And yes, drag shows involving children are explicitly designed to re-engineer child sexuality. As the academic queer theorists have explained, these performances are "site[s] of queer pleasure" used to liberate children from "the rhetoric of childhood innocence."
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) September 6, 2022
Category: Culture
IT ALWAYS GOES BACK TO MARX, SOMEHOW…
Leftists will get impatient or roll their eyes when they hear someone like Jordan Peterson describe postmodernist “critical theory,” critical race theory, or any aspect of identity politics (especially the phenomenon of “gender fluidity”) as “cultural Marxism.” And yet. . .
Michael Anton drew my attention to a passage in the transcript of Leo Strauss’s seminar on Marx that he taught at the University of Chicago in 1960 (emphasis added):
Partly basing himself on Adam Smith, Marx makes this suggestion: the inequality of capacities which is empirically undeniable is the effect rather than the cause of the division of labor. So the inequality of capacities, in other words, is a social product, not a natural datum. Great inequality of capacities is certainly the effect of the division of labor. The division of labor in its turn leads rather to the impoverishment of the activities of the individual.
All this would seem to lead to the conclusion that with the abolition of the division of labor, eventually there will be equality of capacities. But does not the inequality have natural roots?
Yet what is the historical process except the conquest of nature, and therefore also to some extent of human nature? But to what extent is the historical process a conquest of human nature and therefore a conquest also of natural inequality? Marx is unable to give a principle here, and that is a revenge for his contempt about the question of the essence of man; because if the essence of man remains so wholly indeterminate, how can you then have any principle here?
Comment: this preceding paragraph expresses exactly the premises behind Kamala Harris’s seemingly incoherent recent statement that demonstrates the Marxist roots of her thought: “So equity, as a concept, says: Recognize that everyone has the same capacity, but in order for them to have equal opportunity to reach that capacity, we must pay attention to this issue of equity if we are to expect and allow people to compete on equal footing.”
To continue with Strauss:
Let us read the clearest passage of Marx on the natural root of the division of labor: “With the development of property the division of labor develops. The division of labor was originally nothing except the division of labor in the sexual act.” Period.
In other words—that is of course an absolutely fantastic assertion, because if you want to be realistic you would have to say that this division of labor is not limited to the sexual act; it has to do with procreation as a whole. You know that men do not become pregnant but women do.
But this wholly unreasonable limitation to the sexual act instead of taking the whole, procreation, is characteristic of the whole procedure.
Now if you think this through, what is the conclusion? If the division of labor is rooted ultimately in the bisexuality of man—that is the primary form—and the division of labor is to be overcome, let’s get rid of the bisexuality. Yet don’t laugh. I mean, it is silly but it is a very serious problem, and there is of course—and you know, I’m not speaking of Mr. or Mrs. Jorgensen* in particular [laughter], but I’m concerned with the—people have given some thought throughout the ages to the question of producing human beings in test tubes. You know, the homunculus problem.
Well, that is a practically absurd suggestion; that is clear. But we are concerned now—what is the principle which allows us to say that is absurd and not merely some vague knowledge of what we can do and cannot do?
* NB, from the footnotes: “Christine Jorgenson underwent sex-reassignment surgery in 1951. Jorgenson, previously known as George William Jorgenson, Jr., became a celebrity after a front-page story in the (New York) Daily News in December 1952 told her story (“Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty”).
On other words, Strauss more than 60 years ago anticipates one way in which the wholesale madness of Marxism would go retail in our time, and why sooner or later it had to express itself through direct hostility toward the essentially differences between men and women.
