Times’ coverage is par for the course.

As we have noted many times in this space, it is socialism, not oil prices or the weather or greedy businessmen or any other such factor that’s to blame for Venezuela’s economic crisis. This is what socialism produces. Always and everywhere. It is as close to an iron law of economics as there can be.

Yet reporters continue to obfuscate, if not totally ignore, this economic reality when they try to explain to readers what is going on down there.

Why do reporters ignore the obvious? We’d surmise that it’s largely because liberal journalists are infatuated with the idea of socialism.

Well, duh. They’re socialists themselves, and they’re so much smarterer than the rest of us, and…well, this time, it just HAS to work. And if you don’t believe all that, just ask them.

Hoist by his own petard.

Disney and Netflix officials said Friday they’re not sure why references to chromosomes and gender were removed from a 21-year-old episode of “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” which is available now for online streaming.

The 1996 episode, “Probability,” originally featured a cast member saying, “I’m a girl. Could have just as easily been a boy, though, because the probability of becoming a girl is always 1 in 2.”

“See, inside each of our cells are these things called chromosomes, and they control whether we become a boy or a girl,” she added. “See, there are only two possibilities: XX, a girl, or XY, a boy.”

That segment has since been removed, and it is not available in the version that is now streaming on Netflix, the Washington Free Beacon was first to report.

Nye’s new program, “Bill Nye Saves the World,” which is exclusive to Netflix, departs from his old television show’s position on gender.

“Gender is like sex, it’s on the spectrum,” Nye said in one of his newer episodes.

News that Nye’s old television program has been edited for Netflix comes on the heels of the premiere of his new online show, which takes a very progressive approach to a number of issues, including climate change, world population and gender.

Well, nothing says “science” more than hiding the facts to fit whatever political narrative is currently popular and maintain the approval of your fellow Progressivists, right?

Hey, balance the ball on your nose now, Science Guy, and clap your flippers together; maybe the libtards will throw you another fish. MJ has a couple of pertinently impertinent questions:

Shower thought: Doesn’t discussion of the wage gap assume someone’s gender?

Shower thought II: Does the B in LGBT assume there are only two genders?

Gee, I dunno. Maybe we could get a real scientist, instead of a PC douchebag like Bill Nye, to address those sometime.

Kill the goose that lays those pretty golden eggs.

HARTFORD, Conn. (WTNH)–Connecticut’s state budget woes are compounding with collections from the state income tax collapsing, despite two high-end tax hikes in the past six years.

It means the current budget year, which ends in just two months, is now seriously in the red and next year’s deficit has ballooned to $2.2 billion.

It’s happening because the state of Connecticut depends too much on its wealthy residents, and wealthy residents are leaving, and the ones that are staying are making less, or are not taking their profits from the stock market until they see what happens in Washington.

Why, that’s just wrong, those rich bastards. HOW DARE THEY?!? Obviously, what Connecticut needs to do is just pass a law preventing anybody from leaving. That ought to fix things nicely.

Commie schmucks.

Whether it’s Venezuela or Connecticut, the end stages of socialism are never pretty. But somehow, they always ends up looking pretty much the same.

Speaking of embarrassment.

Now, does Nick Gillespie really think altering tax policy will magically transform low-IQ, inbred Muslims from the Maghreb into patriotic French republicans who work at Parisian software shops? It’s tempting to say it is just another pose, but the evidence is piling up in favor of the argument that Nick Gillespie is a stupid person. Anyone who truly believes altering tax policy will reverse a thousand generations of evolution is an idiot.

That’s the fundamental problem with modern libertarians. They believe this or they simply are incapable of mastering ground floor level biology. The reason the country of Niger is a basket case is that’s the way the people of Niger want it. It is full of Hausa. The reason Paris was Paris was that, up until recently, it was full of Parisians! Now that Paris is filling up with North Africans and Arabs, it is looking like Algeria with better plumbing.

What’s happened to libertarians is a form of what Vox Day calls convergence. It used to be that libertarians accepted the chain of causality. They worked backward in order to arrive, obliquely, at the first cause. If you wanted to have a nation of maximum freedom, you had to have a nation with rational laws and that meant a rational, Anglo-Saxon culture. The result was a libertarianism in one country model.

Then a new breed of libertarian showed up mouthing all the economic arguments of libertarians, often with the zeal of a fanatic, but embracing liberal cultural arguments, re-framing them in terms of personal liberty. The result is libertarians have almost fully converged now with the liberals. They have been assimilated into the Borg. Libertarianism, like most libertarians, is all about someone else paying for their ethnic dining habits.

Jeez, that stung me, and I’m only an onlooker.

Not that Gillespie is completely wrong, mind. The origins of the decay of France—and the rest of Europe—can easily be traced to their witless embrace of the eternally destructive force that is socialism, sure enough. But to assert that the recent exponential acceleration of that decay has little or nothing to do with the importation of hordes of primordial fanatics openly hostile to the culture that brought them in—vociferously dedicated to its destruction; antipathetic to assimilation; implacable and intractable, eager to do violence against it by any means they can contrive—bespeaks a willful blindness I can’t even begin to grasp.

And I’ve long considered myself a libertarian of the small-l variety, and have admired Gillespie’s writing and quoted it here who even knows how many times.

That said, Z’s last line still smarts a little. And like I said, I’m only an onlooker here.

The bottom line is, all the old paradigms have been overturned, and not just in France, or even Europe. Here in the States, what we thought of as conservatism has been revealed as useless against the Progressivist onslaught, an ideology all too comfortable with its own perpetual defeat. The political party long associated with it stands exposed by its actions as fraudulent, a subterfuge in collusion with its declared enemies, struggling to maintain an unworkable status quo that benefits not the governed, but the government.

Our gutless leaders have not only refused to mount an effective, proactive defense against a deadly jihadist foe, they’ve actually repeatedly suggested that occasional mass murder in our public spaces is just something we’ll all have to learn to live with, while boasting of our supposedly indisputable military supremacy—a hollow supremacy purchased at unimaginable expense, which is incapable of dispensing with an enemy comprised of illiterate goatherds dwelling in remote mountain caves and barren deserts after a decade and a half of violent struggle. They rattle cardboard sabers and mouth empty threats to vanquish an enemy they’re too goddamned cowardly to even name.

The real issue, politically and ideologically speaking, is not so much convergence as it is irrelevance—an irrelevance imposed by insuperable reality, unmoved by definitions and assumptions that are all too obviously outdated, rooted as they are in a stultified political structure that dates back to the Civil War. That structure refers whenever convenient or useful to a Constitution it long since discarded; professes reverence to principles it holds in contempt; and relies on a history it never bothered learning in the first place.

Conservative me no more conservatives, and liberals and libertarians too. Republicans? Democrats? Libertarians, Greens, Socialists, Fascists, Populists, Communists? Meh; might as well talk to me about the Whigs as if they still matter.

There’s now a strong wind blowing, and it’s already sweeping all the old detritus aside. Trump was merely the first gust of it. The old-line pundits complained that he wasn’t really a conservative, and he clearly wasn’t a liberal either. But instead of attempting to wrap their old strictures around him, what they should have done was just admit right up front that they hadn’t the vaguest clue what to make of him. They might at least have then been able to maintain their claim to some sort of intellectual acuity, rather then ending up looking like the befuddled guardians of an old, tired order that history already sidestepped and left behind.

Now all that fresh wind, that new paradigm, really has to do to establish its dominance and forever alter the landscape is adequately and persuasively answer a question or two: will it effectively defend me from murderous Islamist troglodytes, and can it be persuaded to leave me mostly the hell alone, to live my life and pursue my humble ambitions as I see fit?

The Constitution doesn’t enter into it; it’s as dead as the dodo, and has been for decades. The Founders’ vision of freedom and legitimate government doesn’t either, for better or worse; it, too, is gone, and cannot be brought back. Government of the people, by the people, and for the people was finished the moment the people felt secure, prosperous, and comfortable enough to start ignoring what was being done in their name by their supposed representatives, and to suffer no personally disastrous consequences from that disregard.

In addition to the questions I just posed, the ultimate one is this: will it work? Along, perhaps, with: can I trust it?

Whatever rises up to replace the current muddle, if it just handles those questions adroitly, it will truly change the world. For the better? For the worse? Well, we’ll just have to wait and see about that, won’t we?

So at long last, here we all are.

Ivanka Trump likes to dance with her young sons to blow off steam when she gets home from work, a cute video she shared on Instagram Thursday suggests.

The video, which has already racked up more than half a million views, shows the always elegant Ivanka, still in her coat, busting a move with three-year-old Joseph while baby Theodore looks on from his high chair. Ivanka captioned the video, “Little moments matter, especially for working moms!! #TBT to an after-work dance party with my boys.” She plugged her new book by linking to a Working Mother magazine article about Women Who Work.

A minor firestorm erupted on the left Wednesday when the State Department retweeted Ivanka’s post promoting the book, in possible violation of a federal ethics rule that bars the use of public office for private gain.

This is possibly the most corrupt thing anyone in government has ever done, according to some of the comments.

And you should read them; the apoplectic, hysterical foaming at the mouth is truly epic.

Know what the truly heartwarming thing is, though—the thing that can’t help but bring a smile to your face regardless of the unhinged lunacy behind it all? Just this: how unhappy must these hapless earwigs be that they could spend even a moment letting themselves be upset by such nonsense? How miserable must someone’s life be—to what depths of intractable unhappiness must they have descended—to reach the point where they could even pretend that something like this could ever matter to anyone, anywhere?

And how much must it gnaw at them that most of us not only will never even hear of this ludicrous “controversy,” but would not give a perceptible damn about it if we did?

Yeah, yeah, I know: it’s all part of their strategy of throwing any and everything they can at Trump hoping something will stick eventually; their “outrage” is phony, their “concern” ginned up, their regard for any sort of “ethics violation” is thimble deep. But if this is the level of desperation they’ve reached, well, I don’t think there’s any possible argument to be made that they’re winning here. As Debra concludes:

So much hateful gnashing of teeth at the sight of a lovely mommy enjoying some quality time with her little boys. It’s pretty pathetic.

Well, sure, it is that, I guess. But it’s also funny as hell.

If y’all can forgive my recent lapse into pessimism, well, I’ll try to make it up to you.

Most voters don’t trust political polls and tend to think pollsters are out to stop President Trump’s agenda.

Uhh. Ummm, uhhh, yeah. Do I even need to add the obligatory “duh!!” here?

Just 26% of Likely U.S. Voters say they trust most political polls. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 55% do not trust most political polls.

Just one-out-of-three voters (35%) believe most pollsters are interested in reporting the attitudes of Americans in an unbiased manner when they poll on Trump. Forty-three percent (43%) think most pollsters are trying to block the president from passing his agenda. Just 12% say most are trying to help the president pass that agenda instead.

Really? REALLY? Just who in the farging fucking blue-balled hell is in that twelve percent, anyway? And how do they manage to feed themselves without full-time federal assistance?

