From "trans strippers don't exist" to "racy, stripper adult drag queens have no place around kids" in three days flat. pic.twitter.com/S7xZq9ADJ6
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) June 20, 2022
Who in the world is going to distinguish between racy, stripper adult drag queens" and "fun, costumed non-blue drag queens"? What are you possibly thinking @sullydish ? https://t.co/NSJgRNSHWu
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) June 20, 2022
Analysis: Guns Are Normal and Normal People Use Guns
As I hope to write regularly for The Reload, I thought my first contribution ought to say something about how I generally approach American gun culture, which bears on the fierce debates over guns taking place across the country.
I am a sociologist who has been studying American gun culture for the past decade. My approach to the topic differs considerably from most of my gun studies colleagues. Rather than focusing on crime, injury, and death with firearms, my work is based on the proposition that guns are normal and normal people use guns. This is not an article of faith or belief statement for me; rather, it is based on my empirical observations of guns and gun owners.
When I say guns are normal and normal people use guns, I mean it in two senses. First, guns and gun ownership are common, widespread, and typical. Second, guns and gun ownership are not inherently associated with deviance or abnormalities.
The normality of guns runs deep in human history. The use of projectile weapons is behaviorally normal for Homo sapiens as a species. Today’s widely owned civilian firearms are part of an unbroken thread of what Randy Miyan calls “the human-weapon relationship,” stretching back to rocks in the uniquely evolved hands of our prehistoric ancestors. As paleoanthropologist John Shea concludes, “Projectile weaponry is uniquely human and culturally universal. We are the only species that uses projectile weaponry, and no human society has ever abandoned its use.”
Although most societies today – consensually or not – give over to the state a monopoly on legitimate violence and hence the ability to restrict civilian ownership of projectile weaponry, the United States is an outlier in having a significant portion of the population insist upon their right to own firearms independent of the state, a right written into the U.S. Constitution and many state constitutions. In early American history, guns were widely owned by those who could legally do so. One reliable estimate found guns in 50 to 73 percent of male estates and even 6 to 38 percent of female estates. These rates compare favorably to other common items listed in male estates like swords or edged weapons (14% of inventories), Bibles (25%), or cash (30%).
Even as the nation has become more settled, more industrial, and more urbanized, levels of firearms ownership remain exceptionally high. Accounting for under-reporting of gun ownership in surveys, a reasonable estimate is that 40% of all American adults personally own a gun, over 100 million people. According to the Small Arms Survey, there are some 400,000,000 privately owned firearms in the United States. Actually, if the average gun owner owns 4 to 5 guns, then the actual number of civilian firearms could be closer to half a billion.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, shooting guns is also very normal in the United States. In 2017, the nonpartisan Pew Research Center asked, “Regardless of whether or not you own a gun, have you ever fired a gun?” Nearly three-quarters of respondents (72%) said YES. In population terms, nearly 180 million adults in America have fired a gun. Pew also asked, “Just your best guess, at what age did you FIRST fire a gun, whether you owned it or not.” 63% of respondents answered that they were under 18 years of age when they first shot a gun.
None of this denies that there are what Claude Werner calls serious mistakes and negative outcomes with guns. These range from unintentional discharges to mass public shootings. But huge denominators in terms of gun owners and guns owned means the absolute risk of accidental injury or death, homicide, or suicide is quite small.
I have previously illustrated this using conservative estimates of guns and gun ownership and broad estimates of negative outcomes (including accidental and intentional deaths and injuries as well as non-fatal criminal injuries and victimizations with firearms). I found that just 0.15% of guns and 0.79% of gun owners are involved in fatal or non-fatal injuries or victimizations involving firearms annually.
Looked at the other way around, 99.85% of guns and 99.21% of gun owners are NOT involved in fatal or non-fatal injuries or victimization involving firearms annually.
Of course, the normality of guns and gun owners is not just an academic question. It is reflected in the way many gun control activists and politicians approach guns. At a time when people use terms like “insane” and “addiction” — or worse — to characterize gun culture in America, it’s important to remember that guns are both commonly owned and generally non-problematic here.
Unfortunately, normality is unremarkable. It is not headline news. It is not of concern to social scientists. And yet it is my dominant experience of guns and gun owners.
Them: ‘You Must Care!’ Us: ‘No.’
We refuse to care about stupid Democrat obsessions.
We don’t care about climate change. It’s a hoax designed to fill the hole in lib souls that used to be filled with faith, and for the ruling caste, it’s a tool to steal our money and freedom.
We don’t care about some alleged moral necessity to disarm normal Americans. When they whine, “The purpose of guns is to hurt people,” we nod. Yes, they are. Our guns never have and never will hurt anyone who is not a criminal or an aspiring tyrant. But when those categories of bad people get uppity, yeah, we reserve our right to hurt them within the bounds of proper laws and morality.
We don’t care about claims that America was stolen from other people. Like every other patch of inhabitable dirt on the planet, America was conquered from people who conquered it from someone else first. When we make a “land acknowledgment,” it goes as follows: “Yeah, we took it, and now it’s ours.”
