Not surprisingly

  Tim Walz’s Daughter Just As Dumb As Dad on Gun Control

Gov. Tim Walz was in a position to become vice president. I think I speak for most of us when I say that I’m glad he’s still governor of Minnesota. It’s not because he’s been stellar at his job there, mind you, as the Minneapolis day care scandal, and Walz’s reaction to it, amply illustrates that he sucks at it. It’s because it means he and Kamala Harris aren’t in charge in Washington.

Both were terrible on gun issues, despite Walz trying to portray himself as a macho man who could out shoot any of us. In fact, when he tried to act big and bad, he just embarassed himself.

When it comes to guns, though, it seems the apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree.

Hope Walz, the daughter of disgraced Minnesota governor and failed vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, called for gun control this week in the aftermath of another attempted assassination attempt on President Donald Trump.

“Gun control doesn’t just save Democrats’ lives. It also saves Republican lives,” she said in a TikTok video posted this week, apparently attempting to position herself as a leftist taking moral high ground.

“You’d think we’d be at a point now where we could call for some common sense legislation, but I don’t know. I don’t know,” she said sarcastically. “Also here to say that political violence is never ok. Duh. That’s the difference between us and them. It’s never ok.”

Walz continued, “But there’s something we can do about it: common sense gun legislation.”

She ultimately called on her audience to “do something about that for everybody’s “For everybody’s sake, yeah. Yeah. Happy Tuesday,” she added. “Feeling a little anxious today, but we’re going to get through it.”

Notably, this is the same “anxious” Walz who described Trump’s previous crackdown on crime in the nation’s capital as nothing more than “bitch baby, wussy, scaredy cat behavior.”

Fascinating, ain’t it?

Look, I agree that political violence isn’t OK. I’ll point out, though, that the left hasn’t exactly been showing any belief in that position. How many have been upset that Thomas Crooks missed, or that this guy didn’t get a shot at the president? How many celebrated the assassinations of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and Charlie Kirk?

Yeah, don’t do the “That’s the difference between us and them” bit. It’s not going to fly.

But let’s talk about “common sense gun legislation” for a moment. We keep having people bring this up, including people with much higher profiles that Hope Walz, but have you noticed how absolutely no one gives us any real concrete suggestions that would have made a difference? Rep. Jamie Raskins suggested universal background checks, but with the would-be assassin getting his guns in California, he passed background checks. That’s ridiculous.

Beyond that, though, most people are just braying about how we need gun control, but no one seems to have anything real to propose. Maybe because they know that nothing they could propose would have done anything and they don’t want people like me to rip it apart for being moronic.

Look, I actually do get her being anxious. Her dad is still governor of a state that’s the center of a lot of strife. People on both sides are antsy and the idea of someone going after her father doesn’t seem so farfetched as it should be. I sincerely don’t want to see that, and I know good and well that she doesn’t, so I’m not going to mock her anxiety here.

But I’ll also repeat that this guy gun his weapons in the most gun-controlled state in the nation, a state that has laws that would never fly anywhere else in the United States, so let’s not pretend this is the result of too few gun control laws. It’s not. It’s the result of leftist talking points and inflamatory rhetoric radicalizing someone to try and rid the nation of a tyrant who is nothing of the sort.

BLUF
“Social-justice education is harming the very students it was meant to help,” Wilson concludes. “America’s most marginalized children are being left less educated, more excluded, and more vulnerable.” That’s not justice.

Focus on teaching kids to read — not fixing ‘root causes.’

Democrats “lost the plot on schools,” writes Charles Barone in Education Next. He suggests a “credible, student-centered education agenda” to regain leadership.

Democrats can “rejuvenate public education,” and “strengthen ties with Black, Latino, and suburban women — voting blocs that care deeply about school quality,” writes Thomas Toch in the Washington Monthly. But progressives and centrists have start talking to each other — and not just in insults.

Fordham’s Mike Petrilli spotlights the discussion on Schooled. In a follow-up, Vlad Kogan challenges Barone’s statement that, “public education desperately needs strengthening, but policymakers must address root causes by addressing the many hurdles in students’ lives that compound their challenges in classrooms.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong, writes Kogan. As he writes in his book, No Adult Left Behind,people have been saying the way to fix urban education is to fix “root causes” since at least the 1960s.”

“It’s much easier to teach an elementary school child how to read than to fix poverty, racism, and other root causes,” Kogan writes. “If we don’t know how to use public policy to ensure that all kids how to read by the end of third grade, the idea that we’ll figure out how to use policy to fix much more difficult issues underlying ‘root causes’ is just implausible.”

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There are things that are too stupid to be said by anyone but a professor of education. – Charlie Martin


It’s called ‘algebra’ because the Arab who figured it out called it “al Jabr”


Prof: Algebra, geometry perpetuate “whiteness”, “unearned privilege” in society.

A math education professor at the University of Illinois has argued in a recently published academic book that algebraic and geometry skills perpetuate “unearned privilege” among white people.

Rochelle Gutierrez, a professor at the University of Illinois, made the claim in a anthology for math teachers, arguing that teachers must be aware of the “politics that mathematics brings” in society.