BLUF
Which brings us back to the Constitution, now as shredded and torn and lying on the floor of the Senate, as Caesar on the Ides of March. The easiest and most direct way to restore our American Republic (not “our democracy”) is to restore the Constitution in all of its salient particulars, including the restoration of the Ninth and Tenth amendments……
What’s in our future? Civil War? Partition? Amicable divorce? In the meantime, let me leave you with this, from my debut novel, the controversial Exchange Alley, written after my return from Moscow in 1991 and published in 1997 but set in the period just before the end of the Soviet Union:
There is an unmistakable odor about socialist countries that pervades every public place. It is a strong animal smell, composed in equal parts of sweat and unwashed clothes, Russian cigarettes, cheap perfume, piss, disinfectant, and leaded gasoline; in the heyday of Communism, every socialist country smelled the same. But in the mother church of Marxism-Leninism, the reek was stronger, sharper, more pervasive. It was the ur-stench of the Soviet system, the stink of a dying animal and with each passing year it got stronger and more difficult for foreigners, even fellow travelers in the west, to ignore.
Smell that here at home now? I thought you might.
What’s the Constitution Among Friends?
Thus spake the great George Washington Plunkitt, of Tammany Hall fame, and it makes a fitting epitaph for the noble experiment in self-government that is, or was, the United States of America. Last week, we discussed the now-explicit anti-constitutionalism and anti-Americanism of the modern Left, and their desire to see it on the ash heap of history, now that it’s served its purpose (like John Hurt in Alien) as their incubator and victim. From at least the time of Woodrow Wilson, the Democrats have despised the Constitution—which they think let them down in the battle over slavery—and have sought to kill it by the death of a thousand cuts, some of which have been delivered by the Supreme Court, some by legislation, and some by sheer inanition.
It’s time now to begin going into detail about what can be done and what can’t. The good news is, there are solutions, or rather, one simple one. The bad news is, it will never be implemented, because the century-long browbeating of the American public via the political establishment and their handmaidens in the news media makes that effectively impossible.
She Can Shoot: The Rise of Female Gun Ownership
Women are one of the fastest-growing demographics in the firearms industry
Robyn Sandoval is seeing a sea change at the gun range: The executive director of A Girl and A Gun (AGAG) Women’s Shooting League is noticing that women are showing up to shoot more than ever before. “Every week, basically, we’re approached by a new instructor or range that wants to have a women-focused training program in their area,” Sandoval told Discourse.
Her experience is part of a great ongoing transformation in the gun world. Over the past two years, more than 5 million women bought a gun for the first time. That’s about 37% of the 13.8 million new gun owners that the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s dealer surveys identified over that time period. That makes women, alongside minority gun owners, one of the fastest-growing demographics in the firearms industry.
Why Women Are Buying Guns
In just over a decade, A Girl and A Gun has grown to include more than 200 chapters at 300 ranges across the country. And that growth only accelerated as America entered a period of unprecedented gun sales beginning in 2020. It’s no coincidence that period coincided with unprecedented chaos, Sandoval said.
“With the riots and the pandemic, most everything was kind of still fear-based…they’re afraid that they wouldn’t have access to protection,” she said. “That first responders wouldn’t be able to respond. Or they’d be targeted for violence.”
Breaking down barriers. A Girl and a Gun Executive Director Robyn Sandoval: “We’ve broken through a lot of barriers so that people recognize that the everyday moms and women of all walks of life are welcome at the range.”
A 2021 AGAG survey shared with Discourse shows that 45% of its membership were new shooters. The top reason those new shooters gave for buying a gun was concern over rioting and civil unrest. 59% of the new shooters listed a fear of physical safety or new gun bans as a reason they decided to buy.
But those weren’t the only reasons women gave as they began to seek out training and competition. One reason was simply the realization that something like AGAG was available to them.
“Many of them have just learned that training is an option for them,” Sandoval said. “That’s something we’re seeing more and more is that a lot of women thought that you had to be an operator or have law enforcement experience, or that civilian courses were not available to them, or nobody in their social circle had taken them before. Now, at A Girl and A Gun, we’ve broken through a lot of barriers so that people recognize that the everyday moms and women of all walks of life are welcome at the range.”
