Category: Culture

New firearm owners shaking up gun culture and American politics

HARRISBURG — Richard Reisinger, of New Bloomfield in Perry County, leaned in as David Walker of Savage Guns, a Massachusetts-based firearm company, showed him how to work a new innovation that allows the owner to adjust a gun for right- or left-handed users.

“I have grandchildren; some of them are left-handed, some are right-handed, so now if you purchase a gun, all you have to do is place this on the handle and it accommodates either, so you buy one gun and multiple kids can shoot it,” Mr. Reisinger said, admiring the practicality of the design.

“It is really nice.”

Mr. Reisinger — who was visiting the Savage booth at the Great American Outdoor Show at the Pennsylvania Farm Show complex recently — said he comes from a long line of hunters, a tradition he now enjoys with his grandchildren.

“I do a lot of whitetail hunting at the moment — but with grandchildren, I’ll take them out to hunt pretty much anything that they’re interested in. I love coming to the outdoors show because I get to see, and touch, and feel a lot of different firearms that I might be interested in down the road,” he explained.

Mr. Reisinger — like dozens of other people interviewed that day — said gun ownership is about a lot of things: “Putting food on the table and providing for my family, self-protection and the motor and dexterity skills it sharpens when you go target practicing. You meet more and more new gun owners all of the time; most of them said they bought their first gun for those exact same reasons … they found all of it personally empowering.”

This is a truth that conflicts with our culture’s misconceptions about who “the American gun owner” really is and what his or her motivations are for enjoying firearms. If you turn on the national news or log onto social media, you’re likely to find lawful gun owners portrayed as cultish, backwoods white males who have a gluttonous appetite for violence.

Gun owners see themselves quite differently — and their demographics and motivations don’t fit neatly into the stereotypes.

Despite the millions spent in digital advertisements by gun control advocates like former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the appeal of gun ownership is only increasing. Of all the firearms sold last year, 30% — 5.4 million purchases — went to new gun owners, according to a retailer survey conducted by the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

A new interest in self-sufficiency, caused by collapses in our supply chain, has also led to an explosion in applications for hunting licenses.

According to Stateline, a Pew Trust initiative, many states across the country saw a dramatic rise in both men and women taking a hunter safety class for the first time — with states like Michigan seeing a 67% hike in new hunting license buyers in 2021 compared with 2019, including a 15% increase in female hunters.

People who would never have considered owning a gun were now curious about hunting to provide for their families — and about target practice to learn how to defend themselves and their homes.

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U.S. president Gerald Ford told Congress in 1974: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.” That goes for rights too.

Canada Shows Why It’s Called ‘American Exceptionalism’

It’s shocking to me that some people are surprised by how the situation with the Freedom Convoy went down. It was never going to end well, the odds of them winning were as long as a summer day for a very simple reason: Canada is not the United States.

That may seem obvious, and in the easiest way, it is. But in the way that matters most, it’s probably not that clear.

We have a tendency to think things that simply are not true, like the Iraqi people yearned to be free and democratic when in reality they simply wanted Saddam dead so they could return to settling ancient tribal scores. They had no idea what “freedom” meant, and the concept of individual liberty never occurred to them. It went over like introducing Sharia Law to San Francisco would.

One thing to notice about the coverage of the Canadian Freedom Convoy is how the American media, particularly from conservative outlets, didn’t reflect the will of Canadians. You’d think Justin Trudeau going full totalitarian, turning into a little Fidel Castro (like father, like son – look it up), would bring about a collapse in his popularity, but it hasn’t. Most Canadians were upset he didn’t act sooner.

Canada is not like the United States. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms grants Canadians various rights that, if you don’t think about it, are similar in a lot of ways to the rights we enjoy here. But there’s a major difference.

Our Constitution grants exactly zero rights to anyone, it acknowledges the rights with which we were born and denies the federal government the ability to infringe upon them. The Canadian Charter gives citizens certain rights, explicitly. If a government can grant rights, there is no justification for them not being able to take them away, temporarily or permanently.

When Trudeau invoked emergency powers, US conservatives recoiled in horror. Canadians did not.