In the book chapter, the professor explains that she sees her role as a math educator not just in the way of an educator, but that of an activist against whiteness, which she claims facilitates “microagresssions” and “privilege” between those who excel in math and those who do not.

“On many levels, mathematics itself operates as Whiteness. Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as White,” Gutierrez argued.

Gutierrez also worries that algebra and geometry perpetuate privilege, fretting that “curricula emphasizing terms like Pythagorean theorem and pi perpetuate a perception that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans.”

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Former Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax kills wife and then himself, police say

Virginia’s former Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax fatally shot his wife and himself inside their home overnight, according to local police.

Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis said at a news conference Thursday morning that their teenage children were at the house in Annandale, Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C., when the shootings occurred.

“Former Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax shot and killed his wife inside of their home and then shot and killed himself,” Davis said, adding that their older son called 911 just after midnight.

Davis described the incident as the result of a “domestic dispute surrounding what seems to be a complicated or messy divorce.”

Police are in the preliminary stage of the investigation, but Davis said that Fairfax was recently served paperwork indicating when he was scheduled to next appear in court for the ongoing divorce proceedings.

The former lieutenant governor, who was 47, served in the role from 2018 to 2022 under Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam.

In 2019, two women accused Fairfax of sexual assault years earlier, prompting Virginia Democrats to call for his resignation. Meredith Watson claimed Fairfax raped her in 2000 while they were students at Duke University. Vanessa Tyson accused Fairfax of forcing her to perform oral sex in 2004 when they attended the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

Fairfax denied the accusations, saying the encounters with the women were consensual. He said he would remain in office and called for an FBI investigation into the claims.

When he ran in the Democratic primary for governor in 2021, Fairfax, who was Black, said during the gubernatorial debate he was treated like George Floyd and Emmett Till when Democrats immediately called for his resignation after the women made the allegations.

Elitist Chicago Doc: Average Citizens Don’t Need Armed Self-Defense Because the Poor ‘Don’t Benefit’ From Guns

Dr. Anthony Douglas, the smug University of Chicago trauma resident and arrogant mastermind behind Illinois’ Responsibility in Firearms Legislation (RIFL) Act, stepped up in a legislative hearing last week and belched up a heaping helping of elitist bile blended with a soupçon clinical detachment: “I think poor people don’t benefit from owning firearms,” he pronounced.

What the little people need, the good doctor says, is more “education and resources.” Translation: more tax dollars funneled to “non-profits” with little to no return on the taxpayers’ investment.

Besides, the physician and gun-control researcher claims it isn’t good guys or gals with guns who stop evil predators…all evidence to the contrary. As such, it really should be harder for the poors to get their hands on firearms to defend themselves and their families.

His solution, then, is pricing guns out of reach of law-abiding, responsible citizens who lack bodyguards, private security details, or live in gated enclaves. In Murder City, USA—Chicago—where gang thugs roam free, that’s not social policy, that’s sadistic malpractice.

Was this clown high? Does he have a full punchcard at the local dispensary? Because this delusional drivel sounds like it was baked in a dorm room cloud of weed.

Let’s drag his elitist fantasy out into the reality that is Chicago, the city that’s been mercilessly documented by Wirepoints.org through FOIA records from the Chicago Police Department itself.

High-priority 911 calls—Priority Level 1 and 2, the ones defined as “imminent threat to life, bodily injury, or major property damage”—are the exact emergencies Chicagoans face every day: shots fired, person shot, assault in progress, armed robbery, domestic battery. In 2019, before the progressive crime wave fully metastasized, 19% of those urgent calls had “no officers available” for immediate response.

By 2021, Wirepoints found that number had exploded to 52%—406,829 high-priority incidents in which dispatchers literally had zero cops to send. In 2022 it hit roughly 60%.

Through all of 2023, 56% of high-priority calls—437,000 of them—sat in backlog with no units available. Even in 2024, through mid-May, getting a response was still a coin-flip 50%: 127,000 out of 256,000 urgent calls in which nobody came.

That’s not “delayed,” that’s “we have no police available to send to you.”

Wirepoints documented thousands of “assaults in progress,” “batteries in progress,” “person with a gun,” and “shots fired” calls where callers were told to shelter in place while the city’s response system collapsed. In some districts, entire shifts passed with zero proactive patrol time because every available cop was already buried in backlogs that stretched 30 minutes, an hour, sometimes as long as four hours. Chicago’s own inspector general has long since confirmed the department can’t even log arrival times for huge chunks of emergency calls.

So Dr. Douglas’s prescription isn’t compassion, it’s pure, venomous elitist contempt. He (allegedly) stares at blood-soaked gurneys every shift, but still demands that we disarm the victims instead of the criminals—or fix the catastrophic policies that left over half of emergency calls with “no units available.” He wants to tax gun makers into oblivion so that self-defense becomes a rich man’s luxury that only hypocrites like him can afford.

Spare us the sanctimonious impacted fecal matter, Doctor. The poor in Chicago aren’t sipping lattes in faculty lounges debating “resources.” They’re barricading their doors and praying they make it to and from work safely and survive day to day while the failed system in which you have so much faith leaves them twisting in the wind.

