Category: Culture
The quest for social justice is a powerful crusade of our time, with an appeal to many different people, for many different reasons. But those who use the same words do not always present the same meanings. Clarifying those meanings is the first step toward finding out what we agree on and disagree on. From there, it is largely a question of what the facts are. Social Justice Fallacies reveals how many things that are thought to be true simply cannot stand up to documented facts, which are often the opposite of what is widely believed.
However attractive the social justice vision, the crucial question is whether the social justice agenda will get us to the fulfillment of that vision. History shows that the social justice agenda has often led in the opposite direction, sometimes with catastrophic consequences.
More things are involved besides simply mistakes. All human beings are fallible, and social justice advocates may not necessarily make any more mistakes than others. But crusaders with an utter certainty about their mission are often undeterred by obstacles, evidence or even fatal dangers. That is where much of the Western world is today. The question is whether we will continue on heedlessly, past the point of no return.
A Christian woman who volunteers to feed the homeless says that the number of people who live on the streets of Atlanta has grown exponentially, with entire families, gang members, and prostitutes all seeking assistance.
The woman, named Teresa Hamilton, who goes by the nickname Lady T, has volunteered to feed the homeless in Georgia for over 27 years, but in 2023 she says the situation is worse than ever. Previously, people seeking free meals were mostly limited to those with substance abuse problems, but the volunteer said the demographic has widely grown.
“The numbers are growing. It is a different flavor of homeless people now. Back in the day, it was just some alcoholics or somebody on drugs; now we have whole families living in parks,” she told Fox 5 Atlanta.
Lady T and her crew feed approximately 900 people per week, with different groups serving different types of homeless communities. The volunteer sends teams to provide meals to everyone from prostitutes to homeless gang members.
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“This is one set of people, and we have three or four other sets of people. We got tent city. We got prostitute lane. We got crack city. And we got gangland,” she said. “People don’t understand, even though they are in gangs, they are still homeless.”
“I have a heart for other people who are less fortunate. We need lots and lots of help. We need lots and lots of volunteers. We need financial support always,” she said.
Lady T began working as a volunteer in the mid-1990s after she shut down her successful catering business. The Chicago native said that God spoke to her and she immediately knew she had to shift her focus.
“It was a booming catering business. God woke me up at 2 in the morning and I said, ‘Yes Lord?’ And he said, ‘Feed my people,’ and I shut the catering business down the next day,” Hamilton explained.
“She treats me like a human being,” said Joel Kirkland, who has been homeless for three months.
Another woman named Tanisha Holcomb told Fox 5 Atlanta that she was robbed of all of her belongings in Cleveland, Ohio, before becoming homeless.
“As far as Miss T, she saved my life,” the woman revealed.
An Atlanta resident:
I’ve lived here since 2001 and until a few years ago I had never seen a tent under a highway overpass. Now they seem to be everywhere.
Not defending it, but being homeless is easier than ever because of technology.
With only a smartphone, one can have and manage a bank account, receive income (like public benefits), make online payments, communicate with friends and family, hire transportation to/from your location, schedule medical appointments, have food delivered to your location, purchase items on Amazon delivered to a nearby drop-off point, arrange drug deals, find customers for sexual services, etc.
A homeless person in America with a smartphone can shop, select, and have their preferred tent delivered to them from China to a nearby Amazon locker within a few days, as well as any other “camping” supplies they desire.
In balmy Georgia for 9/12ths of the year, that is a “home-free” lifestyle that is completely feasible from a tent under I-75.
Suspension of Disbelief
Experts and the Power of Self-Deception
Recently, a friend fretted about what she perceived to be the dismal state of the world, based on the pronouncements of “experts” but, anticipating my response, added, “But you tend to dismiss ‘experts.’” I said she misjudged my sentiments, and that:
“I don’t dismiss experts. I simply don’t worship them. I don’t wish to grant them authoritarian power. And, out of a sense of risk-aversion and a knowledge of history, I want them kept on short leashes. As I wrote sometime back, science is a fine expert witness and a bloody dangerous judge.”
Experts are ordinary human beings, with all the fallibilities that come with membership in our species. Like everyone else, experts sometimes suppress truth and disseminate falsehoods for self-preservation or personal gain. Sometimes, they do so in service to some larger cause. Experts, short on time or resources, may cut corners, publishing information they hope is correct, while knowing it may not be. In all these situations, the expert knows his or her information is or may be false.
More interesting, more likely, and more dangerous are those situations where the expert sincerely believes his or her falsehoods to be correct, owing to the lure of self-deception. Paul Simon’s “The Boxer” sings:
“I have squandered my resistance
For a pocketful of mumbles
Such are promises
All lies and jest
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest”
I don’t “dismiss” experts but am wary of their tendency to squander their resistance, hearing what they wish to hear and disregarding the rest. Such is the sway that the still small voice of self-deception holds over all of us. And that voice is not muted by a doctorate or academic chair. In Duck Soup (1933), Chico Marx asks Margaret Dumont, “Who ya gonna believe? Me, or your own eyes?” I know enough history (and enough experts) to know that one’s own eyes are often at a distinct disadvantage versus a thing devoutly to be wished.
