The left doesn’t have enough kids to win.
That’s why they’re so insistent on controlling your kid’s education.
So maybe…just don’t voluntarily hand over your kids, and we win this whole thing in a generation.
— Nick Freitas (@NickJFreitas) April 21, 2025
Getting Past the “Duck Dynasty” Stereotype of Gun Owners
Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
The New York Times recently published a super multimedia article about new, nontraditional gun owners called “The Tipping Point” (16 February 2025). Subtitle: “America’s newest gun owners are upending preconceptions about who buys and gun and why.”
I read it with interest and was later told by someone at the Times that the piece took two years to put together. Bravo for real journalism.
In an otherwise fascinating and well-reported story on the changing face of gun owners in America today, the authors include a significant misstatement. They write, “a majority of gun owners are white, conservative, male and from rural areas.”
This “Duck Dynasty” stereotype of gun owners is one I have challenged for years now, from my 2019 presentation on Gun Culture 2.0 to my recent opinion essay in The Hill on the unrecognized diversity of gun owners.
To build a better gun debate, we need to ground our arguments in the diverse reality of contemporary gun ownership, rather than perpetuating divisive mythologies.
1 Timothy 5:8
KJV
But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.
“You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” – VPOTUS J.D. Vance.
A Hard Heart Kills: Why Liberal Values Breed School Shootings
Traditionally, the school shooting phenomenon was perpetrated by young, disaffected males. But, a disturbing new trend seems to be forming. The tragic shooting at the Abundant Life Christian School this week was committed by a young girl. A fifteen-year-old with a digital history indicative of the deep angst experienced by many young teenagers left adrift in existential darkness.
It is a very disturbing trend indeed when our young girls, typically characterized by feminine compassion, who should be anticipating the joys of family, motherhood, or career, instead are driven to find meaning in mass homicide. Surely, this is a sign of cultural apocalypse.
Reportedly, Natalie Rupnow had an online obsession with mass shootings and death. Can it really be surprising that our culture of death (the death of God, death of the unborn, the death of personhood) produces mass-murdering kids?
We treat the unborn like bio-waste and devalue life to the point of absurd irrelevance, discarding it at will. The message to anyone paying attention is that life is disposable and subject to whim or convenience. Making a statement with the lives of innocent people is a simple metaphysical extension of the secular culture of grievance and lack of eternal accountability.
Perhaps some old-fashioned hell-fire preaching might go a long way toward saving lives, both temporal and spiritual.
The Clock Strikes Thirteen
And the Establishment gets washed away by a preference cascade. But it was a damn close-run thing.
What happened? It’s like a spell broke. Since November’s election (re-election?) of President Donald Trump, the woke is going away, and all sorts of problems are resolving themselves. But why?
There are several reasons, but basically, it’s a preference cascade.
In law we talk about the proverbial thirteenth chime of the clock, which is not only wrong in itself, but which calls into question everything that has come before. Most of our institutions have been chiming thirteen for quite a while, and people have noticed.
But it’s not enough to notice. Soviet citizens knew their system was founded on lies, too, but the system kept them isolated, unaware that so many of their fellow citizens felt the same way, and unable to come together to act.
This technique, used by totalitarians of all sorts, is called “preference falsification,” in which people are forced to profess belief in things that they know not to be true. If the powers that be are good at it, virtually every citizen can hate them and want them out, but no one will do anything because every citizen who feels that way thinks they’re the only one, or one of a tiny number.
In his classic book, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, economist Timur Kuran notes how governments, and social movements, do their best to enforce this sort of ideological uniformity. People tend to hide unpopular views to avoid ostracism or punishment; they stop hiding them when they feel safe.
This can produce rapid change: In totalitarian societies like the old Soviet Union, the police and propaganda organizations do their best to enforce preference falsification. Such regimes have little legitimacy, but they spend a lot of effort making sure that citizens don’t realize the extent to which their fellow-citizens dislike the regime. This works until something breaks the spell and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared, at which point the collapse of the regime may seem very sudden to outside observers — or even to the citizens themselves. Kuran calls this sudden change a “preference cascade,” and I believe that’s what’s happening here.
In America, the left spent years bullying people into accepting “woke” ideas on race, gender, and politics. There’s considerable reason to believe that a majority of Americans never accepted these ideas, but between constant media repetition, and the risk of being mobbed and canceled if you disagreed with them, most people for years were afraid to stand up.
But two things put a stop to that. One was Donald Trump’s election. The other – and the two are related – was Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now X, which is now a free-speech platform with roughly equal representation of Democrats and Republicans. Both had the effect of blowing up the lefty bubble and letting people realize that they, not the woke, were the actual majority.