That may be surprising to many people, but not Sarah Hauptman. She has been involved with gun-rights activism in Minnesota for years and recently started helping to run the holster company Phlster, which her husband founded in 2011. There’s a big difference between when she first started shooting and today, she said: Women are increasingly a fixture at gun ranges.
A path for women. Phlster owner Sarah Hauptman: “When your friends shoot, and you see female faces shooting, and you see people who look like you, it’s a lot more accessible.”
“It used to be you’d go to a shooting class, and you’d be the only girl there,” Hauptman told Discourse. “Now, more often than not, there’s several.”
That kind of representation matters, Hauptman said: It’s created a kind of snowball effect. “When your friends shoot, and you see female faces shooting, and you see people who look like you, it’s a lot more accessible,“ she said. “You don’t have to swim against the current to get into it. There’s a path for you.”
Hauptman said breaking down the barriers to entry also leads many women to embrace what she sees as the empowering nature of gun ownership. Hauptman herself did not grow up with firearms. She only became interested later in life after she and her mother decided to try out shooting and had a proverbial blast. “The fun got me into it and kept me into it,” she said.
But after the fun factor brought her to gun ownership, it was its practical utility that made her want to stay. And it even made her want to advocate for others to get involved.
“You kind of realize, ‘Oh, this actually gives me a lot of capability, and it is a kind of equalizer,’” she said. “Once you realize that you can control that power and make it part of your life and add to your ability with it, you’re not giving that back. You’re not letting anyone take it from you either.”
Hauptman said that’s why more women are turning toward firearms to provide for the safety of their homes—households for which they are more often primarily responsible. “I think more women are taking responsibility for their own self-protection,” she said. “More women are living alone. Whether they’re single moms or whether they’re just single women, more women are solely responsible for their own self-defense.”
That’s borne out in AGAG’s data too, which shows 37% of its members are single. “More women than ever before are actually becoming the first gun owner in their home, as opposed to it being more male-driven in the past,” Sandoval said.
Less Pink, More Practicality
The gun industry has taken note of the increasing prominence of female shooters. Sandoval said the market has evolved for the better in recent years. Gun companies are now doing much more than just making superficial appeals to female shooters.
Ten years ago, it was a “pink it and shrink it” mentality when it came to product development. But now, there are really thoughtful products that women want to use, that are developed for women, that fit women’s hands better, that fit their bodies better, that give them more options for concealed carry. It used to be where women’s choices in concealed carry were pretty limited to really small guns, and now, most women, regardless of their size, can carry a full-size, even decked out with lights and optics.
Sandoval singled out Glock’s introduction of slimline models, such as the Glock 43 a few years ago, and Walther’s recent release of the PDP F-Series as examples of major industry players emphasizing designs that appeal to women. While those guns are also popular with men, their design took the unique needs of women into consideration. Sandoval said Walther consulted with AGAG on the design of the PDP F-Series, and the company’s process included measuring the hands of a thousand women to better tweak the layout of the pistol’s trigger and controls.
Mark Oliva, a spokesman for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, said those kinds of considerations are becoming more and more common in the industry. “Designs of handguns for personal protection are incorporating features long sought by women, including smaller frames, lighter springs, redesigned magazines for easier loading, and shotgun and rifle stocks designed to more readily fit the needs for women with length of pull,” he told Discourse. “The AR-15, due to its easy adaptability and customization, has been a rifle that can easily fit the needs of women gun owners by simple and small adjustments.”
Sandoval also praised the latest innovations in concealed-carry options made with women shooters in mind, including those from Hauptman’s company and its competitor Dene Adams. “The Phlster Enigma has been a game changer in the industry,” Sandoval said. “That’s rocked the training world. Dene Adams also has really great products. I love that [Dene Adams products] have Kydex holsters in them to make everything safer. There’s a lot of activewear and concealment wear out there that don’t have the safety controls in place that instructors want to see.” She said the Kydex inserts help cover the trigger of the firearm to stop the trigger from being pulled unintentionally.