Self-deception can be conspiratorial, communal, or solitary and can be remarkably persistent. Self-deceived expertise is extraordinarily dangerous when issued blank-check authority by governmental or religious authorities. In Bastiat’s Window, “1,600 Years of Medical Hubris” explored the groupthink that ossified Western medicine between the 2nd and 19th centuries, plus the collectively reinforced misinformation that impeded the proper treatment of autism, ulcers, and prion-borne diseases in the 20th century. In “When Sterilization Was Dogma,”
and I discussed groupthink, eugenics, and contemporary challenges. “Gloomy Saints and Wandering Virtues” recounted how Alexander Graham Bell dispensed nonsense about the heritability of deafness—contradicted by the genetic histories of his mother and his wife.
To illustrate the powers of self-deception, I’ll offer three stories:
- Anna Anderson, who successfully impersonated Russia’s Grand Duchess Anastasia for over 60 years,
- Harry Houdini, who persuaded thousands of viewers that he could make an elephant vanish from an open stage, and
- Scottie Ferguson, the fictional detective in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, who blindly missed the true connection between two women with whom he was destructively in love.
L-o-n-g read, but worth it.
The Return of Paganism
The spiritual crisis afflicting contemporary America has ancient and enduring roots—and so does the cure
When a 28-year-old person identifying as transgender shot up a Tennessee school in March, killing three children and three adults, the usual grim afterlife of tragedy was underlined by an odd note: One by one, media outlets rushed to apologize for “misgendering” the shooter, who, they explained, had been born female but had recently begun identifying as male.
How to make sense of such a statement? And what to do when a newspaper headline tells you about a “trans woman left sobbing in JFK Airport after TSA agent hit her testicles”? Appealing to reason hardly helps, as J.K. Rowling and others learned the hard way when trying to ask simple questions such as how one might define sex if not according to the chromosomes rooted in literally every cell of our bodies. Instead, anyone wishing to find his way through the thicket of American public discourse these days should start by embracing one simple and terrifying idea: The barbarians are at the gates.
I mean this almost literally. Everywhere you turn these days, pagans are afoot, busily hacking away at the Christian and Jewish foundations of American life and replacing them with a cosmology that would have been absolutely coherent to followers of, say, Voltumna, the Etruscan earth god, or to those who worshipped the Celt tribal protector Toutatis.
If you think the above paragraph is a little bit overblown, consider the numbers. In 1990, scholars from Trinity College set out to learn just how many of their fellow Americans practiced some form of pagan religion. The numbers were unsurprisingly small: about 8,000, or enough to pack your average Journey reunion concert. But the researchers asked again in 2008, and this time, 340,000 Americans said yes to paganism. A decade later, the Pew survey posed the same question, and, if it is to believed, there are now about 1.5 million Americans professing an array of pagan persuasions, from Wicca to the Viking lore, making paganism one of the nation’s fastest-growing persuasions.
So fast-growing, in fact, that my colleague Maggie Phillips recently reported in Tablet magazine about the thriving, and officially recognized, pagan faith groups within the U.S. Army. “What’s important now,” one of its leaders, Sergeant Drake Sholar, told Phillips, “is showing religious respect and understanding across the board as Norse Pagans, or Heathens, return to a distinguishable religious practice.”
Today Should Be a National Holiday: An Annual Tradition.
If there were any justice today would be a national holiday at least as big as Independence Day. I’m not kidding.
Back in the 1770’s an unrest that had started more than a century before–with Colonial reaction to the English Civil War, the Catholic reign of James II, and the Glorious Revolution that followed–was growing in the American colonies, at least those along the Atlantic Seaboard from New Hampshire down through Georgia. Protests over taxes imposed without the taxed having any voice in the matter, complaints about a distant monarch and legislative body making rules and laws over people to whom they are not beholden.
There had been clashes which fed that unrest, including the famous “Boston Massacre” where British troops fired into a rioting mob resulting in several deaths. Think of it as the Kent State of the 18th century.
In an effort to quell the unrest, or at least have it be less of a threat to British officials, General Thomas Gage, Military governor of Massachusetts, under orders to take decisive action against the colonists, decided to confiscate firearms and ammunition from certain groups in the colony. His forces marched on the night of April 18, 1775.
The colonists, forewarned of the action (the Longfellow poem, which children learn in school–or they did when I was in school “Listen my children and you shall hear, of the midnight ride of Paul Revere”–is historically inaccurate, but it sure is stirring, isn’t it?), first met the British troops at Lexington Massachusetts where John Parker, in command of the local Colonial Militia said, according to the recollection of one of the participants,
“Stand your ground. Don’t fire unless fired upon. But if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”
Whether Parker actually said those words, the first shot was fired. No one knew who fired it, whether British or Colonial. In the ensuing, brief battle the British regulars put the Colonial militia to flight.
The British then turned toward Concord.