Not surprisingly, given how wrong most pollsters were about the outcome of the presidential election, 64% of Republicans think most pollsters are trying to block Trump’s agenda, a view shared by 42% of unaffiliated voters but only 24% of Democrats.

That bolded part is on me, and is something I try to remind myself of each and every day. So should you; so should we all, lest we weaken in the face of the Left’s unceasing propaganda. Onwards.

Some election analysts suggested last year that Trump had hidden support among voters who were unwilling to say publicly where they stood because they were fearful of criticism.

Yeah, “criticism.” Or, y’know, violent, masked Progtards camped out on their front lawn with torches, threatening to burn their houses down and beat them, their wives, and their children to a greasy pulp.

I’ve always said polls are bunk; I took statistics in college, and the first thing they drummed into our heads was that polls can be manipulated to say anything the pollster wants, with plenty of classroom examples of how easy it was to do just that. So take all this with a grain of salt; as this very article admits, most pollsters—along with everydamnedbody else—completely missed the Trump Train’s arrival, and still don’t get why so many of us jumped aboard. Infallible they ain’t, to say the very least.

That caveat acknowledged, my gut feeling is that these numbers are probably pretty close to accurate. I think there are way more of us still willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt, and trust him more than the usual Powers That Be suspects to put America’s best interests first. We’ll need to press him now and then, of course; there’s no realistic reason to expect him to be right every single time. But I do believe we’re some distance yet from abandoning all hope, battening the hatches, hunkering down, and loading magazines with the intention of imminently emptying them. Or so I hope, anyway.

(Via Bill)

Williamson totes another righteous beating.

I make no bones about that fact I don’t like Kevin Williamson, the house rumpswab at National Review. I have no tolerance for people who put on false fronts and Williamson’s quill pen act is as phony as a three dollar bill. George Will did the same thing for decades, but he at least had a first class education and did some time as a university instructor. He was a gold-plated phony, but at least he had some credentials. Williamson has none of that. He’s just a real life version of Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons.

Gratuitously mocking fat guys is not a good look so I resist the temptation by doing what most everyone does and that’s avoid reading National Review. It’s not that hard as the only interesting thing about conservative commentary these days is the remarkable dullness of it.

Regular readers of this blog will know that my view of the Official Right and their slow-witted little brother, Official Libertarianism, is that they trail along behind the Progressives, as they flit from one fad to the next. Their contempt for the Dissident Right is not about ideology. It’s that they think the scruffy trouble makers to their Right make them look bad to their friends on the Left. It’s hard to make $30K from college speeches when the people running the college are blaming you for the alt-right hate-thinkers.

Maybe that’s why there is a market on the Official Right for the type of contemptuous poverty porn Williamson is peddling. The Left has made hatred of working class white people that shop at Walmart a centerpiece of their identity. Hillary Clinton ran for President on a platform of “White People Suck.” Perhaps the Official Right is just aping what they see, but with their own spin on it.

Of course they are. It’s what they do: follow the Left’s lead, do what they’re told, pretend to be in opposition as long as their subordinate place at the big DC table is reserved. Talk big, do nothing. Lap up whatever crumbs the Left deigns to throw their way, and be grateful. Crow about how things will really be different Next Time….but Not Yet. Not ever Yet.

Well, screw them, every last man Jack of them. As far as I’m concerned, the Republicrats are way more despicable than the Democrat Socialists. At least the libtards don’t make any bones anymore about their desire to see America That Was destroyed, humbled, and dragged through the sewer.

Not so with Conservative Inc. They’re way more devious, or so they’d like to think. They lie about all sorts of things, from their reverence for the Constitution to their desire for smaller government, while never harboring the slightest intention of doing anything at all about any of it. Even after being handed the Congress entire, the Presidency, and the overwhelming majority of governorships and state legislatures, they still lament their powerlessness, their hopeless inability to respond in any meaningful way to the clearly-expressed will of the people who elected them.

They’re not just liars, frauds, and cowards; they’re lickspittles and collaborators to boot—in league with those they claim to abhor, advancing an agenda they’re pledged to thwart, and hoping we won’t notice any of it.

They mouth platitudes they don’t respect, in support of an agenda the exact opposite of the one they profess in order to keep their snouts in the trough for a little bit longer. As such, their treachery is the deeper, their treason is the more grotesque; their gross infamy should trail them for a thousand years. They are as corrupt as any other mouldering, rotten corpse; for the health of the foundering Republic, their overdue excision from the body politic cannot come soon enough.

Okay, I can’t even. I just…can’t even.

Trayvon Martin’s getting a college degree.

The slain Florida teenager — killed by George Zimmerman five years ago — will be awarded a posthumous bachelor’s degree in aeronautical science from Florida Memorial University.

Martin’s parents, Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, will accept the degree on his behalf during the school’s spring commencement on May 13. Fulton is an alumnus of the school, a historically black university in Miami Gardens.

The aeronautics degree is in “honor of the steps he took during his young life toward becoming a pilot,” the school said in a Facebook post. Florida Memorial’s Department of Aviation and Safety has a designated Cessna pilot training center, and the school also houses the Trayvon Martin Foundation.

Florida Memorial wanted to award the degree to Martin now because, if he had lived and attended the college, he would have been graduating this year, said school President Roslyn Clark Artis.

If he had lived…and attended the college. And paid attention in class, and completed his assigned coursework, and not mugged random white people along the way, and spent most of his time getting high and robbing random victims, and generally being the useless violent thug he was.

On her Twitter page, Fulton thanked the university for honoring her son. She said he became interested in aviation after attending summer camps at Florida Memorial.

“He was so excited,” she told CNN. “But he couldn’t decide whether we wanted to fly planes or fix them.” Martin took aviation courses in high school, as well as a few flying lessons.

Well, hey, bless his little heart. Maybe if he’d actually followed up and pursued that, he might have ended up as something other than a parasitical drain on society who got his just deserts when he made the mistake of picking on someone prepared to defend himself instead of laying down and begging for mercy like Martin expected.

Martin was shot and killed in February 2012 by Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain in Sanford, Florida. Zimmerman had called 911 to report a suspicious person in his neighborhood and later got into a fight with the 17-year-old. Zimmerman said he shot Martin in self-defense.

“Got into a fight.” Umm, no. Zimmerman was viciously assaulted by Martin, who WAS a suspicious person, and successfully defended himself after being jumped and having his head smashed into the pavement repeatedly by this predator. Zimmerman said he shot Martin in self-defense…because it’s true. That is exactly what he did. Just like you would have, just like I would have, just like any sensible, self-respecting person would have if it happened to us.

But hey, we mustn’t let inconvenient truths get in the way of a good narrative, right? Poor, poor little Trayvon, an innocent child whose dreams reached to the stars themselves, but who saw those beautiful dreams snuffed out by a vicious, hateful, bigoted White Hispanic who murdered him for no reason, no reason at all.

Just who do these malignant assholes think they’re fooling with this transparent horseshit, anyway? Certainly not anybody who’s ever suffered the misfortune of having to live in a neighborhood populated by the likes of Trayvon Martin, that’s for sure.

(Via Sundance)

The difference between anticipated—or dreaded—civil war, and the real deal.

Been a powerful lotta yappin’ and prognosticatin’ on the intarwebz about the imagined (imaginary) Civil War we’re in. Probably be a sight more.

So, as a public service for all the Clever Clydes out there who want to be doing play-by-play on the apocalypse, here is a handy recognition guide for recognizing a civil war, versus a tantrum.

Nota bene that this handy field guide is not by any means a complete comparison, just a handy reference card.

In a tantrum, there is a copious quantity of whining, bitching, self-pissing, moaning, and being “triggered”.

In an actual civil war, being “triggered” takes on a much more literal meaning.
 
Anything solved by a crack on the ass or a punch in the nose is a tantrum.

A civil war invariably involves a body count. Usually, a prodigious one.
 
Also note that if a tantrum becomes a widespread delusion, it can lead to a civil war.

And, for my money, those widespread delusions are what we really have to worry about.

I think Coulter just may be tired of all the, uhh, WINNING.

Mulvaney’s most disturbing comment was to say that what upset Trump the most was the Democrats’ “spiking the football” on this deal.

Apparently, Trump’s fine with no wall — and everything else in a bill straight out of George Soros’ dream journal — if only the Democrats hadn’t been so rude as to tell the public about it. When your main complaint is that the other side is gloating too much, maybe you’re not that great a negotiator.

Yeah, sure, it’s only 100 days in, it’s an artificial deadline, the media is dying to say Trump has failed and so on.

Except: Planning for the wall should have begun on Nov. 9, and a spade should have been put into the earth to begin building it the day after Trump’s inauguration. Now, it’s 100 days later, and we still don’t have the whisper of a prospect of a wall.

Moreover, this isn’t one random bill funding Planned Parenthood (which this bill does). This is the budget deal. There won’t be another one like it until next October.

That’s a spectacular failure. Democrats have got to be pinching themselves, thinking, Am I dreaming this?

Oh, I doubt that. After all, it’s only been like this for the last forty years or so; they gotta be so used to it by now they just take it as a given. This, though, is the crucial part:

No amount of abandoning his supporters will get Trump anywhere with Wall Street, Hollywood or the media. Their ferocity will simply shift to ridicule.

The deal was that we were getting the Hollywood version of a New York businessman: an uncouth, incurious rube — who would be ruthless in getting whatever he wanted.

In addition to being the only candidate for president in either party taking America’s side on trade, immigration, jobs and crime, what set Trump apart was his promise that we would finally win.

Remember? There would be so much winning, we were going to get “sick and tired of winning,” and beg him, “Please, please, we can’t win anymore…It’s too much. It’s not fair to everybody else.”

We’re not winning. We’re losing, and we’re losing on the central promise of Trump’s campaign.

How would Trump, the businessman, react if an underling charged with developing a new golf course could never break ground?

Trump would fire that employee so fast your head would spin.

We want the ruthless businessman we were promised.

We certainly do. Yes, it’s early days yet, steep learning curve, all that. And I always said anyone expecting Trump to fix everything all by himself was delusional—in four years, much less a few months. But on the wall at least, it’s time for him to dig in and bare some teeth. No, he can’t legislate from the Oval Office, that ain’t how it works. And yes, he’s produced some very good executive orders, and is fighting a three-front war against the Republicrats, the Demicans, and Court Media. But he’s showing too much give on some of his core platform planks, seems to me, and if he wants to risk being turned into a lame duck three years prematurely, well, that’s probably the way to go about it.

We elected you to drain the damned swamp, Donald. A tough job, certainly—maybe, probably an impossible one—and one that won’t get done in a day, or a hundred of them. But you ain’t gonna do it by pouring more stinkwater in, either.

Update! Schlichter:

So far you’ve done some great things, and you are blessed with hilariously inept enemies. But the one opponent you can’t beat is yourself. That’s why they are trying to manipulate you – because only you can defeat you.

Are you going to let yourself be played?

Do you want to go down in history as a loser?

If your reaction to seeing your buddy Arnold’s miserable failure is “Oh yeah? Hold my near beer!” just keep on stiffing your friends and hanging with the “cool” kids who are laughing at you behind your back.