We don’t care about their froth-mouthed accusation that America is some sort of racist cauldron of hatred. Many of us served in real racist cauldrons of hatred and have no time for the silly posturing of frivolous ninnies pretending to be white saviors by nattering on about non-existent “white supremacy” – which is a remarkably colorblind concept since anyone who rejects the ideology of the faculty lounge can practice it regardless of race or ethnicity, including people who are black and Latinx – hey, it’s our word now, commies, and we’re never letting you live it down.
And we don’t care about a minor tussle – punctuated by an unpunished government murder of an unarmed trespasser – from over a year and a half ago, except to the extent that the political persecutions that followed must be remedied and avenged. Every non-narc victim of this Stasi witch hunt should be pardoned and the next GOP administration should settle their civil rights suits for the outrageous violation inflicted upon them by a politicized DOJ for huge sums. The guy who shot Ashli Babbitt should be prosecuted – there’s no statute of limitations on murder – and the GOP, once it takes Congress back in November, should investigate the federal agents on the scene, the systemic denial of rights, and the selective prosecutions that followed. That would make for an interesting set of primetime hearings, as opposed to the tedious political onanism of the current kangaroo kommittee.
We don’t care about any of it. And that is important. The left can only impose its will when it convinces us to choose to let them do so. They have to make us care. Look at them. They are a gaggle of mutated misfits, neurotic chicks, academic parasites, grievance hustlers, and femmy doofuses who can’t do a push-up. They can force nothing on us. That’s why they attempt to enlist the power of the state to do it for them, but their real power comes from us going along. When you watch some stupid Star Wars spin-off on Disney, you empower them. When you refuse to vote because you are convinced your vote will never be counted – despite huge election reforms in places like Georgia – you help them. When you let yourself think, “Gosh, maybe this androgenous fatty screaming that I am a privileged tool of the patriarchy has a point because s/he/it would never lie to my face,” you let them win.
No.
Instead, fight for what you care about.
We care that America neither be humiliated by seventh century savages nor abandon our allies to them. We’re going to reform our military into what it was meant to be – an awesome and awesomely unwoke killing machine that strikes terror in the hearts of communists and other terrorists around the globe.
We care that American warriors are no longer sacrificed in stupid wars by people who never pick up a weapon except to shoot their hunting buddies in the face by accident. We’re going to oust the Beltway Cowgirl and her ilk. But not Adam Kinzinger – his new Democrat friends already ousted him through gerrymandering, and it must sure be humiliating to have been so publicly treated like a cellblock punk. No, we’re electing based Republicans who know what time it is. It’s time to fight.
We care that our schools are hardened to protect themselves from the little psychos this sick culture breeds. And we care that they not teach woke nonsense. We’re going to clean them up one school board insurrection at a time, and if the FBI thinks that makes us terrorists, then that’s just another reason to close it down.
We care about the culture enough to make it clear to woke companies that if they side with our enemies, they are our enemies, and there is a price for choosing to be our enemies.
We care about it taking $140 to fill up the tanks of our SUVs when oil is sitting there untouched under the surface of our great land because to get it would offend Gaia and all her followers in Manhattan and Santa Monica. We’re going to elect a new president from the “Drill, baby, drill” caucus.
We care about our kids not becoming the psycho-sexual playthings of skeevy perverts, whether hired by some idiot principal or elsewhere in the culture. We’re going to punch back so hard on these mutants that they’ll understand that der kinder are off-limits or else.
We care about America. We’re well aware that this is the greatest country on earth, the greatest country in human history, and we are not about to give it up to mollify a bunch of tantrum-throwing weenies trying to draw us into the psycho-drama created by their daddy issues.
And we care enough about America to tell these freaks demanding that we care about their Toobin Zoom call litany of gripes, “No.”
In the 1960s, campus protesters rejected adult authority, writes William Deresiewicz. Now the “young progressive elite” want the grownups to protect them from emotional and psychological harm, writes William Deresiewicz on Bari Weiss’s Common Sense Substack.
Not much has changed since he wrote Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of America’s Elite in 2013, he writes.
We are back to in loco parentis, in fact if not in law. College is now regarded as the last stage of childhood, not the first of adulthood. . . . The nature of woke protests, the absence of Covid and other protests, the whole phenomenon of excellent sheephood: all of them speak to the central dilemma of contemporary youth, which is that society has not given them any way to grow up — not financially, not psychologically, not morally.
. . . The attributes of adulthood — responsibility, maturity, self-sacrifice, self-control — are no longer valued, and frequently no longer modeled. So children are stuck: they want to be adults, but they don’t know how.
“Beware of prepackaged rebellions,” he tells the Class of 2022. “That protest march that you’re about to join may be a herd.”
Becoming an independent person isn’t easy, writes Deresiewicz. “Childhood is over. Dare to grow up.”
Stanford University (motto: “Let the winds of freedom blow.”) doesn’t want to let students grow up, writes Bill Evers of the Independent Institute in the Washington Examiner.
The Office of Student Affairs, which had fewer than 50 employees just three decades ago, now employs more than 400 administrators who micromanage students and infantilize adults who pay for an education at Stanford.
Under the ResX plan, students are assigned to a campus “neighborhood” for their undergraduate careers, Evers writes. They will find ethnic-themed dorms for the “Black Diaspora” and “Chicanx/Latinx” students to apartment buildings promoting “the IDEAL (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access in a Learning community).”