A small unit of militia, hearing reports of firing at Lexington marched out but on spotting a British unit of about 700 while themselves only numbering about 250 they returned to Concord. The Colonial militia departed the town across the North Bridge to a hill about a mile north of town where additional militia reinforcements continued to gather.
The British reached the town and began searching for the weapons they came to confiscate. They found several cannon, too large to be moved quickly, and disabled them. Other weapons and supplies had been either removed or hidden.
On seeing the smoke of the burning carriages from the cannon, the Militia began to move. It is not my purpose here to go into detailed description of their movements but in the end the British regulars found themselves both outnumbered and outmaneuvered. They fled, a rout that surprised the Colonial Militia as much as the British regulars. Again, I simplify but in the end they marched back to Boston continuing to suffer casualties from what amounted to 18th century sniper fire from the surrounding brush. The frustration of the British soldiers led them to atrocities, killing everyone they found in buildings whether they were involved in the fighting or not.
Eventually the British forces fought their way back to Boston where they were besieged by Militia forces numbering over 1500 men.
And the Revolutionary War had begun.
And so, on this day in 1775, the nascent United States took the course that would lead eventually to Independence.
And that’s why April 19 deserves to be a National Holiday on a par at least with Independence Day. The latter was recognition of what became fact on the former.
By James Mullin
At the rate things are going, we’d better start preparing for life under perpetual Democrat or Uniparty governance. Here are just a few points to ponder about what that life might be like. Feel free to share with Woke family and friends.
Do you like the dark, i.e. living in the dark and carrying flashlights and candles after the sun goes down? You’d better because there will be lots of opportunity once Uniparty-induced brownouts and blackouts take hold because of our power grid’s inability to supply dependable power as the war on fossil fuels takes hold. Exaggerated? Read about California in the last 20 years.
Do you like extreme heat in your house in the summer? See above. Beware of living in the Southeast. This is how the Uniparty will play nasty against its most geographically identifiable opposition. Get screens for your windows. NOW.
Do you like extreme cold in your house in the winter? See above. By the way, don’t depend on firewood. They’ll ban it. CO2, you know.
Do you like to save money for your future and your family’s? Do you realize how very selfish that is? Do you have a preferred bank or stock market in mind that may not be subject to the Winds of Wokism, and its ensuant incompetence? Will your rate of savings ever exceed the future rate of inflation/money printing?
Do you think you’d rather just buy a hard tangible asset like gold? Do you realize that your government once outlawed gold ownership 100 years ago, forcing even average citizens to hand it over?
Do you like to eat? Do you like your kids to eat, and not have malnutrition? Guess what our country has depended on for over a century to bring its crops to market? (Hint: CO2.)
Do you like to see your kids maimed or killed in endless wars? It’s no use saying that won’t happen when the whole world is united by the current blend of fascism/socialism. Read the novel 1984. It’s the best expose ever of endless, revolving war.
Do you like living in a house with a backyard for your kids to play in? Did you ever read about the Obama administration’s plans for future American housing? It’s already being put in place in California.
Do you like being involved in your kids’ lives and helping them navigate life’s key issues? Sorry, the state will take over now. Think that’s a stretch? Ever hear of LGBTQ? Read about school districts across America (in red states and counties too) hiding children’s “gender status” from parents.
Do you like your kids being well educated? We are already seeing an epic slide downward here. Ask your kid to spot Uganda, Belarus, or Malaysia on a map. Ask your kid to do a simple ratio and proportion problem. Best of all, ask your kid how much change you get from a twenty if your bill was $11.31. In your near future, your children will likely have a failed intellect unless they are at an elite coterie of schools. (And malnutrition is never kind on brain development anyway).
Do you feel voting is good, and that your vote is meaningful? Have you read about the election of 2020? Do you know who Katie Hobbs or John Fetterman are?
Do you like having a dog or cat as a pet? Given items 2, 3 and 4, that may not be in the cards. Given item 6, you might become your pet’s greatest enemy. Do you know how few pets there were in the old Soviet Union or Mao’s Sino workers’ paradise? Ever wonder why?
Did you and your wife enjoy choosing a name for your child? Did you know that serious restrictions were placed on this in previous Marxist (socialist) societies?
Do you like the option of defending yourself if someone is trying to kill you or your family? Read about what happened to a certain parking garage attendant in Manhattan.
Do you want a better life for your child, and do you work hard to make that happen? Return to item 1 and read this list again.
Depending on how you answered these questions, you’ll know whether you’re ready to live in the Democrats’ brave new world or if you’re willing to go to the polls in the first half of 2024 to vote for the best Republican candidate in the primaries, and then to show up at the polls again in November, even if your candidate didn’t win, to slow the seemingly inevitable Democrat tide.
Democrats’ Knee-Jerk Gun-Control Demands Ignore The Most Basic Facts About Human Nature
The difficult truth is, stopping these shootings is not just a matter of policy — it’s a matter of the heart.
The elementary school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, is a tragedy no community should ever have to endure. As fathers, our hearts break for those innocent children and their parents, as well as the brave and selfless teachers. The heroic police officers, who sprang into action with total disregard for their own safety, saved countless lives. The shooter, whose name should not be made famous by the media, reminds us there is evil in this world, that every moment with our families is precious, and that something in our country must change.