Both Sandoval and Hauptman emphasized that certain gun features that appeal to women, like the thinner grip of the Glock 43 or the Enigma’s beltless holster system, for example, are just as appealing to many men. In fact, while the Enigma has quickly earned a sort of cult status among female concealed carriers, it is even more popular with men.
“Our product is 100% gender neutral,” Hauptman said. “It works on basic physical principles that can be applied to any body type. The reason that it’s popular among women is because women are just less likely to wear belts.”
She said Phlster’s goal is to make it easier for everybody to carry regardless of their gender. However, women have long been underserved in the gun-carry market. So being able to more directly address their needs has helped the company gain an enthusiastic following.
“More women are successfully carrying, and they’re not giving up,” Hauptman said. “They’re not saying, ‘I can’t get it to conceal, so I can’t carry.’ And they’re not saying, ‘I can’t get comfortable, so I can’t carry.’ And they’re not saying, ‘I don’t feel safe.’”
Instead, they’re more easily surmounting the barriers that traditionally kept women from owning firearms. Hauptman hopes that brings more of them into the gun-owning community, and, ultimately, into gun-rights activism. “If we can make it easy for people to carry and have a stake, then those people have a much higher chance of going on to become advocates and preserving the Second Amendment for everyone,” she said.
Polling has consistently shown women are more supportive of gun restrictions than men. Women have also traditionally lagged behind men in gun ownership. As more women become gun owners, though, they may be affected by another long-term polling trend where gun owners are less supportive of gun restrictions. If more women become gun owners, and they become less supportive of gun-control laws, it could have a significant impact on gun laws at every level across the country. These trends are definitely worth watching in the years ahead.
The future of female gun ownership is bright—and it will likely continue to shine, Hauptman maintains. “I don’t know if as many women at their core will ever be as interested in shooting as men,” she said. “But I think the snowball effect is probably going to continue for a while.”
The Declaration of Independence is Unconstitutional
While there is plenty of talk and rhetoric proclaiming all that is “Constitutional” or “Unconstitutional”, when we examine and recognize that document which more than any other represents the soul of America, we find that document is: The Declaration of Independence.
With the simple preface, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”, the novel idea of constructing government solely as best servant to the People and their God given privileges was born.
Because of the Declaration, and specifically this prefatory clause, the United States has developed a whole philosophy of thought called “American Exceptionalism”.
This philosophy is what makes us special, different from any other nation on earth, and dare I say… Better!
To the chagrin, of our current Commander in Chief, better is not better at all. In fact, better, a.k.a. American Exceptionalism, in the mind of our exalted leader, is arrogance.
To think, that we individuals might strive for excellence, driven by nothing other than our own will and the Providential opportunity with which we are presented is obscene to those like Obama who embrace a Statist ideology.
At his core, the Statist is a parasite who requires a subjugated public to advance himself. Unlike the rugged individualist who advances by grit and determination, the Statist assembles his power through propaganda that pits those rugged individualists in society who have achieved, against the sloth groups who have been convinced that achievement is an accidental occurrence falling upon those who have been “lucky”.
Out of this thinking is bred a whole line of thought that has undermined our Founders vision for America and has convinced our populace that the Constitution is a “living, breathing” document which must be tempered by the populist mood of the age.
And of what character is this mood which is now arbiter and driver of public policy in America?
Schizophrenic, ignorant, sanctimonious, and dishonest are adjectives which come to mind.
It would seem, if we could apply contemporary American views and compare them to the theme of the foundational clause upon which our whole government has been built we ought to be able to find a congruence of understanding.