Students’ social life is regulated: Students must register any party they host, he writes. Get-togethers during “dead weeks” before finals are banned, as is hard liquor and drinking games, even for students 21 and older.
These measures “have drawn widespread condemnation from students, including a student-led health and safety initiative that provides snacks and water at parties and walks students home on the weekends,” Evers writes. “These students say that the rule changes have spurred an increase in binge drinking.”
Look around and all you see is failure.
A bunch of kids are being murdered by some semi-human, so what do you do? Draw your weapon and put him down or die trying? Or do you sit there, doing nothing?
The same government we’re supposed to give up our guns to because they have it all under control chose Option B. It chose failure.
Tell me more about how the real problem is that we have the capacity to defend ourselves.
But the real problem, to our enemies, is not that murderers murder. The real problem, to our enemies, is the very fact that we can defend ourselves. The objective of our trash elite is not to have a country that runs well, where people are secure, and where rights are respected. The objective is to rule. And if a bunch of kids die for that, they’re fine with it. They can live with failure, but not accountability.
The clusterfark in Uvalde is just a symptom of a much bigger pathology. It is a symbol of the failure of every institution in our society. And the solution is never to revamp the institutions and eject the parasites heading them. It’s always – always – to take power from us and give it to the people who screwed up in the first place.
Show of hands – who was shocked to hear that this creep was on law enforcement’s radar before his killing spree?
I see a distinct lack of hands.
But the failure is not limited to being unable to stop murderers. It’s not even the only failure involving schools. The schools are churning out a generation of quasi-literates and have been turned into a Grindr for perverted weirdos to use for grooming their prey. We got a good view of the failure during another epic failure, the COVID response.
This is systemic.
Everything is failing.
Go try to get baby formula.
See if you can afford gas. Hell, roll up to a Mickey D’s drive-thru and try to roll away with lunch for four under $30.
The courts don’t work, the Congress doesn’t work, and our alleged president is a borderline clinical moron who is lying when he’s not merely stupid. This human sex toy got up at Annapolis and told the Naval Academy grads that he had been accepted there. It was a lie – of course, he’s senile so maybe he believed it – and the regime media skipped over it like they skip over everything else that offends the official narrative.
Failure, failure, failure.
What is one institution that works? Just one.
Well, he answers his question.
BLUF
The idea that guns caused the carnage we have faced is so intellectually bankrupt that it isn’t worth discussing. Remembering where we were as a nation just 30 years ago makes it even more so. It’s time to ask what changed.
Flashback 30 Years: Guns Were in Schools… and Nothing Happened.
The millennial generation might be surprised to learn that theirs is the first without guns in school. Just 30 years ago, high school kids rode the bus with rifles and shot their guns at high school rifle ranges.
After another school shooting, it’s time to ask: what changed?
Cross guns off the list of things that changed in thirty years. In 1985, semi-automatic rifles existed, and a semi-automatic rifle was used in Florida. Guns didn’t suddenly decide to visit mayhem on schools. Guns can’t decide.
We can also cross the Second Amendment off the list. It existed for over 200 years before this wickedness unfolded. Nothing changed in the Constitution.
That leaves us with some uncomfortable possibilities remaining. What has changed from thirty years ago when kids could take firearms into school responsibly and today might involve some difficult truths.
Let’s inventory the possibilities.
What changed? The mainstreaming of nihilism. Cultural decay. Chemicals. The deliberate destruction of moral backstops in the culture. A lost commonality of shared societal pressures to enforce right and wrong. And above all, simple, pure, evil.
Before you retort that we can’t account for the mentally ill, they existed forever.
Paranoid schizophrenics existed in 1888 and 2018. Mentally ill students weren’t showing up in schools with guns even three decades ago.
So it must be something else.
So, what is going on? There was a stopped shooter in Charleston West Virginia. And it’s tempting to go a little crazy and start wondering if the three letters are “activating” people way less stable than the ones that hang out on this blog, and getting them to go hot.
ON THE OTHER HAND, as I’ve mentioned 2020 and 2020 Won not to mention 2020 Too we’ve been driving the entire population insane. And the run away inflation and weird job market — look, yo, yes, I hear everyone is screaming for employees. And that seems to be true in retail and food service, but anyone above that level of specialization or skill, that I know is looking for a job, is meeting serious headwinds — aren’t helping people who are already economically marginal.
In any population, at any given time, there are any number of people who might decide to go out via suicide by cop or in a blaze of ignominy by killing a bunch of innocents. And by the way, this has nothing to do with the availability of guns. Mass killing happens in every culture, though the Portuguese guy a couple of decades back who killed an entire group of people (like 20) with knives is still a puzzle. What were they doing, while waiting to be killed? Never mind.
Yeah, the democrats are trying to bang the drum for “sensible gun control” because it is their last desperate hope. They know what they WANT to do to the population, and it doesn’t work if the population is armed. Sooner or later, the signal goes up, and then it’s Cathy bar the door and they lose. (Note I’m not saying someone will give a signal. I’m saying that something will happen that the majority of the population will interpret as a sign to cut loose Also note this is not a threat. It’s a prediction.) So they are trying to bang their little drum, which means those of you who work in the gun industry know overtime and crazy hours and price jumps are coming, right? Because every time “Sensible gun control” (We’re so far past sense it’s not even funny) is uttered, the national gun industry go brrrrrrrr and the air temperature heats a fraction, from all the factories working over time.