How We Know Guns Aren’t Albuquerque’s Problem
When New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham took her animosity toward the Second Amendment and ramped it up to 11, trying to ban all lawful carry in Albuquerque, she said it was in response to the rampant violent crime in the city. She called it a public health crisis and used the draconian restrictions we saw during COVID-19 to justify this particular draconian measure.
And, of course, she got slapped down over it.
But it’s clear that she never got the message regarding the right to keep and bear arms nor the fact that while the city does have a problem, it’s not guns that are causing it.
In fact, it’s probably something else fueling a lot of the problems.
The Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office seized 65,000 fentanyl pills and three guns on Tuesday during a search of an apartment off East Central.
Richard Cortez, 44, who authorities say lived in the apartment, is charged with drug trafficking and three counts of possession of a firearm by a felon.
Michael Herrera, 18, who was inside the apartment at the time of the raid, is charged with resisting, evading or obstructing an officer for not surrendering “for over 30 minutes.”
Both men were booked into the Metropolitan Detention Center. Neither man had an attorney listed in online court records.
Court records show Cortez was sentenced to prison for drug trafficking in 2010 and for years afterward bounced between prison and probation after repeated violations.
In 2016, a BCSO deputy arrested Cortez on felony drug possession, according to court records. Cortez faced another potential prison stretch, but the case was dismissed, and Cortez was set free after the deputy didn’t show up for court.
Prosecutors filed a motion to detain Cortez until trial following Tuesday’s seizure, calling him “dangerous.”
“The defendant is a major dealer of fentanyl in the Albuquerque area,” according to the motion. “He had three firearms ready for use.”
How could he possibly have gotten guns? Gun control laws are in place to prevent people like this from getting guns, after all.
Then again, there are laws intended to prevent people from getting 65,000 fentanyl pills, too, and we see how well they worked.
See, the issue with most violent crime is that the violence is often ancillary to something else. In the 1990s, when the homicide rate was so ridiculous, it was gangs and drugs. To some degree, that’s still the case. Convicted felons aren’t reformed, they’re just put back on the streets where they seek out ways to continue with their previous criminal endeavors.
In this case, Cortez was a known felon with a long and prodigious history as a criminal, only to be able to become a “major dealer of fentanyl in the Albuquerque area.”
It looks to me like putting him right back on the streets time and time again wasn’t really doing all that much, and knowing a deputy didn’t show up for court in 2016, which got his case dismissed makes it that much worse.
Let’s remember something, folks. If fentanyl is so heavily controlled–and yes, it is–and people like this jackwagon can get it, why does anyone believe you can keep someone like this disarmed? What makes them think that suddenly a law will be passed that will make it so he can’t get firearms from any source?
It’s insane.
Then again, what about gun control isn’t?
The first entity to establish a Mars colony will be the universe’s first trillionaire.
Lately, we’ve had a lot of puddlefish whining about how “we” shouldn’t go to Mars. Some of them actually think they get a vote, based on economic illiteracy and the delusion that SpaceX is somehow part of the US federal government. [Closed caption for the hard-of-thinking: it isn’t.]
But others just think they are giving good investment advice… SpaceX investors can do what they want, but Mars is a frozen wasteland full of nothing but near-vacuum and rocks.
So why would anyone want to go there?
Elon Musk likes to answer this question by pointing out that it’s not a good idea to store all humanity’s eggs in one basket. He’s right, but this kind of argument isn’t comprehensible to everyone, nor is it the full picture.
So now it’s the SF writer’s turn.
And therefore I present to you…
Scott Stapp from Creed goes off in between songs.
“We start reminding them of what our Constitution says. We start reminding them what our Bill Of Rights says. We remind them that we are a Constitutional Republic built upon the Bible and the word of God and NOT a democracy.”… pic.twitter.com/RLj8R6T1z9
— 17AbsoluteRedux76 (@RealAbs1776) September 15, 2024
The Decline and Fall of the Western Church
I read a heartbreaking column in the Deseret News on Friday. It was by a pastor named Ryan Burge. It was titled, “My church is closing, and I don’t know what comes next — for me, or America.” In the column, Burge tells how his congregation, First Baptist Church of Mount Vernon, Illinois, recently shuttered its doors for good. At one point, Burge questions whether he was ever fit to lead a church. That speaks highly of him since no pastor should ever look himself in the mirror and say, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” He also struggles with the fact that while his profile as a Christian academic grew, his congregation continued to age out and shrink.