Or you can say “No.” You can take charge. You can tell the K Street Krew and the Squish Squadron how it’s going to be. You spent your life dealing with old money jerks who laughed at you for who you are and what you did. Until now, you played them. Not vice versa. They were never your friends, and they aren’t now.

Choose to lead, not be led.

Choose loyalty to you and the cause, not the wormtongued advice of craven creeps.

Choose to be a winner, not pathetic.

Amen, to every word of it. Screw those “craven creeps,” as hard and fast and deep as possible, every chance you get. Dance with who brung ya.

I missed out on any commentary on May Day. Luckily, Daniel has it covered:

Most leftists are dilettantes. They admired and admire Communism’s commitment to murdering millions of people and arguing the esoteric dogmas of the party line. It’s this latter that Gornick’s New York Times piece bleeds with nostalgia for. She tells us, again and again, that the Communists were wonderfully inspirational because they sat around kitchen tables arguing about ideas.

So did the Nazis. But the New York Times doesn’t print fond recollections of debates over whether the Japanese really counted as Aryans and how National Socialism should approach the rights of workers. Nostalgia for the Third Reich is rightly regarded as abominable. And the hobby of those who have a soft spot for its murderous totalitarian ideology.

Curiously, the left never applies this same indictment to its own fondness for Communism. Instead it traffics in nostalgia for Communism’s idealism, as if its ideals were any nobler than those of Nazism. But the left believes they were. And how could it not? Communism is just the left taken to its inevitable conclusion.

Actually, I’d take it a bit further: Communism is the Left, period. Or, perhaps more adroitly and accurately put, the Left is Communist. Dress it up how they will; hide it, disguise it, misnomer it. Call it socialism, call it Progressivism, call it liberalism (the most egregious misnomer of them all, and one that didn’t happen by accident)—Communism is Leftism, and Leftism is Communism. Period, full stop, end of story: a totalitarian, authoritarian ideology wherein the State is supreme; rights are not part of our natural inheritance as human beings but granted by the State, and subject to revocation or abridgment as the State may whimsically choose. Wherein individual ambitions and aspirations are subordinate to the needs of the collective as determined by the State. Wherein no individual right to petition the government for redress of grievances is acknowledged, much less honored or respected.

All within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State. This is EXACTLY what the Left wants, and they’ve come all too close to getting it. But it’s as un-American as it’s possible to be.

Well, y’know, FUCK that noise.

The left doesn’t believe that Hitler was bad because he killed Jews. Mass murder isn’t a crime in the left’s eyes. Just ask Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the rest of the gang of monsters whom the left defended in papers just like the New York Times until they had committed the worst of their crimes.

As long as the Hitler-Stalin pact held, leftists vehemently campaigned against war. There were plenty of “Hitler is bad, but” pieces of the sort that they’re running about North Korea or Iran. Hitler only became truly irredeemable when he invaded the Soviet Union. And then everyone, except the Trotskyists, decided that Nazi Germany was utterly evil. Leftist fellow travelers went, in the span of days, from protesting “warmongering” and “militarism” to demanding action yesterday.

And that too is another dirty red secret of the left.

It’s inconceivable that the New York Times or any paper would run a glowing piece titled, “When Nazis Inspired Americans”. No fond recollections from participants in the Madison Square Garden rally. No fond memories of Bund camps. No sugar-coated recollections of how the Thousand Year Reich would create a better world… only to then learn that Hitler wasn’t a very nice man.

But “When Communism Inspired Americans” regurgitates the same exact message. And it remains acceptable because the left feels an emotional and intellectual connection with Communists.

That is the ugly truth at the root of our conflict.

Yes, it is. But it also remains acceptable because we have so long shied away from calling them exactly what they are. We’ve allowed them to hijack the terms of the debate and run away with them; we’ve fought them on their terms and their ground without ever questioning their premises or calling them what they really are. We’ve allowed them to paint any negative mention of Communism as out of bounds, the exclusive province of wild-eyed, irrational extremists…even as they themselves have become more openly extreme themselves.

The fact that “McCarthyism” is now such a dirty word, such an unacceptable paradigm—when McCarthy has been proved in the main correct, by documents released after the fall of the Soviet Union itself, for Christ’s sake!—demonstrates just how successful they’ve been at transmogrifying falsehood into a threadbare scrim of accepted truth.

But that’s what Communists do; it’s what they’ve always done, and always will do. To go rummaging about for the needles of accuracy in the massive haystack of Leftist lies and propaganda is worse than a fool’s errand; it plays right into their hands, and is just the kind of distraction they want us to relax haplessly into. It’s a sort of acceptance of defeat, really, an admission of unworthiness and inferiority, a submission.

And the hell of it is, we’ve let them talk us into it, with nary a shot fired or punch thrown. These days we don’t even dare call a Communist a Communist, no matter how Red they paint themselves from top to toe. They launch violent riots in our streets denouncing capitalism, democracy, and freedom of speech while brandishing hammer-and-sickle flags in our very faces with no fear of repercussion at all, burning and looting while the “fascist” cops stand idly by on orders from city hall without lifting a finger. They’re making a serious effort at overturning the result of a legitimate election, while our so-called “leaders” natter amongst themselves about whether they’re willing to commit a pitiful fraction of the grotesque federal budget to repairing a few miles of a border fence that was supposed to have been finished years ago.

And still we take it, as our despicable “leaders” promise us big results next year, or the year after that, maybe, or sometime, eventually. I’ll risk being tedious again by repeating myself: as with the Muslims, so with the Left—you cannot defeat an enemy you’re too timid to call by his rightful name, or even acknowledge as an enemy. Call it the CF Theorem, maybe. I’ll let Daniel sum it all up:

This is the left. It returns, like a dog to its vomit, to the dream of the true radicalism of a totalitarian leftist state. It occasionally deals with uncomfortable truths. Circles around them. And then it lapses back into an opium dream of Marxists sitting around a kitchen table and debating which windows to smash first and whom to shoot first.

And as has been demonstrated more than adequately the last century or so, they’ll have no qualms whatever about embarking on all that smashing and shooting when they deem the time is ripe for it. We just have to make sure there’s a few of us left who retain the means and the will to shoot back, that’s all.

Fuck May Day. Fuck Communists. Fuck the Left. Let them come. At long last: let them come. May they be shown exactly as much mercy as they’d show us, and not one jot or tittle more.

Put another way: may they all die screaming.

Obamacare repealed and replaced! By….Obamacare.

Let’s get to some of the details of this bill. And this is in as simple language and explanation as I can make it. It’s a side-by-side comparison of what was in Obamacare and what’s changing, what’s being kept, and what’s being removed. Now, under Obamacare, the individual mandate requires people who can afford it to go out and buy health insurance. This House Republican bill repeals that. Kind of.

Because there is a caveat.

It is repealed. However, there are penalties in the House bill, the Republican bill, if you don’t have insurance. Well, they’re not penalties. The penalties that are in Obamacare would disappear. The change is that if you go uninsured for more than 63 days, you will have to pay a 30% surcharge on your premium when you get insurance. This is said to be an incentive designed to encourage people to maintain insurance coverage. So while they’re repealing the individual mandate and repealing the penalties, they are replacing that with a proviso that you can’t go longer than two months without coverage.

Well, you can. But if you do, you’re going to have a 30% surcharge added to your premium when you do get a policy. Now, some are going to think this is a distinction without a difference.

And that’s because it is. But at the risk of being tedious, I’ll refer you all back to what I’ve said so many times: once you let government into healthcare, you will never, ever get it out. Its grasp will only expand; its malign influence, the damage it does, will only broaden, deepen, and worsen. It will NOT be reversed or undone. Not until the next revolution, it won’t. If any.

Government health care has been the Progressivist brass ring since FDR’s reign, at least. There’s a reason for that. The opportunities it affords the Left for control over every jot and tittle of individual lives, the access to endless buckets of money, the chance it gives them to appear Concerned and Compassionate, are simply bigger than any other program imaginable might ever bring them.

And as of 2009, they’ve seized that brass ring. They’ve been struggling for it relentlessly for a century or so. And now they have it. It will not be taken back from them without violent revolution, and perhaps not even then. Everything else is just talky-talk-talk, and nothing more.

Let the sideshow wing of the Uniparty celebrate all it likes. Let Trump spin it how he will. The defeat happened way back in 1965, if not before; all we’re seeing now is the unfolding of the endgame. Name for me one country that ever yielded to the impulse to render their health care decisions to a powerful central government, and thought better of it later, and restored anything resembling a free and open market. You can’t do it, because it never did happen. Not yet, it didn’t. And it won’t happen here.

Government health care is our eternal reality now. Everything else is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Yet another idea whose time has long since come, but will never really arrive.

To our geographic north lies a European-style welfare state that spends about 35 percent of its federal budget annually on elderly programs, children’s services, and health care, and to the south one encounters a Latin American kleptocrat paradise where the only white Anglo-Saxon Protestants to be found are tourists spending their filthy lucre at beach resorts staffed by the downtrodden brown people of the Estados Unidos Mexicanos. What exactly is keeping American lefties from thumbing a ride to Toronto or Tijuana and asking the nice socialists across the border for political asylum?

Progressives have patience only with those who share their opinions, and in their haughtiness, they believe themselves justified in employing the heckler’s veto and in thrusting their ideas on everyone around them. Yet despite having cultural control through the universities, the entertainment industry, and the mainstream media for more than half a century, they have been unable to convert enough Americans to give them a lasting majority in the Electoral College.

The White House was occupied by America’s first social justice warrior president from 2009 to 2017; his bureaucratic acolytes continue in stealth to do  the yeoman’s work of stifling traditional American values, but the left is still unable to silence the opposition. Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, Herman Cain, and others command the attention of millions of Americans on a daily basis, and the Tea Party, Convention of States, and State of Jefferson movements are examples of the grassroots of American patriots who refuse to be subjugated by the collectivist mandarins in the District of Columbia and the various state capitals.

With so much resistance against big government simmering from sea to shining sea, it seems high time for the statists among us start asking themselves if they should pack their Birkenstocks and head off to any number of socialists utopias, from San Salvador to Stockholm, where they can have all the government-run equality they can stomach.

I’ve been saying it myself for years, but the answer is fairly obvious: as long as they know there’s even one person living free of their influence and outside their control, they can never be satisfied. Even the suspicion that there’s a single one of us happily evading their clutches would prevent them from ever having a restful night’s sleep, and would torment them until they managed to rectify the situation to their despotic satisfaction.

All they’ve ever had to do was leave us one place—one solitary, relatively small patch of ground on the entire fucking Earth—where we can live free. And they can’t even do that. That ought to tell even the most obtuse among us all that anybody will ever need to know about who and what they really are.

Civil War v2.0 begins.

On Saturday we held a rally in Berkeley to promote free speech. We knew there would be trouble so we came prepared to fight. We sang, “Glory, glory, hallelujah!” They played Public Enemy. We were disarmed by the police. They were armed to the teeth. We won.