But that, just like their idiotic new boogieman of “White Supremacy” is just that. Idiotic. To call any of these crimes “white supremacy” or think it’s coherent, organized and from the right, you need to be from another planet. Also white needs to have a new, until now unexplored meaning when it’s black-on-Asian, leftist-on-human, Latin on Mostly Latin crimes.
The thing we do know about almost all of these shooters is that they were known wolves. Either they had had run ins with the police before or — frankly — they were screaming cases of mental instability.
Someone reminded me that the shooter years ago, in the navy yard while on a trip in DC called the police to report that the lamps in his room were talking and conspiring against him.
The murderer in Uvalde had an history of cutting his own face, and this didn’t trigger SERIOUS mental health measures. He posted he was going to kill his grandmother (who, on cursory reading MIGHT have been the only stable influence in his life) and no one did anything.
Look, this country has a raging, stomping around insanity issue.
Every country does, to be fair.
The problem in this country — and the West in general — is both the way the Soviet Union used mad houses, and Soviet propaganda corrupting psychiatric theory.
The Soviet Union put political dissidents in mad houses, because if you don’t like happy fun socialist paradise, you’re self-obviously insane.
At the same time it propagandized the west with the idea our crazy people weren’t actually crazy. They were just reacting to the “unnatural” state of capitalism (As opposed to the imaginary communitarian paradise in pre-history that universities have invented and flogged on for decades.)
Enter a serious anti-de-instutionalization drive, and eventually the shutting down of the mad houses, and the new fun “homeless” crisis.
Let me start by saying that in a democratic republic incarceration of the insane is a seriously mind-bending business, because who defines insane, and who gets to pick and extend it?
So, it needs to be approached with extreme care.
BLUF
Meanwhile, our politicians and academics pit Americans against each other based on the color of their skin, while the media machine grants notoriety to cowardly killers whose names deserve to be forgotten. Add to that our social media-crazed culture’s obsession with a few seconds of fame at any expense, and it’s clear that the gun market isn’t what’s radically changed. We need to address the rot we’ve sown for our children to grow up in, and no amount of blaming firearms for our culture’s depravity is going to change that.
Guns Aren’t Radically Deadlier Than They Were 50 Years Ago, But Our Sick Culture Is.
Our culture has incubated a disdain for human life while preaching a gospel of indulging selfish urges, no matter how evil.
Various versions of the AR-15 are some of the popular firearms most relentlessly targeted by anti-gun lobbyists, with their semiautomatic capability (i.e., the ability to fire multiple rounds without manual reloading, while still requiring the pull of a trigger) blamed for the deadliness of many recent shootings. But Colt sold an AR-15 SP1 Sporter Rifle starting in 1964, 58 years ago.
Flashback 30 Years: Guns Were in Schools… and Nothing Happened
This article was originally published in 2018.
The millennial generation might be surprised to learn that theirs is the first without guns in school. Just 30 years ago, high school kids rode the bus with rifles and shot their guns at high school rifle ranges.
After another school shooting, it’s time to ask: what changed?
Cross guns off the list of things that changed in thirty years. In 1985, semi-automatic rifles existed, and a semi-automatic rifle was used in Florida. Guns didn’t suddenly decide to visit mayhem on schools. Guns can’t decide.
We can also cross the Second Amendment off the list. It existed for over 200 years before this wickedness unfolded. Nothing changed in the Constitution.
That leaves us with some uncomfortable possibilities remaining. What has changed from thirty years ago when kids could take firearms into school responsibly and today might involve some difficult truths.
Let’s inventory the possibilities.
What changed? The mainstreaming of nihilism. Cultural decay. Chemicals. The deliberate destruction of moral backstops in the culture. A lost commonality of shared societal pressures to enforce right and wrong. And above all, simple, pure, evil.
Before you retort that we can’t account for the mentally ill, they existed forever.
Paranoid schizophrenics existed in 1888 and 2018. Mentally ill students weren’t showing up in schools with guns even three decades ago.
So it must be something else.
Those who have been so busy destroying the moral backstops in our culture won’t want to have this conversation. They’ll do what they do — mock the truth.
There was a time in America, before the Snowflakes, when any adult on the block could reprimand a neighborhood kid who was out of line without fear.
True ‘liberalism’ is respecting the rights, freedom and liberty of others.
We Battle the Left By Standing Up for Free Speech, Standing Up for Liberalism
When the Biden administration announced the creation of a Disinformation Governance Board last month critics immediately started portraying the agency as the “Ministry of Truth” from George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984.
Critics were right to make this comparison. The federal government has no business, constitutionally or morally, in deciding what Americans can say and not say.
But there was more to it than that. It was a line. A marker thrown down by the Left in the ongoing culture war over free speech.
Because it was truly crazy that the Biden administration would even consider going there. That any president in modern times would. This showed not only that mainstream Democrats had become this comfortable with censorship, private or even public, but that they believed their governance of our speech was a reasonable policy that Americans should just accept. It’s as if the people governing the country were completely unfamiliar with the historic rules and norms of the country they were running.