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It’s loonnggg, but still, RTWT
Warning, there is some amount of foul language used.

FISKING ANTON – BY IAN BRUENE

== BREAKING NEWS: Journalist maintains high word-to-knowledge ratio! More at 11… ==

A couple weeks ago an article was posted by a certain Michael Anton which contains one true and interesting point, drenched in enough manure to solve the coming phosphate supply issues before they ever get started. I meant for this to go up much sooner, but was busy and then caught Xi’s Death Rot.

Let’s dive straight in:

Regime propaganda is so ubiquitous that even if, like me, you make no effort to seek it out and even take steps to avoid it, you can’t help but notice that our masters have fastened onto a new narrative: the coming “civil war.”

This was the crux of all the maudlin, dishonest January 6 retrospectives, of several “think pieces,” and at least three new books: America is facing a second civil war and it will be started by the Right.

These first two paragraphs are the true and interesting part. The Enemy does indeed want a war, and wants us to fire the first shot to provide them with their casus belli.

But this is not new. Anyone who lived through or has read history of the 80s and 90s remembers the hysteria which was stirred up about “right wing militias”, where every policy and action seemed tuned perfectly to piss off the barely stable loose cannons on the right which the Enemy was *sure* existed in large numbers.

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Jim Taylor often said that throughout history pagans have always sacrificed their children to their gods.

BLUF:
Leftists may claim to be secular but that’s not true. They just worship different gods—themselves, Gaia, criminals, etc. And their gods are hungry gods who demand young blood, which leftists seem awfully glad to provide.

In the 21st century, we’ve entered a brave new era of child sacrifice

In ancient times, pagans sacrificed children to propitiate angry, erratic, and inscrutable gods, hoping that giving up their most precious possessions would save the entire community. Leftists are still doing that, not just with abortion, but with their COVID policies and the madness of their decriminalizing crime.

Child sacrifice was normative across the ancient world. It was only the combination of the Torah’s proscription against human sacrifice (The Binding of Isaac, Genesis 22), combined with Jesus Christ offering himself as the ultimate sacrifice, that pagan societies eventually abandoned the practice.

Their reluctance was understandable. From one pagan culture to the next, their gods were motivated by the basest human emotions and, when triggered, were likely to visit drought, flood, earthquakes, hurricanes, famines, and disease on unwary humans who, somehow or other, offended these prickly deities. Whether as a preemptive bribe or an ex post facto apology, the offering had better be big, and what could be bigger than one’s children?

But we in the modern West are better than that, right? We’ve abandoned child sacrifice. We wouldn’t dream of killing children to appease a god. After all, most on the left don’t even believe in the capital “G” God and they’re probably materialists who don’t believe in small “g” gods either. Or do they?

Image: Aztecs sacrifice a child to appease angry gods (1499). Public domain.

A few stories got me wondering if leftists are quite the rational atheists they think they are.

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Data shows there’s more diversity at a gun range than a university faculty lounge

“Gun-ownership in America is diversifying, because of safety fears,” says a headline over at The Economist. As those of us in the Second Amendment community have known for a while, the sociopolitical climate since the start of the pandemic – egregious criminal–coddling behavior by the state, releasing dangerous prisoners because of COVID, nationwide “fiery but mostly peaceful” riots, rising violent crime, looting / shoplifting, hate crimes, falling trust in law enforcement – contributed to a sudden surge in gun purchases by groups historically not inclined to own them. The Economist reported the following:

Of the 7.5m Americans who bought firearms for the first time between January 2019 and April 2021—as gun-buying surged nationwide—half were female, a fifth black and a fifth Hispanic, according to a recent study by Matthew Miller of Northeastern University and his co-authors.

The 7.5 million number may well be a low estimate; one estimate from the NSSF is that there were 8.4 million new gun owners in 2020 alone. As I’ve written before in these pages, adding up numbers for 2020 and the first half of 2021 points to a potential 11.6 million first-time gun owners. The team here at Bearing Arms has written a lot about growing diversity in the Second Amendment community. We see this not only in data collected nationally and over the long-term, but also experience it first-hand at gun ranges. (As an immigrant who grew up without guns and didn’t touch one well into his adult life, I’m living proof of this demographic shift myself.)