The rally was called “Patriots Day” and featured the tagline “Punk’s Not Dead It’s Conservative.” The speakers included Lauren Southern, Based Stickman, Baked Alaska, Latina for Trump Irma Hinojosa, and Brittany Pettibone. At least ten groups were there to make sure the talk happened, including Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, American Civil Defense, L.A. Coalition for Trump, Blacks for Trump, 2 Million Bikers, Vets for Trump, Berkeley College Republicans, OC College Republicans, Democrats for Trump, and our own Proud Boys, who picked up Lauren from her hotel, surrounded her all day, and escorted her home after the riot.

The guests spoke about the importance of free speech and suggested that neo-Marxism is more than just an annoying fashion trend—it’s a scourge that has infected our schools, our media, and our government. The attendees were not white supremacists. They were American citizens of all races who love this country and hate the fascist dogma of the left. Communists have killed 100 million people. Muslims are planning to kill people right now. Black nationalists are doing it. Black nationalist Muslims are the worst of both worlds. However, white nationalists—no—white people who don’t hate themselves are the problem. This backwards logic died on April 15, 2017.

Among the protesters who arrived at the rally was a filthy-rich porn star known online as #Moldylocks. She came looking for “100 Nazi scalps” and left with a punch in the face. Her boyfriend abandoned her as soon as the going got rough and they both ended up in the ER.

Well, good. I mean, if anybody has to end up there, I firmly believe it ought to be somebody besides just us.

There is a culture war going on, and it’s apoplectic idiots with nothing to say vs. perfectly sane people who want everyone to have their say. Our world includes them. They can go have a talk about how Nazis are lurking around every corner and Trump is Hitler. We won’t “shut it down,” as Yvette Felarca brags. Their world doesn’t include us. They don’t tolerate Nazis, and by Nazis they mean anyone who doesn’t take their radical views seriously. If you think there are two genders (as doctors do), if you don’t support gay marriage (over a third of Americans oppose it), if you think illegal aliens are illegal (as the law does), if you think women are different from men (as reality does), you are a Nazi and you need to be punched in the face. This kind of harassment works for a while. Sane people aren’t looking for trouble. We have jobs and we want peace and quiet after a hard day’s work. However, when you burn down a gay immigrant’s talk because you think he’s a homophobic xenophobe, we start to question your cause. When professors need a neck brace after trying to escape a talk that was already shut down, we begin to wonder what you’re thinking. When pedophiles start telling us what to do, we begin to question their morals. When feminists embrace Sharia, we begin to consider the possibility that none of these people have any idea what they’re doing. Then, when breathtakingly gorgeous intellectuals get maced for daring to question the anarchist narrative, we begin to get angry. This is where we are. We’re angry. And you’re not going to like us when we’re angry.

If they refuse to respect us and our God-given right to hold beliefs that differ from theirs, then may they at long last fear us. And as much as I’ve fretted here over the horror that I’ve long anticipated all this must lead to, I can’t say it’s all downside; if violent Leftwits end up getting physically damaged by the people they’ve assaulted with impunity so far—well, hey, maybe we didn’t name the tune, but we’ll sure dance to it if we must.

I still hold out some minuscule hope that somehow, someway, against all observable odds, they’ll wake the hell up before it’s too late, if it isn’t already. But I never have thought it was the way to bet, and if it really has to come to this…well, I’d much rather win than lose.

We have not yet begun to fight, assholes. So gird your fucking withered loins. You’ve put yourselves in the hurt locker now, whether you know it or not, and you will NOT find getting out of it easy. Because if we let you win, you really lose nothing, and can always come back to fight another day should you muster the grit to do so. Whereas if we lose, we lose something incalculably valuable to us, and we lose it forever, beyond hope of retrieval.

We are NOT prepared to humbly accept that at the hands of the likes of you. Not without a serious fight, we ain’t. If you are unfamiliar with the historical term “war to the knife,” now might be a good time to do a little research and figure out what we mean by it.

Plus, we have all the guns.

Civil War v2.0 begins.

On Saturday we held a rally in Berkeley to promote free speech. We knew there would be trouble so we came prepared to fight. We sang, “Glory, glory, hallelujah!” They played Public Enemy. We were disarmed by the police. They were armed to the teeth. We won.

The rally was called “Patriots Day” and featured the tagline “Punk’s Not Dead It’s Conservative.” The speakers included Lauren Southern, Based Stickman, Baked Alaska, Latina for Trump Irma Hinojosa, and Brittany Pettibone. At least ten groups were there to make sure the talk happened, including Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, American Civil Defense, L.A. Coalition for Trump, Blacks for Trump, 2 Million Bikers, Vets for Trump, Berkeley College Republicans, OC College Republicans, Democrats for Trump, and our own Proud Boys, who picked up Lauren from her hotel, surrounded her all day, and escorted her home after the riot.

The guests spoke about the importance of free speech and suggested that neo-Marxism is more than just an annoying fashion trend—it’s a scourge that has infected our schools, our media, and our government. The attendees were not white supremacists. They were American citizens of all races who love this country and hate the fascist dogma of the left. Communists have killed 100 million people. Muslims are planning to kill people right now. Black nationalists are doing it. Black nationalist Muslims are the worst of both worlds. However, white nationalists—no—white people who don’t hate themselves are the problem. This backwards logic died on April 15, 2017.

Among the protesters who arrived at the rally was a filthy-rich porn star known online as #Moldylocks. She came looking for “100 Nazi scalps” and left with a punch in the face. Her boyfriend abandoned her as soon as the going got rough and they both ended up in the ER.

Well, good. I mean, if anybody has to end up there, I firmly believe it ought to be somebody besides just us.

There is a culture war going on, and it’s apoplectic idiots with nothing to say vs. perfectly sane people who want everyone to have their say. Our world includes them. They can go have a talk about how Nazis are lurking around every corner and Trump is Hitler. We won’t “shut it down,” as Yvette Felarca brags. Their world doesn’t include us. They don’t tolerate Nazis, and by Nazis they mean anyone who doesn’t take their radical views seriously. If you think there are two genders (as doctors do), if you don’t support gay marriage (over a third of Americans oppose it), if you think illegal aliens are illegal (as the law does), if you think women are different from men (as reality does), you are a Nazi and you need to be punched in the face. This kind of harassment works for a while. Sane people aren’t looking for trouble. We have jobs and we want peace and quiet after a hard day’s work. However, when you burn down a gay immigrant’s talk because you think he’s a homophobic xenophobe, we start to question your cause. When professors need a neck brace after trying to escape a talk that was already shut down, we begin to wonder what you’re thinking. When pedophiles start telling us what to do, we begin to question their morals. When feminists embrace Sharia, we begin to consider the possibility that none of these people have any idea what they’re doing. Then, when breathtakingly gorgeous intellectuals get maced for daring to question the anarchist narrative, we begin to get angry. This is where we are. We’re angry. And you’re not going to like us when we’re angry.

If they refuse to respect us and our God-given right to hold beliefs that differ from theirs, then may they at long last fear us. And as much as I’ve fretted here over the horror that I’ve long anticipated all this must lead to, I can’t say it’s all downside; if violent Leftwits end up getting physically damaged by the people they’ve assaulted with impunity so far—well, hey, maybe we didn’t name the tune, but we’ll sure dance to it if we must.

I still hold out some minuscule hope that somehow, someway, against all observable odds, they’ll wake the hell up before it’s too late, if it isn’t already. But I never have thought it was the way to bet, and if it really has to come to this…well, I’d much rather win than lose.

We have not yet begun to fight, assholes. So gird your fucking withered loins. You’ve put yourselves in the hurt locker now, whether you know it or not, and you will NOT find getting out of it easy. Because if we let you win, you really lose nothing, and can always come back to fight another day should you muster the grit to do so. Whereas if we lose, we lose something incalculably valuable to us, and we lose it forever, beyond hope of retrieval.

We are NOT prepared to humbly accept that at the hands of the likes of you. Not without a serious fight, we ain’t. If you are unfamiliar with the historical term “war to the knife,” now might be a good time to do a little research and figure out what we mean by it.

Plus, we have all the guns.

Title swiped from Zman, for a good reason:

The title for this post is a quote often attributed to Leonid Brezhnev or sometimes to Stalin, but like many pithy quotes, its origins are unknown. It was most likely a quick shorthand for the view of the Soviets, during the Brezhnev era, that their sacrifices in the war entitled them to hold the satellite countries of Eastern Europe. The rhetoric of the Soviets, particularly with regards to the third world, could never be squared with the fact that they held a sizable chunk of Europe captive, but they somehow found a way to justify it.

It is also a useful way of understanding the psychology of Progressive groups. They operate a lot like car thieves in the ghetto. A guy boosts a car and immediately buys an air freshener for it, puts some of his clothes in the backseat and always, always litters it with some of his mail. Anyone who has repossessed cars knows this, which is why it is such a great line in this movie. At some level, the thief knows it is not his car, but he makes it his car in the same way a dog marks his territory. It’s his as long as it has his stuff in it.

That’s the mindset of the Progressive. The political ground they acquire, no matter how they acquire it, is theirs. They own it and they intend to keep it. It is not open for debate. It is why Obama, for example, was fond of saying he would not “re-litigate” ObamaCare with the Republicans. As far as he was concerned, he won that ground and he was entitled to keep it. The next debate would have to be over your stuff and how much of it he could take from you and how much you would be allowed to hold, for now.

It is a mistake, I think, to assume it is a conscious strategy they think about before executing. Obama was not sitting around with his advisers coming up with a clever way to close off debate about his health care bill. It’s a natural instinct, resulting from their obsession with the future. Their singular obsession is what they imagine to be the promised land that is just beyond the horizon. Any reconsideration of the past is the same in their mind as turning away from the future and marching backwards.

This is a lesson and a warning for the growing revolt against the gathering Progressive darkness. The game is to always put the other side on defense. Make them defend every inch, while offering them a chance to buy you off, for now. That’s the path to victory, but it will never be easy. Beating back the Progs will make invading Russia in winter look like a walk in the park. The Progs do not yield an inch. They will burn everything before surrendering anything. What they have, they keep.

True enough, of course, but what jumped out at me was something Z didn’t mention: it’s the exact same thing with the Progtards’ temporary allies of convenience, the jihadists. Any bit of soil a Muslim ever set foot on is to be regarded as Muslim territory forever. It’s why they still call a big chunk of Spain “Andalusia,” for instance. They deem themselves to own half of Europe, because Muslims conquered it once; parts of Israel must forever be considered “Occupied Territory” because, despite the Jews having claimed most of it for a millennia or two before their pedophile prophet was even born, Muslim invaders managed to boot them off of it for about twelve minutes or so once.

Ironic? Hugely. Self-serving? Well, duh. Utter, complete horseshit of the purest ray serene, of a sort which only the most despicable surrender-monkey would ever seriously deem worthy of contemplation or discussion?

To ask the question is to answer it.

For treacherous Republicrats, at the very least. Or so we must hope.