Hey Joe Biden, meet ‘America!’
Yet on Wednesday, the Biden administration announced that the Disinformation Governance Board was “paused” for the time being—just three weeks after its creation was announced.
This is also a marker in the war over free speech. And it’s not the only victory in recent times for those of us who oppose censorship. For a change, it has been the Left on defense recently.
Obviously, Team Biden figured out that the creation of this new Department of Homeland Security agency was bad politics for them heading into the midterm elections, along with a dozen other obstacles they will have come November.
But this move was also an acknowledgment that people aren’t going to put up with being dictated to by the woke mob anymore, which has seemed to control much of social media, entertainment, and the Democratic Party for the past few years.
“Rachel” Levine is a sick, twisted man who wants people to believe that there is a medical consensus for transitioning kids so that more people will do it. This is what a predator looks like.
The Brewing Myth of Medical ‘Consensus’ on Transitioning Children
We’ve all heard the oft-repeated myth that 97% of climate scientists agree that manmade climate change is real. This claim has been the go-to response by climate alarmists and activists for years.
If you’re a regular reader of this site, you know that this claim is pure garbage and has been debunked for a long time. Yet the myth prevails. Barack Obama once tried to up the number to 99.5%, but that didn’t catch on. I guess 97% just sounds cooler?
Truthfully, the number itself isn’t important—and not just because it’s phony—because the critical takeaway is that the fake statistic has been used by climate alarmists as proof that, save for a few on the fringe, there is “consensus” that climate change is real, that it is caused by humanity, and that we need to spend billions and billions of dollars on so-called green energy alternatives; otherwise, we’re all going to die yesterday.
Never mind that literally no apocalyptic climate prediction of the past century has ever panned out. New York City isn’t underwater (though sometimes the idea doesn’t bother me), and the only reason food is less available is because of supply chain problems—not massive droughts.
But the myth of consensus is a vital tool of the left to bring more people into their cause and justify all these billions of dollars being spent on green energy technology companies run by their donors. We know how compelling this argument has been; we’ve seen world leaders cite it repeatedly as fact.
So I am more than just a bit concerned that the radical left is now pushing the myth of “consensus” to justify transgender treatments for children.
During a recent interview with NPR, Rachel Levine, the Assistant Secretary of Health, claimed that “there is no argument” about “gender-affirming care” among pediatricians and doctors who specialize in adolescents.
Really? There’s “no argument” at all? None? Zero? Zilch? Nada? There’s 100% agreement? Not a mere 97%?
That’s what he said.
Depression-Era foods that are weirdly making a comeback.
The Great Depression lasted a decade, but its effects changed a generation. Echoing events of 2020, the Depression caused widespread unemployment and food shortages of meat, milk, and other pantry staples. Cooks during the unprecedented economic downturn learned eating simple meals without waste could stretch their dollar. The popularity of home gardens, foraging for food, and alternative recipes emerged as a way to work around high food costs of fresh produce, meat, and dairy products. Although 2020, fortunately, didn’t see the same long-term impacts as the 1930s, home cooking doesn’t appear to be going anywhere and Depression-era foods are making a comeback.
During the height of the pandemic, The New York Times reported empty shelves across the country and the inability of grocers to keep staple pantry items and fresh produce in stock. Essentials such as beans, rice, pasta, and peanut butter became hot commodities. Hot dog sales also spiked. Thanks to modern food shortages — and farmers being forced to destroy food — pared-down cooking habits are once again being embraced. Home cooks are turning to Depression-era foods made with affordable and shelf-stable ingredients to feed the whole family.
America Needs a Return to First Principles
How to revive U.S. vitality and confidence? Economists John Cogan and Kevin Warsh offer a way to think about what made the country prosperous. Pay attention to the ‘three I’s’—ideas, individuals and institutions.
The 21st century so far hasn’t been the best of times for America. First 9/11, then a financial crisis and deep recession, then a global pandemic without recent precedent. The economy has suffered, and politics has been upended. American self-confidence has been badly bruised, and public trust in institutions has plummeted. What can we do about it?
That’s the question that John Cogan and Kevin Warsh, both policy veterans and Journal contributors, asked themselves in September 2020 when prompted by former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. She had just taken over as director of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, where both men are affiliated, and she made a pained but probing observation.
As Mr. Warsh tells it, Ms. Rice said that while “people know what we conservatives believe about economic policy, it doesn’t seem like we’re winning. It doesn’t seem like we’re persuading people.” American policy makers and businesspeople, and leaders around the world, “are less sure why we believe what we believe, and they’re less sure why they should believe it, too.”
The two men treated Ms. Rice’s lament as a challenge and set out to write what Mr. Cogan describes as “a call to action.” Titled “Reinvigorating Economic Governance” and just released, it outlines a policy framework based “on our nation’s foundational principle of natural liberty.” Governments at all levels, Mr. Cogan says, aren’t dealing effectively with America’s challenges: “It’s because economic policy has strayed from what I think of as the first principles.”