Let’s try:
We hold these truths to be self-evident,
These truths are unarguable, anyone from any walk of life, regardless of background, social or economic class, educated or uneducated would agree on undeniable fundamental truths. What are fundamental truths? Do all our inhabitants agree about them?
that all men are created equal,
declaring us all subject to the same unarguable truths, the same rule, and the same law. No individual or group would be afforded any more or any less in the eyes of our law; ergo, it is not by accident that Lady Justice adorns a blindfold when ascertaining weights on a balance scale.
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
That separation of Church and State thing kind of falls apart right here. Unalienable meaning that they cannot be taken away, and that we are endowed by our Creator—God, specifying exactly who endowed us with our Rights. It is not a stretch to infer government’s only role here is to protect what God has provided. Do all American’s believe this? Is this the contemporary understanding of “Constitutional”?
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
While the Founders were content to allow us to use our imagination in interpreting what unalienable rights we were endowed with, they wrote down a couple to make sure we got onto the right track. Our most important rights were listed, and it is not by accident that Life was put first.
The order of rights was listed in a prioritized manner exalting Life the supreme right, and should any Right conflict with another, the latter would yield to the former.
If a mother felt pregnancy was in some way threatening to her Liberty, her baby’s right to Life was, in the scheme of things, of such priority that mom’s Liberty could be impinged for the duration of the child’s term. Using the word “was” instead of “is” might seem offensive, however, in today’s culture, do we respect this distinction? Is abortion today viewed as greater right than is Life?
Has Roe vs. Wade established a women’s right to end her pregnancy at any point before a child’s birth, for any reason? Have we not heard Senators and Representatives state that the “right to choose” is a Constitutional right?
Politicians love to invoke all that is “Constitutional” or “Unconstitutional” in support of their views or positions, but if we cannot even agree on the most fundamental right from our most fundamental document, how on earth can we intellectually interpret whether or not Arizona can or cannot ask someone who has broken a law if he/she is in this country legally or not?
Today the United States recognizes Constitutionality of the Constitution, based not at all upon the words of the document, but upon the urges and inclinations of those who have seized power by appealing to the largest voting bloc.
There is no such thing as a Constitutional right which cannot be readily overturned, and in the contemporary interpretation, our Declaration of Independence is…
Unconstitutional.
Quite often, I am asked for my opinion. You might think that the topic would be politics, or history, or perhaps business, but usually, it is not. Rather, I am asked how a young man should approach his life, in these days of confusion, of uncertain future, of corrosive liquid modernity. In response, I piecemeal a relatively short answer, tailored to the questioner. After numerous such quick exchanges, I decided to think more deeply on the question, seeking principles of general applicability. So here is my advice to the young, by whom I mean men and women between eighteen and thirty-five, about how to approach their futures.
My advice is more directed at men than at women—but I direct advice to women as well, mostly separate and different advice. I hesitated a little bit to offer advice to women—until I realized my hesitation had been hypnotized into me by decades of feminist propaganda, which falsely claims that men should never instruct women, only the reverse. In truth, any man, and especially a father, should most definitely not just offer advice, but issue directions, to both men and women. The idea that men should not direct women in life choices is a degenerate artefact of modernity; relationships between men and women are partnerships, necessarily involving mutual instruction.
My advice is predicated on my optimistic vision of the future, which I have laid out elsewhere in detail. I assume that the political and social structures of what is now called America will, within no more than a decade, be very different, after some difficulties. If you believe that current American structures will last indefinitely, you should not listen to me. You should either scrabble to join the ever-more-crowded professional-managerial elite, or join the Amish. If you believe that a fracture followed by reworking of our society is coming, then I have something to offer you.
MESSAGE TO THE UNVACCINATED:
“Even if I were pollinated and fully vaccinated, I would admire the unvaccinated for withstanding the greatest pressure I have ever seen, even from partners, parents, children, friends, colleagues and doctors.
People who were capable of such personality, courage and critical ability are undoubtedly the best of humanity. They are everywhere, in all ages, levels of education, states and ideas. They are of a special kind; they are the soldiers that every army of light wants to have in its ranks. They are the parents that every child wants to have and the children that every parent dreams of having.