Unfortunately, the radical left has once again rushed to demand new laws and policy changes that would have done nothing to stop this tragedy — or any tragedy.
The renewed call to expand background checks to cover even private gun sales between friends and family members ignores the fact that most mass shooters who bought guns legally — including radical Islamic terrorists — passed background checks anyway. And no law will stop criminals from getting guns illegally by stealing them or acquiring them on the black market, because they’re criminals.
The Nashville tragedy has also reignited calls to implement so-called “red-flag laws” in which American citizens can have their firearms confiscated without due process, even as a result of baseless accusations or innuendo. Research shows such laws have no effect on violent crime, and it’s possible they could actually increase suicide rates by making troubled individuals fear discussing their issues with friends or family members because their ability to defend themselves and their loved ones could be taken away.
All 50 states already have laws on the books — often referred to as “Baker Act” statutes — regulating how to handle individuals who could be a danger to themselves or others and allowing medical professionals to intervene when necessary. In the case of the Nashville shooter — a transgender-identifying 28-year-old reportedly receiving treatment for mental illness — if police had been made aware that the shooter was hiding guns, they said they would have seized them.
As with so many similar tragedies, the cowardly Covenant School shooter chose a soft target, shooting through the school’s locked doors and counting on it taking time for armed law enforcement to respond. In fact, police said the shooter had mentioned another potential target, “but because of threat assessment by the suspect, too much security, they decided not to” attack it.
If you think criminals don’t consider this when planning an attack, then you haven’t read last year’s Buffalo, New York shooter’s manifesto in which he wrote that areas where concealed carrying of a weapon is “outlawed or prohibited may be good areas of attack” and that “areas with strict gun laws are also great places of attack.”
Tolerance and Acceptance Were Never Going to Be Enough for the Trans Crowd.
I try to bring humor to everything. I’m a comedian. As my wonderful friend and mentor Stephen Kruiser can tell you, comics find humor in the worst of conditions. Not only can I not see the “funny” in the Tennessee shooting, I don’t want to seek it.
The trans movement asked for tolerance, then acceptance. Then they just wanted to use the restroom of their preference for their safety, despite a lack of violence against trans people and a bushel full of trans attacks on kids. We allowed it. I regret that. A lot.
Today, we are at a point where a 6’4″ man named “Lia” Thomas has been allowed to dominate women’s college swimming, while the real women on the team were told to shut up and not complain about losing their accolades to Thomas and having to eyeball his twig and berries in the showers.
Major publications like the NY Post, the Daily Mail, and even the Post Millennial have called “he” a “she.”
People have lost their jobs for refusing to play make-believe with the small portion of the country plagued by a mental malady called “gender dysphoria.”
Despite all the ass-kissing the trans crowd has enjoyed, they feel they are being “genocided” out of existence. So much so that they are planning a “day of trans vengeance.”
If you keep telling mentally ill kids that people disagreeing with them is literal genocide, eventually one of them is going to pick up a weapon.
— Joel Berry (@JoelWBerry) March 27, 2023
In the United States, the trans crowd walks on water. Yet six people — three of them only nine years old — had to die, just five days before the “day of trans vengeance.” One of them was the daughter of the school’s pastor. I’m sure that was just a coincidence, right?
Live long and prosper. If they will let you.
Longer lives, society, and freedom.
Longer, healthier lives: A disaster for humanity? To hear some people talk, yes.
Harvard aging researcher David Sinclair has managed to regulate the aging process in mice, making young mice old and old mice young. And numerous researchers elsewhere are working on finding ways to turn back the clock.
This has created a good deal of excitement. We’ve seen these waves of antiaging enthusiasm before: There was a flurry of interest in the first decade of this century, with news stories, conferences, and so on. That enthusiasm mostly involved activating the SIRT-1 gene, which is also activated by caloric restriction.
You can buy supplements, like resveratrol or quercetin, that show some evidence of slowing the aging process by activating that gene, or by killing senescent cells. Drugs like rapamycin and metformin have shown promise as well. And diet and exercise do enough good that if they were available in pill form, everyone would be gobbling them.
But while pumping the brakes on the process of getting older and frailer is a good thing, being able to actually stop – or better yet reverse – the process is better still. If I had the chance, I’d be happy to knock a few decades off of my biological age. (Ideally, I think I’d be physically 25 and cosmetically about 40.)
But does this mean we’re looking at something like immortality? Well, not really.
Even a complete conquest of aging wouldn’t mean eternal life. Accidents, disease, even death by violence will still ensure that your time on Earth – or wherever you’re living in a century or two – eventually comes to an end. Still an end to, or even a dramatic delaying of, the process of decay and decline would be nice. As Robert Heinlein observed in the 1950s, you spend the first 25 years of your life getting established, then the next couple of decades striving to get ahead, and then by age 50 your reward for all that is that your middle is thickening, your breath is shortening, and your aches and pains are accumulating as the Grim Reaper waits around the corner.