No one voted for Trump because of the “Access Hollywood” tape. They voted for him because of his issues; most prominently, his promise to build “a big beautiful wall.” And who’s going to pay for it? MEXICO!

You can’t say that at every campaign rally for 18 months and then not build a wall.

Do not imagine that a Trump double-cross on the wall will not destroy the Republican Party. Oh, we’ll get them back. No, you won’t. Trump wasn’t a distraction: He was the last chance to save the GOP.

Millions of Americans who hadn’t voted in 30 years came out in 2016 to vote for Trump. If he betrays them, they’ll say, “You see? I told you. They’re all crooks.”

No excuses will work. No fiery denunciations of the courts, the Democrats or La Raza will win them back, even if Trump comes up with demeaning Twitter names for them.

It would be an epic betrayal — worse than Bush betraying voters on “no new taxes.” Worse than LBJ escalating the Vietnam War. There would be nothing like it in the history of politics.

He’s the commander in chief! He said he’d build a wall. If he can’t do that, Trump is finished, the Republican Party is finished, and the country is finished.

And all will deserve it, too. Not so much Trump, actually; he’s fighting a three-front war here, and the way the deck is stacked against him means his supporters (me included) are willing to overlook a lot. And I doubt any of us are ready to throw in the towel a mere hundred days into a four-year term.

As I’ve said from the very start: anybody who thinks Trump can fix all this all by himself is delusional; anybody who thinks he can do it in a few months is a fool. But he’s going to need to start improvising ways to end-run the DC shitweasels somehow, and that right soon—lest the unrealistic and faint of heart begin to abandon him in droves. Loss of faith he can ill afford; loss of hope will be the end of him.

Update! Vox nails it:

The God-Emperor should begin each day by looking at his schedule and telling himself two things.

1. Does this help me build the wall?
2. Does this help me drain the swamp?

If anything on his schedule does not fit into those two categories, he should cancel it and replace it with something that does.

By George, I think he’s got it. I’m not ready quite yet to say Trump’s time is running out. But there is certainly a limit on it, and I can’t see any good reason for him to flirt around the edges of it. Just do it, Donald; all you ever did have backing you all along was we the people, and that’s still enough. Republicrat and Demican Powers That Be skullduggery aside, we still got your back. All you really have to do—all anyone expects or hopes for—is to keep dancing with who brung ya; keep trusting us as we’ve trusted you. Just do that, and you really can’t fail; we’ll take care of the rest, by any means we have to.

Just the latest knife in the back of the former Republic from the Republicrats. Nothing more, nothing less.

A deal has been reached on a $1 trillion-plus bill to fund the government for the final five months of this fiscal year, an agreement that is likely to avert a government shutdown.

After President Donald Trump backed down on funding for the construction of a border wall, some additional sticking points remained, including health benefits for coal miners, funding for Puerto Rico and an additional $30 billion for defense, delaying congressional negotiators and causing them to miss their deadline of last Friday. Congress passed and Trump signed into law a one-week extension to keep the government open and give negotiators more time.

The newly reached deal includes an additional $15 billion in defense spending, less than what Trump asked for, but still $25 billion more than last year’s spending. It also includes a permanent fix to fund coal miners’ health care instead of a temporary extension.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York called the deal “a good agreement for the American people” that “takes the threat of a government shutdown off the table.”

It’s Schemer, so you know right away that it’s nothing of the sort.

And I swear I typed in Schumer there, but autocorrect turned it into “Schemer,” so who am I to argue, eh?

“Early on in this debate, Democrats clearly laid out our principles,” he said. “At the end of the day, this is an agreement that reflects those principles.”

Well, he certainly got THAT part right, anyway. I’ll let Rush deal with the rest of this stinkburger, echoing as he does so many things I’ve said here so many times.

So Obamacare gets funded. Sanctuary cities get funded. The EPA gets funded through September. Planned Parenthood gets funded. The wall does not. So if you’re asking yourself, “Why am I voting Republican?” you have a good question.

Why is anybody voting Republican, if this is what happens when we win?

We won the House, we won the Senate, we won the White House, and the Democrats thwarted everything we supposedly said we were going to do with our victory. Well, I don’t want to use the word “we,” ’cause I’ve got nothing to do with this. This is another reason why I do not get close to these people. I do not… I would not relish having to have you call here today and make me justify what all happened here, had I been out there promoting and ballyhooing. That’s why I keep my distance from these people, ’cause I don’t have any control over what they’re gonna do or say, what their policies are going to be.

If you’re asking, “What am I voting for Republicans for?” you have a legitimate question. This is one of the reasons Donald Trump was elected. This is the swamp. This is what needs to be drained: The way the budget happens, the way legislation happens, who’s responsible for it.

Donald Trump won the election and he ran and won on a series of issues, and all of them are embodied in this budget, and not a one of these things did Donald Trump seek the presidency by saying he was going to continue. The one thing that is not paid for in this budget is the one thing that Trump made one of his top two vote-getters, and that’s building the wall. And that of course is related to immigration.

So what explains this?

Rush knows very well what the explanation is, of course, and he goes on to spell it out just in case any of you have been asleep for the last, oh, twenty years. Bottom line, at least for me: the current supposed “two-party system” is a pure-tee sham, a misdirection intended to keep the federal Leviathan fed and growing. There is no—NO—meaningful distinction to be made between Republicrats and Demicans. NONE.

People, especially GOPe-DemSoc shills, have long simpered on about the hopelessness of ever successfully establishing a “third” party (all too conveniently forgetting just how the Republican Party came into existence in the first place). But I’m not arguing for a third party; what we really need, desperately need, is a second party. Because right now, we simply don’t have one. And until we get one, no meaningful change in the direction we’re headed has the slightest chance of being implemented—Trump or no Trump. The meaning of that couldn’t be more clear, either:

Now, Trump knew this; it’s why he ran for office. You knew it. I knew it. We all knew this. This is what being opposed to the ruling class, being opposed to the establishment is all about. But now it’s become crystal clear. Now it’s no longer a matter of speculation and theory. Now we know, we’ve just extended a federal budget all the way through September and there’s nothing in it that represents the will of the American people as expressed in the election. There’s nothing in it that represents the campaign pledges, promises, objectives of Donald Trump. Quite the opposite.

This budget is a direct slap in the face. This budget is a stop sign. And it’s throwing down the gauntlet. “You may be elected president, but you’re not getting anything. Nothing’s gonna happen here.”

And bingo, right there it is. It ain’t just Trump who’s being slapped in the face, either.

You want to tell me again all about the “will of the people,” the “consent of the governed”? First, you’re gonna have to show me where on this sad Earth it truly exists or is respected, because it damned sure ain’t here.

With every passing day, it looks more and more likely that there truly is no voting our way out of this. That thought, and the toxic, unforeseeable consequences emanating from it, ought to chill your very marrow. But like it or not, so far it remains the simple truth.

This government, illegitimate through and through, is now openly laughing at you—mocking your aspirations, scorning your beliefs, and jeering at the risible notion that there’s anything at all that you can do about it, or ever will be. They’re betting heavily on your complacency, compliance, and impotence continuing indefinitely. They’re betting on the eternal resilience of the status quo, and the sheep-like docility of the American people.

We’ll see what all that gets them in the end.

And rationality.

Every year, traffic engineers review the speed limit on thousands of stretches of road and highway. Most are reviewed by a member of the state’s Department of Transportation, often along with a member of the state police, as is the case in Michigan. In each case, the “survey team” has a clear approach: they want to set the speed limit so that 15% of drivers exceed it and 85% of drivers drive at or below the speed limit.

This “nationally recognized method” of setting the speed limit as the 85th percentile speed is essentially traffic engineering 101. It’s also a bit perplexing to those unfamiliar with the concept. Shouldn’t everyone drive at or below the speed limit? And if a driver’s speed is dictated by the speed limit, how can you decide whether or not to change that limit based on the speed of traffic?

The answer lies in realizing that the speed limit really is just a number on a sign, and it has very little influence on how fast people drive.

And that our current speed limits are based not on reason or the limits the highways themselves were designed to safely sustain, but on the Left’s will to absolute power over its subjects and its lust to make driving as miserable and inconvenient as possible, carefully masked by their desire to Save Gaia™.

Traffic engineers believe that the 85th percentile speed is the ideal speed limit because it leads to the least variability between driving speeds and therefore safer roads. When the speed limit is correctly set at the 85th percentile speed, the minority of drivers that do conscientiously follow speed limits are no longer driving much slower than the speed of traffic. The choice of the 85th percentile speed is a data-driven conclusion—as noted lieutenant Megge and speed limit resources like the Michigan State Police’s guide—that has been established by the consistent findings of years of traffic studies.

Yet most speed limits are set below the 85th percentile speed. We first investigated this topic at the urging of the National Motorists Association, a “member-supported driver advocacy organization” that has made raising speed limits to the 85th percentile one focus of its efforts.

One member pointed us to a 1992 report by the US Department of Transportation on the “Effects of Raising and Lowering Speed Limits,” which, beside making the same arguments described above, noted that the majority of highway agencies set speed limits below the 85th percentile, leading over 50% of motorists to drive “in technical violation of the speed limit laws.” lieutenant Megge believes the compliance rate in Michigan to be well under 50%.

It seems absurd that over half of drivers technically break the law at all times. It’s also perplexing that speed limit policy so consistently ignore traffic engineering 101. So why do people like lieutenant Megge need to spend their time trying to raise speed limits?

A very interesting article, all of which you should definitely read—including, as it does, this subhead: “HOW SAUDI ARABIA GOT US ALL DRIVING 55 MPH.”

Yep, we all have so, so much to thank Our Friends The Saudis for, don’t we?

(Via Insty)

“Girl, 12, forced to withdraw from chess tournament for wearing ‘seductive’ dress” is the headline. Now I’ll show you a pic of the dress, so you can see for yourself how “seductive” it may or may not be:

And now I’ll give you the link to the story revealing where this happened, and what “religion” is involved, so you can decide for yourself whether the savages who profess it are indeed ready to come out of the dark, dank caves (figurative AND literal) imposed on them by their 10th century “morality” and into the light of the 21st century–or whether they should be shunned, isolated, and avoided like the plague they are by Westerners who are truly (ahem) “woke” to their intractable degeneracy.

But hey, I’m sure you knew that already. While we’re at it, I’ll also note that not once—not ONCE—is this “religion” mentioned in the NYT story. But then, that could hardly be much of a surprise to anybody either, right?

(Via Insty)

You diehard greaser types will no doubt complain that “gel” and “pomade” are contradictory, a sort of oxymoron, and you’re probably right. Gel is gel; generally speaking, it has no grease, no wax, and washes out easily with water. It ain’t usually combable, and once you break that hard, crisp shell after it’s dried, there ain’t no bringing that pompadour back. It’s basically hair-plastic, and any relationship to pomade is no more than theoretical, at best.