They are beings above the average of their societies, they are the essence of the people who have built all cultures and conquered horizons. They are there, next to you, they look normal, but they are superheroes.
They did what others could not, they were the tree that withstood the hurricane of insults, discrimination and social exclusion. And they did it because they thought they were alone, and believed they were the only ones.
Banned from their families’ tables at Christmas, they never saw anything so cruel. They lost their jobs, let their careers sink, had no more money … but they didn’t care. They suffered immeasurable discrimination, denunciation, betrayal and humiliation … but they kept going.
Never before in humanity has there been such a “casting”, now we know who are the best on planet Earth. Women, men, old, young, rich, poor, of all races or religions, the unvaccinated, the chosen of the invisible ark, the only ones who managed to resist when everything collapsed.
That’s you, you passed an unimaginable test that many of the toughest Marines, Commandos, Green Berets, astronauts and geniuses could not withstand.
You are made of the stuff of the greatest who ever lived, those heroes born among ordinary men who glow in the dark.”
Author unknown
For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing. Acts 17:21-31
BLUF
None of this is to say that whatever the Current Thing happens to be is trivial or unimportant; it’s only to say that Current Thingism is a sign of democratic decay that erodes the vital role of deliberation that is essential for our system of government. With all this in view, the fact that so many of the self-professed defenders of Our Democracy are so adamantly devoted to the Current Thing calls their motives into question. The next time you see an American flying a Ukrainian flag, ask yourself: could they find the nation on a map?
The Tyranny of the ‘Current Thing’
There is no better evidence of the managed nature of what passes as “democratic deliberation” than the recent development of “Current Thingism.” Even if you aren’t familiar with the term, you know the phenomenon well. There are many crises unfolding in contemporary America, and the “Current Thing” is whichever one our elites insist should be the focus of our attention at the present moment.
For a while, the Current Thing was #MeToo. From 2016 until 2018, the Current Thing was Russian collusion. After that scheme unraveled, we moved through a series of Current Things, each of which was said to compound the grave threat Trump supposedly posed to Our Democracy: in March 2020, it was Covid-19; for a few months that summer, it was systemic racism; then, it was the Delta variant; finally, for a stretch of early 2021, it was the January 6th “insurrection.” And when Russia invaded Ukraine, Ukraine became the Current Thing. You knew it was the new Current Thing because all the smart people suddenly changed how they spelled and pronounced “Kiev.”
So, you know what the Current Thing is. What, then, is “Current Thingism”? Current Thingism is the default mindset of a certain segment of the American population: typically, the professional, liberal, educated, urban caste of society. Current Thingism is an enduring assumption that whatever the Current Thing happens to be, it should, in fact, be the Current Thing—the issue among issues.
Current Thingism also enables some judgment on the part of the Current Thingist. Because the Current Thing deserves our total attention and deference, anyone who disputes the existence or the urgency of the Current Thing is a problem. The person who does not concede the urgency of the Current Thing is dumb, dangerous, or both. Remember the treatment of those who doubted the efficacy of masks? Those who were reluctant about mRNA vaccines? Those who doubted the wisdom of sending billions of dollars to fund Ukraine’s defense? Such is the fate of those who don’t get in line with the Current Thing.
Although America has many pressing problems, Current Thingism itself is a threat to the nation. To some degree, it is a threat because America is facing so many crises. Current Thingism artificially elevates one political concern over all the others, which justifies inaction on other matters that may, in fact, be more urgent. Some will argue that while the term “Current Thing” is new, the phenomenon is not: they might say that certain issues have always been prioritized over other issues. They’re right and wrong.
Japan’s Gun Restrictions Are Far From Sufficient To Explain Its Low Crime Rate
While gun control enthusiasts rushed to defend Japan’s firearm restrictions after Shinzo Abe’s assassination, copying that approach in the U.S. is legally, politically, and practically impossible.