From the Smithsonian — a chart of the "whiteness" they want eradicated from society.
Planning for the future is bad? Seriously? pic.twitter.com/CAk5Uxt16D— John R Lott Jr. (@JohnRLottJr) January 30, 2023
Is Woke Fatigue Finally Setting In?
The Broadway show “Ain’t No Mo’” may soon be no more, if ticket sales do not pick up. If you have never heard of it, you are not alone. But for the sake of expediency, here is a brief description from the home page of the show’s website:
Direct from a smash-hit run at The Public Theater, AIN’T NO MO’ dares to ask the incendiary question, “What if the U.S. government offered Black Americans one-way plane tickets to Africa?” The answer is the high-octane new comedy from the mischievous mind of playwright Jordan E. Cooper.
Moving faster than a transatlantic jet plane, this unprecedented, unpredictable comedy speeds through the turbulent skies of being Black in today’s America.
Brilliantly blending sketch, satire, avant garde theater, and a dose of drag, AIN’T NO MO’ will leave you crying with laughter—and thinking through the tears.
So put your tray tables in the upright position. Enjoy your flight. And never look back.
The site’s banner shows a jetliner, painted in a Kente cloth pattern, and a ragged U.S. flag on the tail, being shredded by the wind. And there are references in the show to privileged white people. It is made up of a series of sketches about how various black characters would react to the idea of the U.S. Government offering black people free flights back to Africa for repatriation. Of course, it is getting rave reviews. But the show is slated to close because it is not drawing an audience. Cooper, who also acts in the production, said that because there were no celebrities, no smash-hit songs, and no well-known intellectual property, people were just not lining up at the box office. An effort is underway to rally the theater-going public to save the production. You can watch Cooper’s interview and see a brief clip from the show’s opening on MSNBC here.
Page Six had an Instagram post from Cooper urging people to attend:
Ain’t No Mo’ needs your help! It’s a new original play that’s BLACK AF, which are both things that make it hard to sell on Broadway. We need all hands on deck with urgency. In the name of art, in the name of resistance, in the name of we belong here too, in the name of every storytelling ancestor who ever graced a Broadway stage or was told they never could.
Cooper said that the production has kept ticket prices low and urged people to sponsor someone by buying them a ticket. Will and Jada Smith purchased tickets for an entire show.
Maybe the production does not have the star power to generate an audience. Maybe there’s just not been enough publicity. And, of course, it may be due to racism because, reasons.
But it may also be that people are burned out with trying to be woke 24/7. For years, from the office of the president of the United States to the local school boards and every office, activist, bureaucrat, and administrator in between, people have had racism, trans, and every other phobia and “ism” pounded into them at every juncture. People who have known they are not racist are tired of defending themselves every minute, except perhaps when it comes to their children. And they also know that discussion is simply impossible. And even the true believers may be growing weary of confessing their sins with every other breath. How many times can you flog yourself on the steps of Canterbury Cathedral, especially for offenses you know you did not commit? How long are you supposed to clap for Stalin before your hands start to bleed and your arms cramp? You may be opposed to racism. You may even have rended your garments and heaped ashes on your head over your privilege. But when the accusations become unrelenting and perpetual repentance for values you do not hold and actions you did not commit becomes a mandatory national ritual, you might begin to tune out. At least personally. Never publicly, lest a fresh round of accusations commence. But privately, you may be too tired to go the distance yet again. No matter how non-racist you are, you will never be non-racist or anti-racist enough.
At this point, I must add the mandatory disclaimer that there are racists. We all know that. It has always been thus. But not everyone is racist. I was never a racist and am still not. You can visit some of my other pieces if you want to read those stories. But no matter my history and my views, society still says that I am racist by virtue of my existence. It is the only permissible conclusion. And as the Borg might say, “Debate is futile.” Since in the public square, everything is racist, people may simply be looking for some emotional respite in their private lives. They may be tired of constantly being relegated to stereotypes and not individuals. And eventually, the response to an accusation of an “ism” or phobia may become autonomic, with people, even in their private moments, routinely driving themselves into the ground over prejudices they do not really hold. Struggle sessions may become everyday things, as people replace their daily affirmations with their daily accusations.
Which may have been the point all along.
One thing that ties recent mass shootings? Harassment
One thing I think we do a terrible job of when it comes to preventing mass shootings is trying to get a peek inside the minds of the killers.
People don’t just wake up one day and suddenly decide to slaughter people by the gross. That kind of pathology likely develops over time, which means it can be prevented from ever happening, preferably without a single restriction on any civil liberty.
In fairness, there have been looks at what mass shooters have in common. They found things like treatment for mental illness and broken homes as common themes.
Yet in looking at recent shootings, I found something else. A history of harassment.
I’m not talking about them necessarily harassing others, but instead being the victims of harassment.
Let’s start with the University of Virginia shooter. He allegedly killed three of the school’s football players after a field trip.
However, it also appears that he reported to his father that he was the victim of bullying.
The alleged killer at Club Q in Colorado Springs also dealt with harassment, and on a much larger scale. In fact, entire legions on the internet enjoyed harassing him.