However, diversity is a whole lot more than ethnic bean counting or about the superficial differences – religion, sexual orientation, etc. – among us. What counts the most, in my opinion, is diversity of thought and opinion, and the ability to express those freely without the fear of retaliation or retribution. This is where I think gun owners are simply outstanding; respect for individual freedom, for not treading on someone else lest our freedoms be tread upon, appears to come naturally to lawful gun owners. There is some data on political diversity among gun owners. Anecdotally speaking, the gun owners at my local club cover the gamut from traditional blue-collar tradesmen to Ph.D. holders, from the MAGA coterie to Medicare-for-All supporters.

Contrast that with a typical university faculty lounge and the difference is night and day. There is hard data showing how limited diversity is among university faculty. They may look different, have different national origins or sexual orientations, but politically they are incredibly alike. There’s also plenty of publicly available data that shows how faculty donations to candidates for office is overwhelmingly left-wing. Consider these recent examples: 96% at Harvard University, 97% at Yale University, and 98% at Cornell University.

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Better place for it anyway, although T.R. was an early progressive who gave credibility to later elitist progressives with tyrannical aims, like Woodrow Wilson.

Teddy Roosevelt Statue Bound for North Dakota After Being Removed From Outside Museum of Natural History in NYC

A statue of President Theodore Roosevelt that has stood outside the Museum of Natural History in New York City for more than 80 years was removed Wednesday night after complaints of racism and colonization.

The bronze statue was removed in pieces and is expected to be shipped to the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota, The New York Times reported. It is estimated to cost $2 million for the removal process.

No, Gun Culture Has Not Been Radicalized

In a single issue in March of 1961, Guns & Ammo ran ads for a “Sniper Model” Enfield Match rifle, a French 8mm machine gun (“used in two World Wars”), a Mannlicher military pistol, a U.S. .30 M1 carbine, and a police-ordnance Ingram Model 6 submachine gun chambered in .45 ACP (only $49.95!). If you’re surprised that these machine guns and high-powered military rifles were marketed to hunters in the 1960s, you might have unconsciously accepted a flawed but popular narrative about American gun culture.

According to this story, gun owners have only recently become “militarized,” thanks to the machinations of the National Rifle Association and its infamous leader, Wayne LaPierre. That military-style attitude has further resulted in a recalcitrant stance toward gun control and an obsession with armed self-defense.

There are many examples of this fable, but the most recent comes from the New Yorker, in a declaratively titled piece, “What Happened to Gun Culture.” As author Benjamin Wallace-Wells helpfully explains, gun culture has become “one of the most dangerous elements of the right” during LaPierre’s tenure.

“Military” or “militarization” appears nine times in the article, as Wallace-Wells claims that only since the 1990s have manufacturers been allowed to sell “military-grade weapons” and “market them as military weapons.” Ultimately, Wallace-Wells writes, LaPierre’s NRA “brainwashed an entire country” by transforming a political base of hunters into a “new, expanded audience of gun guys” who support a “maximalist defense of guns.” This new gun culture has spawned characters such as Kyle Rittenhouse, the January 6 rioters, and, most horrifically of all, Black Rifle Coffee Company.

As with all stories that attempt to shoehorn the history of a community into a convenient political narrative, this myth is mostly untrue.

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The only thing really surprising is that the demoncraps feel ‘sporty’ enough to let what they’d like happen out in public.

COVID-19: Democratic Voters Support Harsh Measures Against Unvaccinated

While many voters have become skeptical toward the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a majority of Democrats embrace restrictive policies, including punitive measures against those who haven’t gotten the COVID-19 vaccine.

A new Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 48% of voters favor President Joe Biden’s plan to impose a COVID-19 vaccine mandate on the employees of large companies and government agencies. That includes 33% who Strongly Favor the mandate. Forty-eight percent (48%) are opposed to Biden’s vaccine mandate, including 40% who Strongly Oppose the mandate. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

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The Great Liquidation

America is hanging by a thread.  A great liquidation is underway, with many of the structures that support American society..or, in some cases, any viable society…being kicked away, sold off piecemeal, or just wantonly destroyed.  I’m talking about physical structures, legal structures, and social structures.