The sole exception to that rule for a long time was Lay-Rite. I was fortunate enough to meet the purveyor of that fine product at Viva Las Vegas one year; he gave me a bunch of free samples, along with a whole shit-ton of Lay Rite t-shirts and combs. He told me the whole Lay Rite story: his father in law was a chemical engineer working for DuPont or somebody, and he explained to his father in law what he’d like in hair goop but never had found: firm hold, easy to wash out, no eternal grease stains on his pillow, high shine, easy revivability after hours sweating it out on the dance floor.

His pop-in-law got to work, and Lay Rite was the result. It works great, is hard to find, and pretty expensive to boot. I kept some around for years, but used it sparingly, mostly just for shows. It would sting like hell when sweating it out onstage; it would run down into my eyes and just burn like hell. I took to wearing sweat bands on each arm just to deal with the agony. But it held, it was shiny, you could comb it with a little water and your coif would be just like new again. Plus, it smelled nice, too.

No true pomade can do all that, I assure you. I used Murray’s for a long while, which is a waxy, high-hold pomade that looks great the first day, then builds up in your hair after a couple more, then requires about three days of intensive washing with blue Dawn dishwashing liquid to get out, whereupon you can start the cycle all over again. You never will get the grease out of your pillowcase if you use it regularly; dandruff and zits are just the price of doing business, that’s all.

Royal Crown, of course, is all grease, no hold, and completely useless, bless their pitiful hearts. I got a great story from when we did Star Search years ago: my personal hair and makeup girl just freaked out because I had some in my gear bag. She was a middle-aged black woman, and hadn’t seen that stuff since she was a kid, when her whole family was using it. She waxed ecstatic, hollering to the other hair/makeup women, “Looky what this white boy got, look! Royal Crown!” It was truly funny, and remains one of my fondest memories from the whole Star Search experience.

I switched to NuNile after a couple of years with Murray’s. NuNile is actually a Murray’s product, and as far as the true pomades go, it remains my favorite. Lighter, greasier, and less waxy than Murray’s, it offered decent hold with slightly more ease of washing-out than Murray’s. I think I still have a tin of it in the bathroom medicine cabinet, although I haven’t used it in a long while. It’s probably broken down into gummy upper-cylinder lubricant by now, or perhaps some sort of pesticide.

But the other day in Walmart I was perusing the ethnic hair-care section and spotted this Murray’s gel-pomade. It’s called Texture King Gel Pomade, from Murray’s Barber Experience line, and I can’t find it on the Murrays’ website at all. It was all of five bucks for a good-sized tub of it, so it didn’t take a whole lot of pondering for me to snap it up for a trial. I was almost out of hair goop anyway aside from the aforementioned tin of NuNile—which my hair is far too sparse to support anyway these days, and I had no intention of resorting to—so I figured what the hell.

And let me testify: this stuff is the shit. Impeccable hold, with a bit of elasticity to it; washes right out with no waxy buildup at all; a grease-style shine and feel underlaying it. Brings the super-hold crunchiness back with a light splash of water should you lose it; re-combs just fine if you need to, although of course the more you do that the less it works, as any reasonable person would expect. No zit-farming pillow residue at all. And it smells just fine.

I don’t know what possessed Murray’s to create this fine product, and I don’t care. Maybe some marketing genius noticed they were losing business to Lay Rite; maybe some restless young soul just thought after decades of maintaining the same product line they’d had since 1954, it was finally time for something new. Doesn’t matter; I only hope they stick with it. I haven’t been this pleased and excited about a hair-care product since I met the Lay Rite guy in Vegas, and as long as they keep making it, I’ll keep using it.

If you’re a greaser-rock dork with any interest in this sort of thing at all, which I figure probably covers a sum total of about six or eight of you CF lifers out there, believe me when I tell you that you won’t go wrong by moseying down to Walmart and picking up some of this stuff. If you don’t like it, well, clearly you got the wrong idea and need to rethink a few things. No need to thank me; I’m a giver, y’all.

And no, that whole turning grey/turning loose business I can’t help ya with. I would if I could, believe you me.

When the going gets tough, the cucks roll over.

Young America’s Foundation (YAF) has pulled out of Ann Coulter’s Thursday event at UC Berkeley, blaming the college for allowing left-wing extremists to terrorize conservatives on campus.

“When Young America’s Foundation confirmed Ann Coulter would speak at UC-Berkeley as part of YAF’s nationwide campus lecture program on April 27, we assumed UC Berkeley would take all steps necessary to ensure the safety of students attending the educational event,” the group declared in a blog post on Tuesday. “In the meantime we discovered that the University of California Police Department at Berkeley has an official ‘stand-down’ policy for any situation that develops on campus as long as the situation doesn’t involve the imminent loss of life, allowing the leftist thugs who have terrorized Berkeley’s campus to do so without consequence.”

“As of 4:00 p.m. today, Young America’s Foundation will not be moving forward with an event at Berkeley on April 27 due to the lack of assurances for protections from foreseeable violence from unrestrained leftist agitators,” they continued. “Berkeley should be ashamed for creating this hostile atmosphere.”

And you guys should likewise be ashamed for folding like a cheap, piss-soaked accordion rather than fighting back, and thereby letting them win.

YAF added that they are still pushing forward with their lawsuit against the college, and that the group “looks forward to the day when First Amendment freedoms are enjoyed by conservative students.”

Lawsuits ain’t gonna do it, bub. I mean, more power to ya and all; I hope you win, for all the good that might do anybody. But when your only hope is an appeal to the judiciary, and said judiciary is wholly converged—infested top to bottom with anti-Constitutional Progressivist termites who are openly hostile to your First Amendment freedoms—well, can you reasonably hope for a good result?

Worse, when the cops are sitting back and refusing to maintain civic order and uphold your most basic human rights against the violent Progressivist onslaught…well, let’s just say their weak-kneed, puissant optimism would seem to be, shall we say, misplaced.

“Ms. Coulter may still choose to speak in some form on campus, but Young America’s Foundation will not jeopardize the safety of its staff or students,” they concluded. “For information on Ms. Coulter’s plans, please contact her directly.”

Gee, nice cop-out there, boys. If the restoration of Constitutional liberty is reliant on this sort of wet-pantied cowardice, then the restoration of Constitutional liberty is something we won’t be seeing for a long, long time. On a positive note, though, this IS Berkeley we’re talking about here. And Berkeley—along with most of the rest of California—was lost a long time ago, and is no longer worth bothering about. Let them go their way. We’ll go ours.

The civil war I’ve been mulling over here for a good while now has started; it began in Berkeley, of all places. There may still be some small chance of avoiding the shooting part of it, but probably not. Either way, there was never the remotest chance of a victory for FreeFor in Berkeley, of course. It’s merely the place where the battle’s contours are taking shape, and its inevitability made undeniable. We cannot peacefully coexist with Leftist vermin implacably committed to denying us our God-granted liberty. They are not going to leave us alone without getting their noses severely bloodied first, and until the consequences of their fascist arrogance are unmistakably spelled out.

Once again: they will not stop. They will have to BE stopped.

It never should have come to this, though, and we will all come to rue it in the end. But the hard, insuperable fact is that we no longer share any common ideological ground with the Left, any at all. There is no reasoning with them, no meaningful dialogue possible, no chance of true or equitable compromise.

In fairness, I understand YAF’s motivation here, and I know they think the wording of their capitulation will maybe matter someday, to somebody. I also understand their unwillingness to confront the violent, authoritarian Left without some assurance of police protection. It’s Berkeley, for God’s sake; they’re surrounded, without hope of reinforcement anytime soon. Nobody wants to be on the wrong end of a beating; nobody wants to get killed over what seems a mere political disagreement, especially in a place where the cause was so long ago lost.

But at this point, they—and we—are going to have to provide our OWN protection, under whatever terms and ROEs WE deem necessary and appropriate. They punch us, we punch them—harder. This is much more than an ordinary political disagreement. This is a fundamental, bare-knuckled dispute between two ideologies that cannot coexist within the borders of a single nation, and can only be settled by conquest and unquestionable victory for one side or the other.

I say again: if you wish to “compromise” with them, then which of your most basic and precious liberties are you willing to give up? And do you really believe that, once you’ve surrendered one or two, that will be the end of it, and their demands will end? CAN you have any faith in such a risible notion, having seen how greedy they are, how unslakable their thirst for absolute power over you is?

If so, may I have some of what you’re smoking?

The time for us to docilely soak up their repeated assaults and pat ourselves on the back for “taking the high road”—expecting approbation from the Powers That Be that will never come, while our honest blood clogs the gutters—is over. Vox spells it out:

This is yet another reason why the Alt-Right is replacing the conservative movement. Conservatives are social cowards who are manifestly unwilling to fight for their sacred principles against internal enemies. Sure, they’ll bravely fight external enemies to the death so long as they have the State’s blessing, but they cave every time they don’t have its approval.

That, in the end, is the fatal weakness of the conservative movement; the need of its members for the approval of authority. As long as the Left can wield the trappings of authority, conservatives will fall in line.

It seems they can’t even conceive of such a notion, or wish to hide from it, but it’s spelled out right in the Oath of Allegiance to the Constitution they claim to revere: enemies, foreign AND DOMESTIC.

We are now all on a path none of the sensible and historically literate among us really wants to walk. I hate it. But so be it.

Update! Two from Ace’s HQ, spelling out exactly who the Leftymedia wants you to blame. Guess who it is; go on, guess. I dare ya.

What's happening on campuses now has a lot to do with how Trump fans flames over excessive political correctness https://t.co/8SIYovyuX5

— Jeremy W. Peters (@jwpetersNYT) April 27, 2017

And here’s a typically twisted, depraved take from the NYT:

In Ann Coulter’s Speech Battle, Signs That Conservatives Are Emboldened

“Emboldened.” To have the lunatic audacity to expect that the fucking US Constitution applies to them too, the bastards.

Yep, we’re off to a typically NYT start here.

Ms. Coulter, the acid-penned conservative writer, canceled a planned appearance on Thursday after the political organizations that invited her rescinded their support over fears of violence. “It’s a sad day for free speech,” she said.

But across the country, conservatives like her are eagerly throwing themselves into volatile situations like the one in Berkeley, emboldened by a backlash over what many Americans see as excessive political correctness, a president who has gleefully taken up their fight, and liberals they accuse of trying to censor any idea they disagree with.

I know, right? I mean, how DARE any conservative speakers have the temerity to think they might be permitted to give a speech on a college campus expressing ideas liberal censors disagree with?

Oh, and damn that damned Trump, for gleefully taking up this fight on behalf of “emboldened” conservatives.

President Trump’s victory was, to many of his supporters, a defiant uprising against what they saw as a cultural and political elite that told them their values were wrong and their beliefs bigoted.

WHICH IS PRECISELY WHAT THE FUCK THEY’VE BEEN DOING, AND CONTINUE TO DO, AND WILL NEVER STOP DOING.

And Mr. Trump, who has routinely used racially charged controversies and social movements like Black Lives Matter to his political benefit, has leapt to their defense, ready to fan the flames.