They have and need the same constitutional right to armed self-defense that you take for granted from the comfort of your bubble. In the real Chicago, where cops aren’t available to show up half the time, that arrogance and contempt leaves innocent people to be victimized and slaughtered.

The Center Square has the full testimony. Read it and seethe . . .

A proposed bill gun owners say will price lower income buyers out of the market continues to get attention at the Illinois state capitol.

Opponents of House Bill 3320 estimate the Responsibility in Firearms Legislation, or RIFL Act could tack on thousands of dollars in taxes to one firearm purchase, and that would price lower income people out of exercising their Second Amendment rights.

Advocates for the bill, like Dr. Anthony Douglas, said there’d be minimal added cost.

“I think poor people don’t benefit from owning firearms,” Douglas said during a House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force subject matter hearing of the bill Wednesday. “I think more people benefit from access to education, access to resources.”

State Rep. Patrick Windhorst, R-Harrisburg, said that’s an elitist opinion and people of lesser means want to be able to protect themselves.

“The Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States guarantees that to them,” Windhorst said. “And it’s really not our place to say, ‘well, we think you’re better off not having this thing,’ which is the tone of this committee.”

Virginia’s Democrat Senate Majority Leader on Why Their ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban and Magazine Capcity Limit Really Isn’t a Big Deal

If you have an assault rifle, you can keep it. If you have an assault pistol, if you have one of these pistols with a silencer on it and a pistol grip in the front. A really big, big pistol…you want to have one with a telescope on it or lasers or whatever else you want, that’s okay. You just can’t buy a new one and you can’t sell it to anybody. If you want to have a magazine with more than 15 bullets, you can keep that, too. You just can’t buy a new one.

— Virginia Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell

“blast radius”


D.C. Claims Chaos Will Ensue if Magazine Ban Disappears

Last week a three-judge panel on the D.C. Court of Appeals (which is the highest local court in the District) ruled the District of Columbia’s ban on ammunition magazines that can hold more than ten rounds violates the Second Amendment. These magazines are “arms”, the court concluded, and they are unquestionably in common use for lawful purposes, which means that they’re protected by the U.S. Constitution.

Now the District of Columbia is hoping to reverse that decision through an en banc review, and is asking the Court of Appeals to keep the ruling from taking affect while it appeals.

In its request, the District claims that the panel’s decision “has created uncertainty and chaos” and that the “blast radius of the decision is potentially massive”, arguing that the opinion also impacts “exceedingly common charges governing unlicensed and unregistered firearms.”

I think D.C.’s licensing and registration requirements are equally unsound from a constitutional perspective, but there’s nothing in the panel’s decision that impacts those statutes. The opinion released by the court deals exclusively with the District’s prohibition on commonly owned magazines, and the only uncertainty resulting from the decision is whether or not the ban is still actively being enforced.

The U.S. Attorney’s office has already declined to pursue charges against any legal gun owner caught with a “large capacity” magazine, though the D.C. Attorney General’s office has continued prosecuting possession cases.

The D.C. Court of Appeals hasn’t granted the District’s request, but the opinion will likely remain on hold while the en banc review is being considered. The court has set an expedited briefing schedule that will conclude next Wednesday, and a decision on granting or denying the en banc request could come by the end of next week.

There’s an easy way to ensure there’s no confusion over the panel’s decision: let it stand and take effect.

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This level of stupid used to be fatal

And she’s a hypocrite too, but all leftists are, so… Billie Eilish gets permanent restraining order against man who repeatedly turned up to her home.
Metro News, June 19th, 2020.


Billie Eilish (whoever that’s supposed to be) at the Grammys: “Nobody is illegal on stolen land. We need to keep fighting and speaking up. Our voices do matter..F ICE.”

James Lindsay

Let’s talk about the opening part of this statement: “nobody is illegal on stolen land.” We can break it down, but we should also know what it is. What we are looking at is Chinese-style political sloganeering called “tifa” (提法).

Communist communications ever since Mao took over China (and the CCP before that) almost always follow this kind of formulation, called 提法 (tífǎ), which literally translates as “watchwords” or “slogans.” Literally, it means to lift up or present or highlight the core message or political principle in play through a charged slogan.

The purpose of the sloganeering is actually to do a kind of political engineering through carefully selected and weaponized words that are easily memorable and that hijack the critical thinking faculties of the people who both hear and repeat them so they’ll advance the Party line.

You can think of tifa quite literally as a form of “discourse engineering” with the intent of doing political engineering or political warfare more or less by hijacking people’s brains through mystifying slogans. (Mystification is like a more powerful form of confusion, akin to having been put under a spell.)

In his amazing analysis of the CCP in the early 1950s, just after Mao took power (in October 1949), psychologist Robert Jay Lifton referred to what amounts to tifa as “thought-terminating clichés.” That is, they’re slogans (or clichés) that have the power to turn off your ability to think clearly about what’s being said and implied and to just go along with the political messaging rather than to question it.

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