In Chesapeake, the killer there left a note outlining his grievances, which included claims of being harassed by others.
That’s three recent killers who were either being harassed or felt as if they were, but they’re not the only ones.
In Uvalde, for example, the killer there had a history of being harassed, with some actually calling him a school shooter.
Now, understand that nothing about this is an attempt to excuse these killings. It’s not. There’s literally no valid reason to respond to harassment like this with homicidal action.
But if we’re ever going to uncover the roots of these horrific crimes, we simply have to discuss some uncomfortable things. That includes any potential role that harassment of these individuals might play in this.
It’s not an excuse and I’m not necessarily saying the harassers are responsible for these crimes. No, that responsibility rests on those who pull the trigger, as it always has.
Yet on the same token, if this is a unifying thread, then it’s a thread we as a society can work together to severe.
It’s one thing to be in the public sphere and receive harsh reactions to what you’ve offered up. I’ve been there myself and while it sucks, it’s the price you pay for playing in that sandbox.
But these cases appear to be different. These are people who were reportedly being harassed without that kind of action.
Now, I also have to admit that harassment may not be the issue, but a persecution complex. Maybe many of these people who reported being harassed really weren’t. It’s possible that they just thought the criticism they received was harassment when it was really nothing of the sort.
Sure, we know at least some were actually harassed and bullied, but it’s possible this isn’t a unifying thread among mass killers. I don’t think it is, necessarily, but I wouldn’t be intellectually honest if I didn’t concede the possibility.
Either way, this is something that the supposed experts should be looking at.
Too bad they can’t look beyond pushing for gun control.
BLUF
When parents, voters, and political leaders understand the true nature of Drag Queen Story Hour and the ideology that drives it, they will work quickly to restore the limits that have been temporarily—and recklessly—abandoned. They will draw a bright line between adult sexuality and childhood innocence, and send the perversions of “genderf***,” “primitivism,” and “degeneracy” back to the margins, where they belong.
The Real Story Behind Drag Queen Story Hour
Aimed at children, the phenomenon is far more subversive than its defenders claim
Drag Queen Story Hour—in which performers in drag read books to kids in libraries, schools, and bookstores—has become a cultural flashpoint. The political Right has denounced these performances as sexual transgressions against children, while the political Left has defended them as an expression of LGBTQ pride. The intellectual debate has even spilled into real-world conflict: right-wing militants affiliated with the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters have staged protests against drag events for children, while their counterparts in the left-wing Antifa movement have responded with offers to serve as a protection force for the drag queens.
Families with children find themselves caught in the middle. Drag Queen Story Hour pitches itself as a family-friendly event to promote reading, tolerance, and inclusion. “In spaces like this,” the organization’s website reads, “kids are able to see people who defy rigid gender restrictions and imagine a world where everyone can be their authentic selves.” But many parents, even if reluctant to say it publicly, have an instinctual distrust of adult men in women’s clothing dancing and exploring sexual themes with their children.
These concerns are justified. But to mount an effective opposition, one must first understand the sexual politics behind the glitter, sequins, and heels. This requires a working knowledge of an extensive history, from the origin of the first “queen of drag” in the late nineteenth century to the development of academic queer theory, which provides the intellectual foundation for the modern drag-for-kids movement.
The drag queen might appear as a comic figure, but he carries an utterly serious message: the deconstruction of sex, the reconstruction of child sexuality, and the subversion of middle-class family life. The ideology that drives this movement was born in the sex dungeons of San Francisco and incubated in the academy. It is now being transmitted, with official state support, in a number of public libraries and schools across the United States. By excavating the foundations of this ideology and sifting through the literature of its activists, parents and citizens can finally understand the new sexual politics and formulate a strategy for resisting it.
Microsoft just dropped the latest Pride flag design, and yes, IT’S REAL.
“…the endgame of woke tribalism is the fracturing of things like the Pride flag into millions of ‘oppression groups’ until we get down to the rights of the individual”
Just more willful ignorance
BLUF
The stereotype of gun owners is a lie. The media calls us male-pale-and-stale, and who cares if old white men are disarmed anyway. In fact, gun owners now look like a cross section of the USA. Minority urban women are the fastest growing segment of new gun owners. I think Democrat politicians are afraid that more women and minorities will decide to become gun owners. These new gun owners might enter the culture of armed America and protect themselves.
That fear keeps Democrat politicians up at night.
New Gun Owners are Invisible to the News Media and Democrat Politicians
More people own guns today than ever before. That growth is a continuation of a long term trend that goes back several decades. In addition to that gradual increase, we’ve also seen an extraordinary growth in new gun buyers in the last two years. We had to rewrite who owns guns and why they own them. Today, about four-out-of-ten families have a firearm in their home. Despite the astounding changes in gun ownership, the way some politicians talk about guns and gun owners is out of date. New gun owners are subjected to a crash course in being misperceived and misrepresented by politicians and by the mainstream news media alike.
What is real and what is fantasy?