While my online platform was rising and I was being offered a variety of opportunities to speak and write, things were continuing to decline at my little church. I would come from home from speaking at a conference that had a couple hundred in attendance to preach before a nearly empty sanctuary on Sunday morning.
Not all denominations are struggling, but many churches in America and the West are declining. But Burge is taking too much on himself. The deck was stacked against him. While the world may increasingly hold Christianity in contempt, we have often been complicit in our own destruction.
In “The Screwtape Letters,” Screwtape, a senior devil in Hell, writes to his nephew Wormwood. Wormwood is a junior tempter trying to win the soul of his “patient.”
The real trouble about the set your patient is living in is that it is merely Christian. They all have individual interests, of course, but the bond remains mere Christianity. What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call “Christianity And.”
You know—Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring. Work on their horror of the Same Old Thing.
The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart—an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship.
The issue of “Christianity And” is not merely a stumbling block for the mainline Protestant denominations. It is true that those churches subscribe to ideas such as Christianity and LGBTQ+ or Christianity and Abortion. As a result, those denominations splinter, and their congregations shrink. I have heard them say that they are “small but mighty.” If they are mighty, it is because they have yoked themselves to the popular causes of the day.
America has a problem
Observation O’ The Day
Because the children are our future and the elderly can’t be groomed like a child can pic.twitter.com/2MakNIefTQ
— 𝕄𝕚𝕤𝕤𝕪🦋 (@BornAgainMissy) June 20, 2024
Notice that the AI actually doesn’t answer the question.
Garbage in/Garbage out
While playing with an AI based search engine, Perplexity, we asked the question “what groups of people are most responsible for gun homicides in the United States?”
The engine’s response echoes multiple decades of research by people in the criminology field. It echoes the… pic.twitter.com/4nVuHowS1S
— Gun Facts (@gunfacts) June 17, 2024
Take a minute to get through the accent. I wouldn’t say ‘education’ per se is the problem. An indoctrination of a partisan agenda feeding the normal fallen human condition is.
What if democracy is merely the politic or superstructure of a particular cultural stage? Simple mass literacy in that case, continuing advances in teaching and learning in secondary and post-secondary levels will necessarily upset democracy in the places where it first appeared. Secondary education and especially higher education will introduce the notion of inequality into the mental and ideological organization of developed societies. After a brief period of hesitation and scruples the more highly educated end up believing they are truly superior.
In developed countries, a new class is emerging that comprises roughly 20% of the population in terms of sheer numbers, but controls about half of each nation’s wealth. This new class has more and more trouble putting up with the constraints of universal suffrage. It is a surprising return to the world of Aristotle, in which oligarchy may replace democracy at the very moment when democracy is beginning to take hold in Eurasia, it is weakening in those places where it was born.
These are indeed curious democracies, in which the political system pits elitism against populism and vice-versa. And although universal suffrage persists in theory, the elites of right and left close ranks to block any reorientation of economic policies that would lead to greater equality.
The common understanding among the elite, reflection of a common superior language among them prevents any correcting of the political system facade when universal suffrage would suggest the possibility of crisis.
Emmanuel Todd, After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order, (2001)
The Top 11 Flags You Should Fly To Trigger Communist Enemies Of The People.
Corporate media recently took old smears about a Revolutionary War-era flag and applied them to Justice Samuel Alito after his wife allegedly displayed the “provocative” symbol in front of his home.
The meaning behind the “An Appeal To Heaven” flag, a pine-tree-adorned symbol used by squadrons of the Continental Navy during the Revolutionary War, is rather innocuous. George Washington’s secretary Col. Joseph Reed created the flag in 1775 to publicly display “an appeal to God to save the colonists from the King’s oppressive ruling.”
The same outlets fomenting fake scandal about the alleged Alito flag have never taken issue with any Americans displaying Black Lives Matter, Ukraine, pro-terrorist, and rainbow flags, despite their connections to anti-American agitation. The New York Times, however, suggested the historic “An Appeal To Heaven” flag was associated with a “push for a more Christian-minded government.”
Here are 11 flags you should fly to not only show your loyalty to God and country but also your disdain for the top enemy of the people that is constantly looking for ways to smear Americans who love their original flag and the Constitution it stands for.
BLUF:
The United States makes up less than 5% of the global population, yet we Americans hold nearly 50% of civilian guns worldwide.
With all these guns, you’d expect America to be at the top of the charts in gun violence and deaths, right?
When you dive into the statistics, past the fear and the headlines, you find that the U.S. doesn’t even crack the top 10 globally for gun violence or deaths per capita.
“The U.S. has the 32nd-highest rate of deaths from gun violence in the world: 3.96 deaths per 100,000 people in 2019.”