Catch that? Why, both sides are equally to blame here, and Trump most of all, for wantonly “fanning the flames” purely for his own “political benefit.” If those provocative, dangerous, belligerent “conservatives” would just shut up and go back to being their usual docile, humble selves and accept the “fact” of their racist, misogynist, homophobic bigotry—why, none of this would be happening!

And actually, they’re right about that, when you get down to it. But you’re getting the gist, right? The uprising against stifling political correctness—against all the direct insults; the contempt for the culture that shelters and provides for them; the adolescent resentment of those without whose forbearance their self-indulgent hatred could not exist for more than five minutes; the childish rebellion against reality—is to be blamed not on those whose irrationality provoked the uprising, but on those who are merely responding rationally to that witless provocation.

Hey, they told us Trump was horrible, and after witnessing the folly of their attempted destruction of the very way of life that they rely on for their continued existence, we voted him in anyway. So now, we must pay. I mean, how DARE we?

All that aside, get ready for a bona fide rarity here: I am about to compliment Bernie Sanders. Sincerely, with no sarcasm or smart-assery at all.

No, really. Not joking; I mean it. The blind pig has found his truffle, and trust me when I tell you that I am just as gobsmacked as you are. Better sit down for this, folks.

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-described democratic socialist, this week scolded anyone who would shut out Ms. Coulter. “What are you afraid of — her ideas?” he asked.

Uhhh, yes, that is EXACTLY what they’re afraid of. But bless your heart for saying it.

“Unfortunately, Berkeley and other universities have played into a narrative that the right would love to advance,” said Robert B. Reich, a former Labor secretary under President Bill Clinton who is now a professor of public policy at Berkeley. “The narrative assumes a cultural plot against the free expression of right-wing views in which academe, mainstream media — every facet of the establishment — is organized against them.”

Mr. Reich, noting the parallels to Mr. Trump’s message, added, “That’s a narrative Trump used to get into the White House.”

Because that narrative is the simple, obvious truth—as has been proved over and over, and was once again in Berkeley.

Can someone tell me, please, the last time a speech by some stupid commie dickhead—ANY commie dickhead, anywhere—was shut down on account of a wholly credible threat of violence by us Reich Wingnuttzzz Nazi Deathbeasts? Anywhere at all, on any pretext whatsoever? Can anybody tell me the last time a speech by some stupid commie dickhead was even protested at all by a Reich Wingnuttzzz Nazi Deathbeasts, even something as simple as just walking around on the sidewalk outside, carrying a sign or something?

There may have been one or two, I guess. But I can’t remember any offhand.

The university breathed a sigh of relief on Wednesday, but it criticized Ms. Coulter, who has a knack for provocation and a history of inviting disruption wherever she speaks, for being wanton and reckless given that it had offered to accommodate her at a later date after canceling her originally scheduled speech. The Berkeley chancellor, Nicholas B. Dirks, said in a note to the campus, “This is a university, not a battlefield.”

Well, not until your violent campus SJWs—utterly devoid of any “knack for provocation,” and with no history at all of “inviting disruption,” natch—decide to shut down and de facto ban a speaker whose ideas they don’t agree with, apparently—thereby making it a battlefield, at least metaphorically. But when they do it, all bets are off, all declamations supporting “freedom of speech” are flushed, all tolerance renounced, all minds closed…and battle is eagerly joined, no matter how you may choose to refer to the ground on which it is fought.

The REAL problem here is, now you twerps just might get some fight back, at long last.

Once again, all they had to do was leave us alone; they didn’t have to attend Coulter’s speech if they didn’t want to. But the very idea that she might be allowed to speak at all was intolerable to them, and via credible threats of violence, they shut free speech down, and directly trampled not just Coulter’s Constitutionally-protected rights, but, indirectly, everyone’s.

And that says all about them that anybody should ever need to know. They are fascists; they are not just un- but anti-American; they are a direct threat to absolutely everything this country is supposed to be about. They are precisely what the Founders feared most, and warned us most explicitly about, in every word and writing.

May the dimestore dictators wake up before it’s too late to avoid the cataclysm they’re forcing on us. Failing that, may they have joy of their choice—in Hell, alongside all the other vanquished would-be tramplers upon human liberty.

Sad denouement update! Leave it to Steyn to get to the bloody heart of it:

The left is increasingly confident in its ideological enforcement mob. Yet, as we saw a week or two back at Berkeley, when you incentivize thuggery, it’s careless to assume you’ll always have a monopoly of it. That too is a free-speech lesson – because, as I always say, in a society without freedom of speech, without vigorous public debate, all you can do to express yourself is punch the other guy’s lights out.

So here we are seven years on from the show not going on in Ottawa, and free speech is despised even more. I should note one other small change: in the old days, columns such as the one below used to attract emails from US readers pointing out that “We’re not like you Canuck pussies/Euro-wimps/[Insert Despised Foreign Jurisdiction Here]. Americans won’t put up with this nonsense.” But it’s 2017 and, from Middlebury to Berkeley, Americans are putting up with it. The organs of the state – from taxpayer-funded schools to law enforcement – are colluding with the thugs against the only diversity that matters: diversity of opinion. A First Amendment that doesn’t extend even to public universities is in pretty poor shape. What matters is public support for the broader culture of free speech and in the US, as in Canada and Europe and Australia, the left’s hostility to freedom of expression is ever more brazen.

He then goes on to repost a 2010 column which is depressingly even more germane now. The meat of the whole thing:

Remember Allan Rock? Oh, come on, he was all the rage for 20 minutes back in the nineties. Was it only a decade ago that he was briefly a rising star among Liberal cabinet ministers and that week’s prime-minister-in-waiting? Having drunk from the poisoned chalice M. Chrétien reserved for his many putative successors, Mr. Rock landed with his bottom in the butter and, for not entirely obvious reasons, is now president of the University of Ottawa. After M. Houle’s Houligans had gone to work, president Rock felt obliged to defend his institution. “We have a long history of hosting contentious and controversial speakers on our campus.”

That’s good to know. By “long history,” you mean 50, 70 years ago? Because the speakers hosted in recent seasons seem to be the usual parade of dreary publicly funded identity-group ward-heelers living high off the hog of diversity. Anyone else has a tougher time wiggling through. The howling gang of rent-a-leftists that greeted Miss Coulter at Ottawa is the natural product of this shrivelled, desiccated environment. I don’t suppose M. Houle gave his email much thought, other than that it would impress the many colleagues to whom he copied it: what a man! Speaking truth to power blond! But most of the diversity-peddling faculty are old enough to have some residual acquaintanceship with the inheritance they affect to revile. Whatever bollocks they spout in class, they have no wish to live anywhere other than an advanced Western society: for one thing, it’s the only place you can make a living selling fatuous pap about diversity; in that and many other ways, multiculturalism is a unicultural phenomenon. In some deep unacknowledged sense, they understand they’re engaged in a pantomime.

But their students are another matter. If you’re born circa 1990, you have been raised entirely in a François Houle world: this is all you know; it’s the air that you breathe. It’s like the difference between the first generation of rock ‘n’ rollers and those nineties gangsta rappers. Elvis sang, “If you’re looking for trouble, you’ve come to the right place / If you’re looking for trouble, look right in my face.” But when you did, as the novelist Tony Parsons noted, you couldn’t help noticing he was wearing a little too much mascara. Whereas when you looked into Snoop Dogg’s or the Notorious B.I.G.’s face, you really were looking for trouble. Asinine ham-fisted clods like Houle are play revolutionaries; I’m not so sure about his young charges. When he threatened criminal charges against Miss Coulter, it was a cheap rhetorical sneer. To his students, it was a call to arms. One was struck in news reports of the riot at the complete worthlessness of the “disciplines” the protesters are “studying”: “Sameena Topan, 26, a conflict studies and human rights major.” Twenty-six, huh?

As for Ottawa’s coppers, they certainly demonstrated that famously Canadian “restraint.” Faced with a law-abiding group engaging in legal activity and a bunch of thugs trying to prevent it, the police declined to maintain order. As George Jonas wrote, “Ottawa’s finest exemplified Canada’s definition of moral leadership by observing neutrality between lawful and lawless.”

There seems to be rather a lot of this in the True North restrained and civil. I’m not just referring to obvious surrenders such as Caledonia, but to the bizarre episode of TVO’s The Agenda broadcast from the Munk Centre last week. No Ann Coulter around, only the finance minister of Ontario. But a Coulteresque mob rushed the stage, and the host Steve Paikin had to insert himself between protesters and the minister. “Regardless of what you thought of yesterday’s budget,” wrote Paikin, “I don’t believe guests who agree to appear on The Agenda ought to get beaten up.”

Oh, c’mon, you pussy. Where’s your commitment to social justice? As in Ottawa, law enforcement declined to enforce the law, the OPP remaining in the wings as thugs rushed the stage. “The police, I’m told, were urged not to intervene,” Paikin explained, “lest pictures of demonstrators being hauled off by the cops show up all over YouTube.”

True. You might haul off a Muslim or a lesbian and find yourself in “human rights” hell. Better just to linger nonchalantly by the side until it’s all over: O Canada, we stand around for thee. Her Majesty’s Constabulary seem to be sending the message that violence pays-—at least for approved identity groups. That doesn’t seem a prudent strategy.

Well, it depends on what your desired end-state is. If your goal is the humiliation of the West and the destruction of its culture—and you feel assured enough by prior meekness in its defense, previous pliant acceptance of your raw aggression, that such meek acceptance will continue—well, what’s not to like? You get to go on winning without resistance; you get victory without real battle, conquest sans combat. You get to march off the field without even getting your clothes dirty or your hair mussed.

But if your goal is the ongoing well-being of the very culture without which you cannot exist, but which your demented ideology demands you revile and undermine…well, yeah, imprudent is probably putting it mildly. But that realization would require an acknowledgement the Left is not capable of, and a logic that is far, far beyond them. It would require humility; it would require an admission of dependency and inferiority that, while perfectly proper and accurate, they can never, ever be reconciled to. Nobody ought to expect it for a moment. As my mom always said: wish in one hand, shit in the other. See which one gets full quickest.

Plain and simple update! That’s about the size of it:

This is who we are up against. They don’t want to debate. They want to destroy. They have created a straw man and that straw man needs to be punished for the fictional crimes he has committed until society suffers so much decay, the freaks appear normal.

There is a culture war going on, and it’s apoplectic idiots with nothing to say vs. perfectly sane people who want everyone to have their say. Our world includes them. They can go have a talk about how Nazis are lurking around every corner and Trump is Hitler. We won’t “shut it down,” as Yvette Felarca brags. Their world doesn’t include us. They don’t tolerate Nazis, and by Nazis they mean anyone who doesn’t take their radical views seriously. If you think there are two genders (as doctors do), if you don’t support gay marriage (over a third of Americans oppose it), if you think illegal aliens are illegal (as the law does), if you think women are different from men (as reality does), you are a Nazi and you need to be punched in the face. This kind of harassment works for a while. Sane people aren’t looking for trouble. We have jobs and we want peace and quiet after a hard day’s work. However, when you burn down a gay immigrant’s talk because you think he’s a homophobic xenophobe, we start to question your cause. When professors need a neck brace after trying to escape a talk that was already shut down, we begin to wonder what you’re thinking. When pedophiles start telling us what to do, we begin to question their morals. When feminists embrace Sharia, we begin to consider the possibility that none of these people have any idea what they’re doing. Then, when breathtakingly gorgeous intellectuals get maced for daring to question the anarchist narrative, we begin to get angry. This is where we are. We’re angry. And you’re not going to like us when we’re angry.