Sitting President, Joe Biden, echoed old myths about gun owners at a fundraising event in June. He said,
“More people get killed with their own gun in their home trying to stop a burglar than, in fact, any other cause.. Think about that. Because it’s hard to do. It’s a hard thing to do.”
Mayor John Fetterman, the Democrat candidate for the US Senate from Pennsylvania, also felt the need to comment on guns and gun ownership. He said,
“I have seen with my own eyes at the scenes in my community what a military grade round does to the human body.” He said that rifles, particularly modern rifles, should be outlawed.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul said,
“This whole concept that a good guy with a gun will stop the bad guys with a gun, it doesn’t hold up. And the data bears this out, so that theory is over.”
Those statements don’t fit what we know. We know a lot about new gun owners because we talked with them. Gun stores asked new gun owners why they wanted a gun so the gun shop employee could direct the customer to the appropriate products. The industry trade group representing firearms manufacturers and distributors collected those answers. The stereotypical gun owner used to be an old white man who bought a gun to go hunting. Several years ago, personal safety replaced hunting as the major reason new gun owners buy a firearm. Today, gun owners are from every demographic group; male and female, rich and poor, urban and rural. Gun owners represent every ethnic and racial group. About one-out-of-four African-American adults own a firearm. It seems strange that the mainstream media and politicians have deliberately ignored that change.
We Are No Longer Conservatives; We Are Restorationists.
Conservatives have long struggled to define the term “conservatism.” This makes sense since it’s always been less a political ideology than a life philosophy. Perhaps even an attitude.
When asked to define conservatism, Abraham Lincoln replied, “Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?”
William F. Buckley updated his answer for the mid-20th century, framing it in opposition to liberalism. In other words, an anti-ideology. In his book Up from Liberalism (1959), Buckley declares conservativism is “freedom, individuality, the sense of community, the sanctity of the family, the supremacy of the conscience, the spiritual view of life.”
A half-century earlier, G.K. Chesterton didn’t so much define the term as identify the action it requires.
All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. [Orthodoxy, 1908]
It isn’t enough to “stand athwart history, yelling ‘Stop.’” Conservatism requires intentional, aggressive work to evaluate the firehose of proposed changes, then promote the good ones and destroy the bad.
Or, as Reagan put it, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
Reagan was prophetic. These days, conservatives spend a lot of time telling younger generations what it was once like to be free. We speak of lost liberties and wonder how best to restore them.
Here’s the plain fact: there’s no need for conservatism when there’s little left to conserve.
That’s why, over at The Federalist, John Daniel Davidson declared, “We Need To Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives.”
Conservatives have long defined their politics in terms of what they wish to conserve or preserve — individual rights, family values, religious freedom, and so on. Conservatives, we are told, want to preserve the rich traditions and civilizational achievements of the past, pass them on to the next generation, and defend them from the left. In America, conservatives and classical liberals alike rightly believe an ascendent left wants to dismantle our constitutional system and transform America into a woke dystopia. The task of conservatives, going back many decades now, has been to stop them.
In an earlier era, this made sense. There was much to conserve. But any honest appraisal of our situation today renders such a definition absurd. After all, what have conservatives succeeded in conserving? In just my lifetime, they have lost much: marriage as it has been understood for thousands of years, the First Amendment, any semblance of control over our borders, a fundamental distinction between men and women, and, especially of late, the basic rule of law.
We have conserved a few things — gun rights, red-state economic policies, religious liberty (for now) — but it’s hard to argue with the main thrust of Davidson’s assessment.
The right isn’t conserving much but desperately trying to restore our freedom, our family, and our constitutional order.
Words mean things, and in the modern age, so does branding. I agree that “conservative” has outlasted its accuracy, but we need to call ourselves something. To that end…
We are no longer Conservatives; we are Restorationists.
We seek not to conserve the role of tradition in our society but to restore tradition to its rightful place.
Similarly, there are no national borders left to conserve; they must be restored.
The family is shattered and we must reintroduce this cornerstone of civilization. (That includes gender norms promoted from the dawn of time.)
Free speech must be placed back in the academy, workplace, and civil society.
All of this is work. Hard work. As such, it requires all of us to join the effort; neighbors, business leaders, teachers, and our government.
This is no longer the time for Conservation. On to Restoration.
There is an eight-year-old girl who likes to play in streams and look under rocks for squirmy critters. She not only knows how to throw a ball but enjoys doing it. She loves math and logic, and has no interest in dolls or dresses. She will grow up to be a woman. Because that’s what girls do.
There is another eight-year-old girl who likes to give tea parties for her stuffed animals. She likes to dance all the dances, often with other girls who like to do the same thing. She loves to read, and has no interest in trucks or trails. She will also grow up to be a woman. Because, again, that’s what girls do.
One of these girls may want to be an astronaut. The other, a chef. Or a mother. Or a lawyer. An actress. A racecar driver. Are all of these desires equally likely among girls? They are not. Girls are likely to want some things more than others. But guess what: the girls who aren’t girly are still girls. You can tell, in part, by the fact that they grow up to be women. Because that’s what girls do.
Sex isn’t assigned at birth. Sex is observed at birth.