The two are well suited for the role. Mr. Cogan, 75, is an economist at Hoover who served in Ronald Reagan’s budget office and is the author of an encyclopedic book on the history of U.S. entitlement programs. Mr. Warsh, 52, worked in the George W. Bush White House and was a governor at the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis.
Their paper is optimistic, almost revivalist, in tone, even as it highlights the many faults with American policy. The U.S. economy, it states, “is among the most powerful forces for good in the history of humankind.” The authors credit the “micro-foundations of the economy” for having driven living standards “to heights unimaginable at the nation’s founding.”
BLUF:
For Americans who seek forward-looking inspiration, the lesson is simple: The nation-state, and the tangible flourishing of the nation-state’s people, must always come first. There is no more important lesson for a decadent, late-stage republic to imbibe.
The Great Sovereignty Reclamation Movement.
The great debates of our time are not exclusively those hard-hitting ones affecting human anthropology and political community—how many genders exist, what criteria we should look for in prospective immigrants, and so forth. Certainly, many of our most notable debates do implicate those most foundational rifts. But some of our other most politically urgent and galvanizing disputes revolve less around substantive questions, such as the nature of justice, than they do around one of the oldest procedural questions in the history of political science: “Who decides?”
A look around the world at this present juncture suggests an emerging consensus: Through our own internal deliberations and our own political processes, “we, the people” should decide the fate of our own nation-states. Recent or ongoing examples in Hungary, France, Ukraine, and Israel are instructive. For political actors paying attention here on the American homefront, there are clear and compelling lessons to take away.
In Hungary last Sunday, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who had been facing relatively tight polling in the lead-up to the national election, cruised to a fourth term. Orban’s defiant national-conservative Fidesz party utterly dominated the unified opposition, which had included everyone from outright communists to full-on anti-Semitic fascists in a ham-fisted—and ultimately ill-fated—attempt to topple the government. Fidesz was wildly successful everywhere outside Budapest itself, and even gained seats in the parliament—this despite the sustained, yearslong campaign to decry Hungary’s alleged “democratic backsliding” from the New York Times, George Soros-funded nongovernmental organizations, and the other usual suspects.
The key lesson from Hungary: A proud nationhood is one that fights to secure its customs, folkways, and traditions from the overweening, heavy hand of the liberal imperium (here, the Brussels-based European Union).
Psaki again confirms she’s nothing more than a political hack that will say anything if the pay is good enough.
Trying to wrap my head around this level of insanity only brings me to the conclusion that since abortion is becoming increasingly more difficult to get in some states (and maybe soon nationwide), these pagans are still trying their best to sacrifice their children to their gods, and this goobermint is trying its best to aid and assist them.
White House’s Latest Threats Expose Depravity That Can Not Stand
If you were in a coma for the last decade and suddenly woke up, there’s likely nothing that would shock you more than how quickly radical transgender ideology has overtaken society.
Imagine hearing arguments in 2012 that children should not only be able to “choose” their “gender,” but that they have a civil right to physically mutilate themselves in response. Yet, that’s exactly where we are. As RedState has reported recently, calls for “gender-affirming care” have moved out of the fringe and firmly into mainstream Democrat politics.
But things are now shifting into an even more dangerous place, if one can even imagine that’s possible. While Republican-led states are seeking to limit the physical abuse of children through the use of “gender-affirming” surgeries which cut off the genitalia or breasts of minors, the White House is now threatening legal action in response.
Psaki Says Sex Reassignment Surgery, Puberty Blockers for Kids Is ‘Best Practice,’ States Preventing It Will Be Held Accountable pic.twitter.com/ZmboFDFIYx
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) April 7, 2022
“Today, in Alabama, instead of focusing on critical kitchen table issues like the economy, Covid or addressing the country’s mental health crisis, Republican lawmakers are currently debating legislation that, among many things, would target trans youths with tactics that threatens to put pediatricians in prison if they provide medically necessary life-saving health care for the kids they serve”…
…”But Alabama’s lawmakers and other legislators who are contemplating these discriminatory bills have been put on notice by the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services that laws and policies preventing care that health care professionals recommend for transgender minors may violate the Constitution and the federal law.”
Understand what this means. Yes, it’s couched as the targeting of anti-child abuse laws in states like Texas and Alabama, which is crazy enough on its own. A state absolutely has the right to disallow certain medical procedures it deems demonstratively harmful and abusive (including abortion, by the way). But the implications here go much further.
If it is somehow illegal for a state to say that children can’t be given “gender-affirming care,” specifically in regards to the mutilation of their bodies, because those children have a “civil right” to such care, that means that parents who refuse to take such steps can be held liable as well. Recall that several years ago in Texas, we witnessed a high-profile case involving a father who not only lost custody of his son but was forced to help pay for the “transition.” The legal system is not going to protect parents as these precedents become more and more common.
This kind of thing can not stand. Republicans lost a lot of ground over the last several decades because they felt they could float above the fray and not get into the trenches of the culture war. But we’ve now moved past disagreements about adult behavior. These are children we are talking about, and the Democrat establishment is now wholesale endorsing the destruction of their bodies, not just in the womb, but throughout adolescence.