Most gun violence in our nation isn’t scattered randomly across the vast landscapes of America.
No, it’s concentrated in just 2% of our counties.Over half of all our murders happen in these small pockets.
This isn’t just about advocating for the right to bear arms. It’s about advocating for the right to live in a society that tackles the root causes of its problems
Federal Court Rules Maryland Parents Can’t Opt Kids Out Of Classes With LGBT Content.
The Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled 2-1 against Maryland parents who sued their local school board for not letting their children in grades K-5 opt out of reading books supporting transgender ideology and gender transitioning.
The Montgomery County Public Schools board denied the parents their request to be notified when the books would be read to their children and the opportunity to opt out.
“The Board is violating the parents’ inalienable and constitutionally protected right to control the religious upbringing of their children, especially on sensitive issues concerning family life and human sexuality,” The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, litigated the lawsuit, stated, explaining:
In fall 2022, the Montgomery County Board of Education announced over 20 new “inclusivity” books for its pre-K through eighth grade classrooms. But rather than focusing on basic civility and kindness, these books champion pride parades, gender transitioning, and pronoun preferences for children.
For example, one book tasks three- and four-year-olds to search for images from a word list that includes “intersex flag,” “[drag] queen,” “underwear,” “leather,” and the name of a celebrated LGBTQ activist and sex worker. Another encourages fifth graders to discuss what it means to be “non-binary.” Other books advocate a child-knows-best approach to gender transitioning, telling students that a decision to transition doesn’t have to “make sense” and that doctors only “guess” when identifying a newborn’s sex anyway.
A district court ruled against the parents, prompting them to appeal to the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals, which denied the parents’ request for a preliminary injunction but allowed the possibility of changing its position once the classes have already been taught, writing:
We take no view on whether the Parents will be able to present evidence sufficient to support any of their various theories once they have the opportunity to develop a record as to the circumstances surrounding the Board’s decision and how the challenged texts are actually being used in schools.
At this early stage, however, given the Parents’ broad claims, the very high burden required to obtain a preliminary injunction, and the scant record before us, we are constrained to affirm the district court’s order denying a preliminary injunction.
Judge Marvin Quattlebaum dissented, writing, “I disagree with the majority’s conclusion that the parents have not produced enough evidence to establish that their free exercised rights have been burdened. The parents have met their burden. They have produced the books that no one disputes will be used to instruct their K-5 children. They produced declarations explaining in detail why the books conflict with their religious beliefs. They have produced the board’s own internal documents that show how it suggests teachers respond to students and parents who question the contents of the books.”
Boy Scouts of America changes name after 114 years to ‘boost inclusion’
“Scouting America”
Comment O’ The Day:
BSA was worried about losing donations and membership because they weren’t “inclusive” enough.
As a non-secular organization God was at their core belief. The BSA was totally inclusive provided you believed in God. Didn’t matter which one, as long as you believed. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc., all at a place within BSA. That was why Boy Scouts is a world wide organization.
But then atheists decided to tell what was essentially a religious group that they had to put aside their religious beliefs. That’s like atheists telling the Roman Catholic Church they had to accept non-believers and accommodate them, altering sermons, Bible studies, etc.
Then came allowing homosexual scout leaders. What a recipe for disaster, especially after the BSA already had a lot of baggage with male scout leaders molesting male scouts. Which no matter how much spin you put on it is homosexual pedophilia.
Then they had to allow girls and LBGTQEIEIO.
Somewhere along this slow motion train wreck the LDS, who were a huge subset of BSA, decided to have the its church form their own scouts. They up and left and took about 1/6th of all BSA revenue with them. Which ironically is what those trying to morph scouting to fit them should have done – form their own groups.
Now the perplexed leaders of BSA are renaming it to ‘Scouting America’, in order to further alienate their membership and donors.
This is nearing the end. Only a matter of time before they auger in. Another classic moral institution destroyed by the Church of Woke, Altar of Inclusiveness and Temple of Moloch.
This is what happens when you compromise your core principles. Pretty soon, you have no principles left.
Violent crime peaked in 1993 within the United States. Since then, it has trended downward due in great part to the “broken windows” style, proactive police work, video surveillance everywhere, and the increase of concealed carriers. In 2020, the year of the Covid 19 lockdowns, crime spiked again in the wake of the rioting surrounding a particular incident of police action.
What has followed since is an increase in lawlessness. The combination of police being afraid to do their jobs due to progressives seeking to prosecute them even when they do everything right, along with progressive prosecutors who confuse justice reform with simply not prosecuting violent offenders, has led to a complete breakdown of law and order in urban areas.