Leftist propaganda is done because we know the truth, and the truth is they’ve all been lying. Alexis de Tocqueville recognized that democracy was much less efficient than aristocratic society, but when the people finally do get off their asses and fight, nothing can stop them. This is where we’re at. The momentum has finally hit its stride and nothing can stop it now.

Yeah, feels that way to me too. After reading this entire post, something smacked me upside the head: they’re absolutely obsessed with us, but we really don’t give much of a shit about them. Very few of us are at all interested in wasting any precious time pondering what they think; let them huddle in their decaying urban rat-traps and mutter about us all they like, we don’t care. They can live however they like; we have no interest in stopping them, or shielding them from the consequences of whatever mad lifestyle they may dream up.

And in the end, that’s what drives them mad, I think: we don’t care. They don’t matter in the least to us. Their opinions are their own, and we aren’t humbled by their view of our benighted failure to share them. At long, long last, try to provoke Daddy all they like, Daddy is no longer paying attention; Daddy is bored, and Daddy has better things to do. The ensuing hissy-fit probably shouldn’t surprise any of us, really.

We wanted a President who didn’t despise America, who didn’t blame America, who would put our national interests first instead of last, when they were considered at all. Who would be unabashed and unembarrassed by his patriotic affection for his country. We elected that President fair and square, against all odds. Beyond that, well, know what? Honestly?

We. Don’t. Care. Sorry, snowflakes, but there it is.

Steyn’s perspicacious old quote, elaborated on:

Thursday’s killer was 39 years old. That’s almost geriatric for the jihad. In France’s (and western Europe’s) population, the demographic cohort ten years younger has a significantly higher proportion of Muslims, and the cohort a decade younger than that a higher proportion still. Which means that there will be, statistically, a higher number of men who wish to do what Thursday’s killer did – and open fire on the careless metropolitan jollity of the Champs-Elysées.

During my time in France, I made a mordant joke that, where once Beirut was “the Paris of the East”, Paris was in danger of turning into the Beirut of the West. Not quite, not yet, but where else is that demographic ratchet headed? Late in the evening, as the waiters brought last cognacs and upturned the chairs on nearby tables, I asked almost everyone the same question: “What’s the happy ending here?” The sophisticates had no answer. The French prime minister and at least one presidential candidate Gallicly shrug and say: Get used to it. Get used to what? A terror attack once in a while? Or an increasing rate thereof? Or, as demography works its remorseless logic, less and less terrorism (because it’s no longer necessary) but more and more smaller and subtler curtailments of la vie parisienne – until there’s nothing left.

One candidate, Marine Le Pen, wants less Muslim immigration. Most of the others won’t even go that far – although, in truth, it’s not that far at all, notwithstanding that it would require withdrawal from the European Union even to attempt it. But, without an end to mass immigration, there is only demographic arithmetic.

And it adds up to…nothing good. But the only math we need to bother about is this: the more Muslims, the more terrorism. So anybody mind indulging me when I ask yet again where exactly the fancy fuck is the demand for the heedless, reckless importation of more of these primordial savages—unassimilable, hostile, murderous, barbaric, incompatible with Western values in every least way—coming from, exactly?

Resist.

You see this sort of smug, superior grin in the face of an SJW. But behind it is utter madness. These are broken people, whose actions are no longer rational in any sense. Some can only gain satisfaction from submission, from emotional and intellectual (and sometimes physical) masochism and self-flagellation. Some can’t even gain it from that, anymore. Some have surrendered completely to animus possession. These people are no longer free-thinking individuals, capable of making decisions. They are, rather, individuals who have completely lost touch with reality. Unable to cope with the weight of the world, they seek to unload it on others. It’s your fault, not theirs. Nothing is their fault, they are perfect, you are to blame for everything.

Underneath it all, of course, they hate themselves. This has given rise to people who say things like “I won’t have children, because they would be white.” Or other folks, like Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King, who desperately wish to be black, perhaps because they could escape the weight of the world by identifying with the oppressed instead of the oppressor.

Look, I’m fond of saying that I’m just a regular guy. And there’s a reason for that. There are some very strong-willed, intelligent people out there who can resist this agitprop and social pressure without much effort. For some, it is easy to shrug it off and pay no mind to it. But that’s not most folks. Marxists are great psychological manipulators. It is their one great talent, and it is enough that it nearly makes up for all their other intellectual shortcomings, which are legion. Most folks are vulnerable, at some level.

And resisting psychological manipulation is not easy for most people. It’s not enough to just say “don’t be brainwashed.” Folks need to know how the brainwashing works, how it can be identified and resisted, how you can avoid going down the path that leads to people who can’t even figure out what gender they want to be, or what ethnicity they are, or what pronoun they feel like using today. These are people who can’t even say “hey man, how’s it going” without being triggered. They are constantly on the look out for the most minor of violations against the political narrative, their entire mind, body, and soul hijacked to serve political figures who care nothing for them (indeed, who probably laugh at their gullibility behind closed doors).

You owe them nothing. You aren’t responsible for the crimes of the world, except those in which you have directly and willingly participated. Anyone, and I do mean anyone who says otherwise is attempting to manipulate you, and place chains upon you. It is, often times, difficult to resist the allure of just giving up the fight. It’s so much easier to throw in the towel, and jump when someone else tells you to. When damn near everyone accuses you of something, to just say “yes, I’m guilty.”

Oh, I dunno. I find it one hell of a lot easier to just say, “FUCK you; go piss up a rope, leave me the fuck alone” and get on with my day, myself—easier, and much more satisfying, too. But I’m old and irascible, and don’t find myself susceptible to much in the way of peer pressure these days, especially when it’s wielded by snot-nose little punk-asses who ain’t been the places I’ve been, seen the things I’ve seen, and done the things I’ve done. So maybe it’s just me.

“Psychological manipulation,” is it? Sheeeeeit. Go ahead and try, cupcakes; snivel, and piss, and moan, and bitch, and riot in the streets all you like. Call us Nazis, call us bigots, call us misogynists, call us homophobes, call us ignorant Neanderthals. Call us whatever you like. Let’s see what it gets ya from people like me in the end. We’ve already heard it; we remain unmoved, solidly what we are, and always were.

Go peddle your singular dorm-room genius someplace else; there ain’t no market for it here anymore. We neither seek nor give the first soggy shit about your approval. Nor do we give a tinker’s damn what you may think of us, publicly or privately, now or forever. Denounce us all you like; rail against the people who pay your bills, pave your roads, provide your food, and make sure the lights come on when you flick the switch till you’re full as a tick from gorging on your own pointless, childish bile.

Your whole problem begins and ends with this: there are way more of us than you ever imagined in your worst nightmares. And we’re all done rolling over for the likes of you.

We ain’t shutting up, we ain’t giving up, and we damned sure ain’t acknowledging your spurious superiority. You really think you want a fight? SERIOUSLY? With those of us who own all the guns, and don’t run shrieking in shock and horror at the very concept of a projectile weapon, or any sort of raw aggression at all?

You want a fight? Well, you’re about to get one. Better think it over before it’s too late, and we hand you your pansy asses on a silver platter, chopped up into bite-sized slices for easier chewing up and spitting out. You’ve been shoveling your noxious bullshit down our throats for well beyond long enough, and indulge you by submitting though we did, we never did like the taste. We’ve been trying to alert you to your peril for decades now. In your spoiled-brat arrogance, you have ignored our every warning, expressing contempt for our forbearance at every turn. Now our indulgence is coming to its end.

We have no desire to kill anybody, for any reason, ever. But you must never doubt for a single second that, if forced to, we will—in job lots, as many as we can manage. We will stack your corpses like cordwood, and will hunt ferociously for more to heighten the pile. We will hate it, we will be horrified by it. We will regret the circumstances that led to it, and agonize over the choices, on both sides, that made it inevitable. But I promise you, as solemnly as I possibly can: we will do it.

Only if we must, but…WE. WILL. DO. IT.

Thanks to your foolish intransigence and sense of entitlement, our backs are now against the wall. You WILL NOT LIKE US with our backs to the wall; I swear on the graves of my ancestors it’s true. I beg of you, I plead with you, from the very depths of my soul: back the fuck off. Stop pushing. Grant us our right to harbor our own beliefs and to speak our minds freely, even if our beliefs conflict with your own. Leave us alone. At long, long last: leave us alone.

Via Francis, who has plenty more to say himself.

The other day I said this:

Is Hannity still on Fox? If so, look for some sort of thin-gruel allegations against him too, sexual harassment or something else, before too long.

But even I didn’t expect them to exploit their victory this fast.

The latest conservative commentator to be accused of sexual misconduct is host Sean Hannity who was accused on the Pat Cambell Show by lawyer, political commentator, and frequent Fox News guest Debbie Schlussel. Debbie claimed on the show that Sean Hannity asked Schlussel to come back to his hotel twice after a book-signing event. Does this constitute sexual misconduct?

Doesn’t really matter. There’s blood in the water, the libtards smell it, and—unable to lay a finger on Trump, who doesn’t much give a shit what they shriek about, and doesn’t have to so far—they intend to lap up every drop.

Maybe there’s something to it, and maybe there ain’t. That, too, doesn’t matter. Last time I checked, verbally hitting on a girl doesn’t constitute sexual harassment, in any sort of legal sense. What does matter is that the Progressivists will use every tool in the box, for just as long as we let them. Fox News, now busily converting itself into CNN Lite under the prodding of the Left, isn’t the vehicle to stand up to them. The sad fact is, there really isn’t one right now.

But we’re gonna have to find one, or create one. I know I said the other day that I’m no fan of O’Reilly, and I ain’t. I never liked Hannity much, either; much as his heart may be in the right place, he’s completely inept, one of the most hapless and incompetent debaters I ever saw.

But he’s going to need defending against the shrill harpies now after his scalp. I don’t know what Schlussel is thinking here, or what axe she may have to grind against Hannity. But on the face of it, I don’t think inviting her back to his hotel constitutes much of anything beyond an ill-considered faux pas on the part of a guy who probably should have known better. For her to launch this assault now is puzzling, and worrisome. Whatever she hopes to achieve with it, it will NOT redound to the advantage of the side she has supposedly supported for years.

But if all that really happened is that Hannity invited her back to his hotel—no groping, no career-limiting threats, no intimidation, no nasty little quid pro quos explicit or implied…well, exactly who among us expect our TV personalities to grow into plaster saints, anyway?

And who among those who will piously express patented Lefty OUTRAGE! about this nothingburger will be the first to mention serial rapist Bill Clinton in the same breath, pray tell?