Remember when some Republicans argued that we must get rid of Donald Trump because he broke “norms and traditions.” Meanwhile, the White House is proclaiming it possibly illegal to not mutilate kids based on childhood confusion. Does that sound normal or traditional to you? Elections do have consequences, and there’s a big one coming up in November. Perhaps more importantly, right-thinking individuals (i.e. those who object to child abuse) have a chance in 2024 to retake this lost ground and solidify the ability of states to protect children.
If there’s one issue that animates voters for the next three years of elections, this should be this. Do not forget. Do not relent. Make them pay at the ballot box.
The notion is people are moving away from proggie controlled places to ‘free America’. Let’s hope they leave those politics behind them too.
More Bad Census News for Blue America.
The Census Bureau formally counts the population only once every decade, but it updates its population estimates annually. While those estimates are not always rock-solid, they reflect the best available data — more precise than moving-truck rentals — to show where our people are shifting.
The latest data add the population change for counties between mid 2020 and mid 2021, following the release in December of the population shifts for states. First, the grim national news:
With immigration sharply curtailed during the pandemic, Americans just aren’t reproducing fast enough to make up for deaths from Covid. Some of this is a temporary problem that should get a bit better as things reopen, but it also reflects long-term trends as birth rates fall. The United States remains in an enviable position: We can add as many people as we need just by letting in more immigrants, if we want. But depending too much on immigrants is a poor substitute for a more balanced approach to population growth built around more born-and-raised Americans.
The boomingest place in America? Idaho. If we measure from April 2020, when the official census was taken, to July 2021, only ten states have grown their population by 1 percent or more:
If you’re keeping score at home, that’s seven states with Republican governors and Republican legislatures, one with a Democratic governor and a Republican legislature, and two with a Democratic governor and Democratic legislature. Of course, political leadership isn’t the only factor; who governs a state doesn’t even fully describe its governing climate, which may be built into long-standing laws. But the pattern is nonetheless pretty pronounced. Most of the growing are states in the Sun Belt or the Rockies with large religious populations.
By contrast, ten jurisdictions (eight states, D.C., and Puerto Rico) lost at least half a percent of their population:
Again, if we are keeping partisan score, the big blue states (New York, Illinois, and California) stick out along with D.C. and Hawaii as the top five slots on the list, with the Democrat-affiliated government of Puerto Rico in seventh place. The rest of the list includes two states with unified Republican governments, one (Louisiana) with a Democratic governor and Republican legislature, and one (Massachusetts) with a Republican governor and Democratic legislature.
Drilling down to the county level, we see Idaho and the surrounding areas with the strongest growth, as well as big parts of Tennessee, east Texas, north Georgia, and most of Florida outside Miami, but also people fanning out of cities such as New York and D.C. to the surrounding suburbs. The Rockies and the southern Appalachians are doing strongly, as Americans literally headed for the hills; the big cities and the Mississippi Valley took a pounding, and no state suffered as uniformly between its big blue city and its red counties as Illinois.
The hardest-hit counties in population decline, reflecting remote-work patterns and rising crime and housing costs, were dominated by the big blue cities. Four of the top ten were Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn, plus San Francisco and neighboring San Mateo County, Boston, and Jersey City.
What do we see in the booming areas? A lot of communities like The Villages and Myrtle Beach, and nine of the top ten in Florida, Idaho, or Utah.
As I have discussed at some length before, Democrats dodged a bullet by having the census conducted as of April 2020, rather than after a year of pandemic, remote work, and progressive law enforcement. If we take the mid-2021 population figures and run them through the formula for reapportionment, two states gain an additional House seat (Texas and Idaho), while two lose a seat (California and Minnesota). That is likely a net gain of two seats for Republicans in the House, and almost certainly a net gain of two electors in the Electoral College in a normal year.
Without getting too far into the math, these are the districts that just make it, and the ones that just miss, if we run the 2021 numbers:
While California would lose a seat if reapportionment was done as of mid 2021, it would also not be that distant from losing two seats. That is a grim trend for the Golden State if it continues in that direction for the rest of the decade, even at a slower pace post-pandemic. New York may also continue its downward trend, which has been ongoing for quite some time; the state had 45 House seats in the 1940s. Florida and Arizona, by contrast, have edged closer to adding another seat just from growing their populations since the census. In terms of the national balance of political power, this seems like good news for Republicans — but help that won’t arrive until 2032.
At least in the political climate of the moment, if not a decade from now, one thing all of this suggests is that we may see shifts in the relationship between the national popular vote for Congress and the presidency and the outcomes, as the major blue states in the next few years are likely to represent fewer people per House seat than the major red states.
BLUF:
In the November 2022 midterms, we are likely to see a historic “No!” to the orthodox left-wing agenda.
What will replace it is a return to what until recently had worked.
The prophets of the new world order sowed the wind and they will soon reap the whirlwind of an angry public….
President Joe Biden believes the Ukraine war will mark the start of a “new world order.” In the middle of the COVID global pandemic, Klaus Schwab and global elites likewise announced a “great reset.”
Accordingly, the nations of the world would have to surrender their sovereignty to an international body of experts. They would enlighten us on taxes, diversity, and green policies.
When former President Donald Trump got elected in 2016, marquee journalists announced partisan reporting would have to displace the old, supposedly disinterested approach to the news.
There is a common theme here.