Police retirement is at an all-time high, and recruitment is at an all-time low. The movement to defund and hamstring police while simultaneously not prosecuting violent offenders is a social suicide pact that is gleefully embraced by large cities, so here we are.
For many years, the leaders in the self-defense community have warned, “You are on your own; nobody is coming to save you.” While it has always been true in the sense that the police simply cannot arrive on time to stop an in-progress assault, now it is quite literally true that police may never come at all. Response times are at a low, and many departments are running on skeleton crews, so depending on where you live, you may get no response, no matter what the situation is.
Ironically, most who have driven this political agenda of defunding the police are also entirely on board with civilian disarmament. Make no mistake, this faction wants you unarmed and helpless and wants to ensure that there are no police to protect you either, from the criminals that they intentionally set loose on your streets.
Those who support such policies remain willfully foolish until the point that their own door gets smashed in or they get carjacked, personally, even though they think such things only happen on the other side of town, not in their gentrified neighborhood.
Why Self-Defense Is The Only Type Of Violence The Left Won’t Endorse
After years of anti-cop rhetoric, violence is out of control in America’s cities. Smash and grabs, sidewalk attacks and old ladies being mugged in broad daylight — all just factored into the cost of living a metropolitan lifestyle. But these are not simply passive inevitabilities that somehow come to pass. They are active policy choices of a revolutionary left, firmly in control of every major city, that sees violence as a tool toward its political aims. In fact, there is only one type of violence the left will not condone — and the key to understanding it lies in these political aims.
The radical left may talk often of high-minded goals, but their ultimate goal is to eradicate hierarchy — the central push of the “equity” agenda. All must be made equal in order for all to be equally free. For classical liberals, this meant equal treatment under the law, unaffected by circumstances of birth. Yet for the radical outgrowth, this now means leveling all aspects of genuine human diversity. However, they do not truly seek egalitarian reforms, but merely to rejigger any form of traditional hierarchy (much of which had already been dismantled by their liberal forebears) and instead place themselves at the top. So the attack on hierarchy really becomes a spiteful, resentful attack on any form of tradition. This is the true nature of the radical left.
Traditional morality posits that the criminal is the “oppressor” of the “victim,” whom he victimizes with his crime. This has been the basis of virtually every legal system throughout human history. Yet radical left morality flips this notion on its head. The new “victim” becomes the criminal himself, victimized by the injustices of a hierarchical society that drives him to desperation: the thief stealing to feed his family or violence as the “language of the unheard.” The person on the receiving end becomes merely a casualty in the putsch to upend traditional morality, while the priests of the new morality consolidate their right to rule.
American Refugees: The Untold Story of the Mass Migration from Blue to Red States.
“Roger Simon is among the many refugees fleeing blue state neoliberalism, and he’s written the best account of our generation’s greatest migration.”
–Tucker Carlson, fired Fox News host
“As a citizen of Tennessee, I can attest to the fact that there is a great migration happening from blue to red states. When people have had enough tyranny, they search for freedom elsewhere. This book captures a pivotal moment in time for our nation.”
–John Rich, country music superstar and owner of Redneck Riviera Brand
“Roger’s analysis in American Refugees provides great evidence that America isn’t in some inevitable national decline, we’re just young. We’re going through our own version of adolescence as a nation.”
–Vivek Ramaswamy, Republican Presidential Candidate
A net exodus of Americans from blue to red states has been in progress for several years now. This is largely a southbound movement, and perhaps some migrants are “running from the cold up in New England,” as the song goes. But mostly they are leaving states that are too far gone into woke socialism to recover anytime soon—in favor of states with more conservative governance.
The conventional wisdom, or fear, among red state locals is that these newcomers, despite having “voted with their feet,” will continue to vote for the same policies that ruined the states from which they are fleeing. Roger Simon argues that the reverse may be more accurate: blue-to-red migrants tend to be serious constitutional conservatives, and they might be the cavalry that rescues the red states from their own problems.
With the possible exception of Florida, the red states, too, are in trouble. Like California, long-term one-party rule has corrupted them, but in a different way. Their political leaders have become disconnected from the conservative values of their constituents. Migrants from blue states, however, are likely to be highly invested in saving the red states into which they are moving.
American Refugees is the story of how a culture clash precipitated a great blue state exodus, and what it means for the rest of America. Focusing particularly on Tennessee, Simon contends that only the red states can preserve the constitutional republic envisioned by the Founders. Only they can save America for our children and grandchildren. The struggle will be great, but the story will ultimately have a happy ending.