The improvised weapon that an assassin used to murder former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last Friday suggests both the impact and the limitations of strict gun laws that make it nearly impossible to legally possess firearms. If it were easier to buy a gun in Japan, the killer presumably would not have resorted to a homemade, jerry-rigged device consisting of two metal tubes bound together with electrical tape. At the same time, the incident demonstrates that no amount of legislation can prevent someone from obtaining a firearm if he is determined to do so.
Abe’s killer constructed a double-barreled weapon that was about 16 inches long, capable of firing two rounds without reloading. The New York Times reports that “it is unknown what kind of ammunition was used.” But in a video of the assassination, “two shots can be heard, approximately two and a half seconds apart, with a deep report that suggests they came from a cartridge such as those fired by a shotgun commonly used by civilian hunters.” The Guardian reports that police found “several similar homemade weapons” in the killer’s home.
While they are less reliable and accurate than factory-produced firearms, such guns can be readily made with materials commonly available from hardware stores. A bigger investment is required for more satisfactory results. But even without prefabricated parts, Reason‘s J.D. Tuccille notes, a CNC mill like the Ghost Gunner 3 “can turn a raw block of metal into an AR-15 receiver.” People also can “use widely available designs to craft a firearm with 3D printers,” with results somewhere between the two other options.
“Japan has exceptionally strict regulations that prohibit the average citizen from obtaining a factory-manufactured firearm,” the Times notes. “Civilian ownership of firearms, except for those used for hunting purposes, is generally prohibited by the country’s Firearms and Swords Control Law.”
Times reporter Max Fisher suggests that the assassination, which might look like a failure of Japanese-style gun control, “is a reminder of, and maybe even underscores, those restrictions’ success.” He notes that the attack was shocking not just because of the high-profile target but also because gun violence is extremely rare in Japan, where civilians owned an estimated 377,000 registered and unregistered firearms in 2017, or about 1 per 300 people. The U.S. ratio at the time was estimated to be about 1.2 per resident, or 400 times as high. Taking into account gun sales since then, the current U.S. ratio is even higher.
That comparison reflects a stark difference in public policies, but it also reflects a stark difference in the facts that policy makers must contend with. Even leaving aside the constraints that the Second Amendment imposes on gun control in the United States, the fact that Americans already own more than 400 million firearms means that copying Japan’s approach is not a feasible option.
That reality also means that politically possible options—including widely popular proposals such as “red flag” laws, bans on particular kinds of guns or magazines, and expanded background checks for gun buyers—will have only a marginal impact on access to firearms in the United States. Furthermore, that impact will be felt most by peaceful, law-abiding Americans, since criminals are highly motivated to obtain weapons and have many extralegal ways to get them.
Keeping those points in mind, what does Japan’s experience tell us about the effectiveness of gun control? “The country experiences fewer than 10 gun deaths nationwide in most years, compared to tens of thousands in the United States,” Fisher writes. “Since 2017, Japan has recorded 14 gun-related deaths, in a country of 125 million people.”
Fisher overstates the annual number of firearm homicides in the United States, which in the decade from 2011 through 2020 averaged about 10,500. But he is certainly right that people kill each other with guns much more often in the United States than in Japan. And not just with guns.
In 2017, Japan had the world’s lowest homicide rate: 0.2 per 100,000 people, compared to 5.3 per 100,000 in the United States. Nearly 11,000 of the more than 15,000 murders recorded in the U.S. that year, or about 73 percent, involved firearms. Even if none of those gun murders had happened, in other words, the U.S. homicide rate still would have been more than seven times as high as Japan’s. And taking into account substitution of weapons, even the impossible feat of eliminating all civilian-held firearms would leave an even larger gap between the two counties.