In normal times progressives worry that they do not have public support for their policies. Only in crises do they feel that the political Left and media can merge to use apocalyptic times to ram through usually unpopular approaches to foreign and domestic problems.
We saw that last year: fleeing from Afghanistan, the embrace of critical race theory, trying to end the filibuster, pack the court, junk the Electoral College, and nationalize voting laws.
These “new orders” and “resets” always entail far bigger government and more unelected, powerful bureaucracies. Elites assume that their radical changes in energy use, media reporting, voting, sovereignty, and racial and ethnic quotas will never quite apply to themselves, the architects of such top-down changes.
So we common folk must quit fossil fuels, but not those who need to use corporate jets. Walls will not mar our borders but will protect the homes of Nancy Pelosi, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates.
Hunter Biden’s lost laptop will be declared, by fiat, not news. In contrast, the fake Alfa Bank “collusion” narrative will be national headline news for weeks.
Middle-class lifestyles will be curbed as we are instructed to strive for sustainability and transition to apartment living and mass transit. But the Obamas will still keep their three mansions, and Silicon Valley futurists will insist on exemptions for their yachts.
In truth, we are about to see a radical reset – of the current reset. It will be a different sort of transformation than the elites are expecting and one that they should greatly fear.
BLUF:
The public still has the will and the ability to organize resistance through protests, labor actions, and civil disobedience. Such resistance is essential for anyone who doesn’t wish to live in a dehumanizing and nightmarish dystopia.
Communicable diseases have always shaped civilization. The consequences of an epidemic can last for centuries, and the outcomes of many wars have hinged on viral and bacterial infections. Smallpox, for instance, played a central role in the European conquest of the New World. During the American Civil War, nearly two-thirds of soldiers’ deaths were caused by diseases like dysentery and typhoid.
The spread of the bubonic plague through medieval Europe presents one of the clearest examples of how an infectious disease can alter the course of history. By some estimates, the Black Death killed 30 percent to half of Europe’s population. The plague severely shrank the peasant workforce, boosting its labor power. Attempts by the nobility to curtail this trend only fueled turmoil and peasant revolts. With reduced agricultural output, the merchant class gained influence at the nobles’ expense, setting the stage for the transition away from a land-based economy and the eventual disintegration of the feudal system.
From 2020 to 2022, we have witnessed an attempt to engineer a reversal of this historical development. Covid-19, a disease many orders of magnitude less deadly than the plague, has been deliberately exploited by ruling elites to bring about a neo-feudal order. This regression has so far been marked by diminished quality of life, sharply increased inequality, and the erosion of personal freedoms and civil liberties. Plans for digital IDs and central-bank digital currencies may further accelerate these developments, and the result will be total domination of a property-less underclass by ultra-wealthy elites and their expert class of technocratic clerics.
Much has been made of the World Economic Forum, its cartoonishly villainous chairman, Klaus Schwab, and the infiltration of various governments through its “Young Global Leaders” program. The focus on this particular group of actors is useful for illustrating how coalitions of financiers, corporations, and unaccountable nongovernmental organizations shape global policies. Schwab’s pet slogans—“the Great Reset,” “the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” “You will own nothing, and you will be happy”—are now a sort of shorthand for the effort to impoverish the world population and technologically expand elites’ control.
This agenda, however, doesn’t need to be tied to one particular organization or group of leaders. Elites’ desire to subjugate the rest of the world isn’t a “conspiracy theory,” but a pattern of class conflict evident from world history. The outcome of this conflict, now raging across a tangible battlefield as well as a digital one, will determine the shape of the world to come.
Anti-gay activists are obsessed with talking about “grooming.”
Of course, the most obvious question is, will there be an AP Program for the advanced students?
Poll finds Republicans would stay and fight, Dems less so
It’s not exactly breaking news that there are profound differences between Republicans and Democrats. We see them every single day, especially in how we view the Second Amendment.
Now, understand, there are pro-gun Democrats. There aren’t many of them, but they do exist and I’m more than prepared to stand side-by-side with them to defend our right to keep and bear arms.
But they’re the minority in their party.
Yet the Second Amendment was meant as a bulwark against tyranny, either domestic or from foreign invasion, which brings us to Ukraine. What if something like that were to happen here. Who would stay and fight and who would flee the country.
Well, Quinnipiac decided to ask in a recent poll, and the results are fascinating.
As the world witnesses what is happening to Ukraine, Americans were asked what they would do if they were in the same position as Ukrainians are now: stay and fight or leave the country?
A majority (55 percent) say they would stay and fight, while 38 percent say they would leave the country.
Republicans say 68 – 25 percent and Independents say 57 – 36 percent they would stay and fight,
while Democrats say 52 – 40 percent they would leave the country.“When confronted with a terrible hypothetical that would put them in the shoes of the Ukrainians, Americans say they would stand and fight rather than seek safety in another country,” added Malloy.
Nearly half of Americans (49 percent) say the attack on Ukraine has contributed to them feeling anxious, while half (50 percent) say it has not.
1,374 U.S. adults nationwide were surveyed from March 4th – 6th with a margin of error of +/- 2.6 percentage points.
So more than two-thirds of Republicans and more than half of independents would stay and fight for their homes compared to more than half of all Democrats who would run.
Fascinating.