Sometimes, in fact, sex is observed before birth. Most commonly, this happens via ultrasound imaging of the fetus. Less commonly, it is possible to look at the karyotype—a visual representation of fetal chromosomes, organized roughly by size—which has been obtained through the usefully diagnostic but somewhat risky mid-pregnancy procedure known as amniocentesis.
All mammals have “Genetic Sex Determination,” which means that we have chromosomes dedicated to starting us down the path of maleness or femaleness.
Some victims are more equal than others.
If I were a real MAGA extremist, I’d be able to tell you about a specific murder trend happening in America right now, but I don’t want to get on the FBI terror watch list.
What I can tell you is this: we are living in a real-life version of The Purge. Murders are up at least 44 percent in two years.
For over two years, we heard a long list of murder victims shouted on TV every day. I know by heart the names and murder circumstances of Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin, Ahmaud Arbury, George Floyd, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and many others.
This new trend is a little different. In fact, I couldn’t help noticing that some particularly gruesome recent killings have been met with a strangely subdued reaction by the mainstream media. Which is weird, because silence is violence.
Crime itself is nothing new. Like many of you, I’ve already been a victim of lots of crimes. Multiple cars broken into overnight, wallets pickpocketed at bars, that sort of thing.
I have also been the victim of a few much scarier crimes. Once, I was robbed at gunpoint. I was alone, walking home just after dusk on a prestigious East Coast college campus. The robber demanded my wallet as he jabbed his handgun into me. He snatched the $20 I gave him and ran away.
Last year, I arrived at a public park to retrieve one of my children from sports practice. As I pulled into the lot, I noticed a group of men hanging around a parked car. My inner systemic racist noticed that they were young, black, dressed like gangbangers, and smoking weed. My inner white privilege told me I should find a different place to park, immediately.
But I convinced myself that there was no way anything bad could happen here, in full daylight, in view of a playground full of kids, so I dismissed my inner “racist” and pulled into the lot.
I called my husband and told him, “I think I just interrupted a gang meetup. These guys look like they have guns.”
He told me to ignore my inner racist. “It’s broad daylight, you’ll be fine.”
Thirty seconds after hanging up with him, I heard the unmistakable sound of gunfire close by. At first I thought I was dreaming. How could my inner racist have been so right? And then I thought, oh no, I was correct in my assumption that these guys were sketchy, and now I’m going to die a “racist.”
The shots were very loud, because they were being fired three feet behind my car. The shooter was crouched down and aiming at the guys who had been standing around the parking lot and were now running for their lives. I watched him shoot one man in the stomach. The victim clutched his guts, screaming, and fell to the ground.
I tried to make myself as small as I could. I learned that you can’t get down very far when you’re stuck in the front seat of a minivan. The shooter kept blasting away, and I called my husband back, this time to say goodbye. He was an hour away, totally unable to help me, and I just managed to tell him what was happening. Then I braced myself in case a stray bullet came through my car, and like the racist that I am, I prayed and waited for death.
When the shooting stopped, there was absolute silence. That was the moment I was most afraid, since I assumed the shooter would be searching for a getaway car, and I was the perfect carjacking prospect, since I’d been the only other person dumb enough to park in the lot. Take another car, I silently begged. Please don’t take this one, with the toddler car seats in it. Do you know how expensive those are?
I heard sirens in the distance. I waited on the floor of my car until a cop tapped on my window. As he took my witness statement he told me, “This parking lot is a gang hangout for the Bloods. What in the world are you doing here?” “Trying not to be racist!” I almost said.
Ah, the Bloods, of course. That would explain why the guys running away had been wearing red, and why the shooter wore a blue baseball cap. (The Bloods are one of the two big L.A. gangs; the other is the Crips. In the 1980s, even white kids from the westside couldn’t go out wearing red or blue, since the Bloods wear red, and Crips wear blue. It is as stupid as it sounds, and if you don’t believe me, go watch the Sean Penn movie Colors.)
My “racism” had tried to warn me, but I didn’t listen. The cop then beckoned for me to get out and look at something behind my car. There were bullet casings all around my car, inches from my tires. “Your car is in the crime scene so we can’t let you leave,” he told me, as another cop strung yellow investigation tape around my parking spot.
My son emerged from the gym with his team. I stared at him and realized that if they had walked out five minutes earlier, it might have been a bloodbath. Rounds had gone through at least two nearby cars, including one containing the parent of a boy on the team, but by some miracle no other innocent people were hurt.
The cop, a Latino guy, advised me to stay away from the park, since it’s near the projects that “the gang controls.” He was telling me to listen to my inner racist! What if I’d pulled up to the parking lot, taken a look at the group of men, and decided not to go in? Would that have been the right thing to do—or the racist thing to do?
As the police officer talked to me, furious people from the neighborhood stood on the other side of the police tape and yelled things like, “Fuck you! Get the fuck out, this is our neighborhood!” Looking back, I probably should have apologized to the polite young man who screamed “white bitch,” since my “racism” is certainly what drew the police to his park that afternoon—it may have even instigated the shooting.
Common Sense is “Racism”