The relative prevalence of guns clearly is not enough to explain the enormous difference in lethal crime between Japan and the United States. That much is also apparent from comparisons between Japan and other countries with strict gun laws. The homicide rates in Australia, Germany, and the U.K., for example, are several times as high as the homicide rate in Japan, although still a fraction of the U.S. rate. In Russia, which has gun laws substantially stricter than the ones Americans face, homicides are even more common than in the United States.
Japan’s gun restrictions do not explain why murders committed with alternative weapons, including knives and blunt objects as well as homemade firearms, are so unusual in that country. Japan’s remarkable peacefulness clearly goes far beyond the firearm regulations its legislators have decided to impose.
“Pressure to conform and internalized willingness to do so are much stronger in Japan than in America,” Independence Institute gun policy scholar David Kopel noted three decades ago. Kopel argued that “the spirit of conformity provides the best explanation for Japan’s low crime rate.”
Japan stands out in another way: Its suicide rate is relatively high. In 2019, the rate in Japan was 14.6 per 100,000 people, compared to 13.9 per 100,000 in the United States, 10.5 per 100,000 in Canada, 8.5 per 100,000 in the U.K., and 4.6 per 100,000 in Greece. When it comes to suicide, the scarcity of firearms in Japan does not seem to have had the effect you might expect.
In any case, the urge to defend Japan’s firearm restrictions after Abe’s assassination, while predictable in the context of the U.S. gun control debate, is beside the point when it comes to practical policy discussions. The same “spirit of conformity” that Kopel saw as important in explaining Japan’s low crime rate, he suggested, “also explains why the Japanese people accept strict gun control.” By contrast, he said, “a gun ban in America similar to that in Japan would be alien to our society, which for over 300 years has had the world’s strongest gun culture.” He argued that “Japan’s gun laws are part of an authoritarian philosophy of government that is fundamentally at odds with America’s traditions of liberty.”
Whether or not you buy that analysis, more than 400 million facts on the ground vastly complicate any practical lessons that American policy makers can draw from Japan. Neither those facts nor the constitutional constraints imposed by the Second, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments can be wished away, no matter how much American gun control enthusiasts might like to pretend otherwise.
BLUF
They could have taken their victories and shut up, but they couldn’t. They had to push and push and push and push until they finally ended up in court. They can’t stop because their rage comes from the vast, burning nihilistic emptiness inside them that no amount of expanded abortion rights or “pride” months or drag queen story hours or transgressive love stories in Disney cartoons can ever satisfy.
….in the end, that’s what they really want. An end to their restlessness and their war against their own savage gods. All we want, by contrast, is to be left alone with a culture we love and prize and wish to pass on to our children. But they want to take us with them because, as we all know, misery loves company. Either we’ll learn to care, or they’ll die trying. Because in their world, right now, everything’s coming up guns and Roeses, and they can’t have that, not now, not ever.
It has long been a dictum of mine that, as far as the progressive Left is concerned, “they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit.” After their twin defeats at the Supreme Court last week, regarding two of their most sensitive issues (both of which derive from their devotion to cultural suicide, which is their principal objective), don’t expect them to give up easily. They subscribe to their version of Islamism or the Brezhnev Doctrine: once they’ve conquered moral or physical tparerritory, it can never go back to the way it was. They see themselves as the heroes of their own movies, good red-diaper babies constantly battling the forces of revanchism and irrendentism, which are you. The idea that they’re the bad guy never occurs to them:
These are, after all, the same people who refused to accept George W. Bush’s narrow presidential victory in 2000 (“selected, not elected”); refused to accept Bush’s win over John Kerry in 2004; rained hellfire and brimstone down on poor Sarah Palin, whose only crime was a surfeit of motherhood, and snarlingly turned on her running mate and their erstwhile favorite maverick, John McCain in 2008; and went bonkers over the surprise victory of Donald Trump in 2016, thus triggering the entire “Russian collusion” hoax that started with Hillary Clinton and eventually came to embrace the FBI, the intelligence community, the media, and the judicial system.
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.