I do not think it is too late to turn this trend around, but the situation is very serious, and I’m going to ask you to gaze into the abyss with me before I discuss some reasons for hope.

Consider:

–Significant parts of America’s energy infrastructure are being destroyed or targeted for destruction.  For example, the Indian Point nuclear plant, serving NYC, was closed in April, despite the fact that this closure will likely create grid instability–and will certainly result in the zero-emissions power it had previously produced being generated instead by sources which do generate emissions. (Yet at the same time, NYC is banning the use of natural gas in new buildings–which will further increase the demand for electricity!) The Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, the largest source of electricity in California, is also scheduled for closure in 2025.  The cost of Diablo Canyon was $14.5B in present-day dollars, and I estimate that this represents at least 50,000 person-years of labor.  Something like 1200 working lifetimes, being wantonly trashed. Only a society which is very rich (for now)–disrespectful of its past accomplishments–and uncaring about the future would act in this way.

And these examples represent only a small portion of the assaults being conducted on America’s energy infrastructure. Peaker plants which ensure continued output under tough conditions, are being closed, with much hand-waving about how ‘demand management’ will solve any problems.  Oil and gas production are being squeezed. Pipeline construction is being suppressed, at the same time Putin is given the US green light for a Russia-Germany pipeline.  Energy is being transformed from an American asset into an American vulnerability.

–Billions of dollars of America military equipment were abandoned in Afghanistan and are now in the hands of the Taliban.  If we use a conservative estimate of $40 billion, that represents at least 400,000 person-years of human labor, thrown away. But that’s not the worst of it, of course: much of that equipment will now be used against us or our allies.  There are already reports of formerly-American weapons on their way to Iran.

The effect of the horribly-executed Afghanistan withdrawal on our credibility as an alliance partner will be devastating.  While many foreign policy types expressed worry about what expecting Germany to pay a larger % of the NATO bill would do to our alliances, any imagined impact of that was trivial compared with the impact of the current debacle.  The negative effect on American military recruiting, also, will be considerable, as discussed by several commenters at this blog.  Overall, America’s actual and perceived power position in the world has been greatly reduced over the past few months.

–American manufacturing has been negatively impacted by numerous policy choices and social factors, and America is no longer the world’s facto ry: that role now falls to China.  We have become extremely dependent on China and other countries for many products and components of products–as we found out during last year’s Covid crisis when we were subject to threats that we would ‘burn in the fire of Covid’ if China should choose to deny us critical pharmaceuticals and ingredients thereof.  We have become highly dependent on other countries for electronics manufacturing, especially microchips: a single Taiwanese company, TSMC, acts as the ‘foundry’ for a whole range of chips produced to the designs of many different American companies.  A Chinese takeover of Taiwan could be devastating to our industry, and such takeover appears considerably more likely than it did a couple of months ago.

Manufacturing was, for a couple of decades, considered by the approved-expert classes to be an increasingly-unimportant industry, populated only by those with inferior and uncreative minds. There is some recognition growing lately that this field may actually matter. But American politicians generally have so little comprehension of how the economy actually works that it is hard to believe that any remedies that they propose will be efficacious ones.  As example #1, I give you Joseph Biden: a man who asserted that anyone who can mine coal can ‘learn to code’, and who apparently believes that manually shoveling coal into furnaces is an actual substantial occupation in America today.  Biden also said, referring to China: “They’re not competition for us.”  This was in mid-2019!

America has given up much of its potential in manufacturing. and the consequences are severe for national security and for millions of people.  

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No moderate utopia

A central theme that I often see in Idaho is to default to labels of extremism when discussing Idaho’s right spectrum.  It’s a regular occurrence to read op-eds suggesting that Idaho’s right has gone too far to the right and that what we really need is a broad center.  But studies from even left-leaning organizations like Pew consistently show that it is in fact the American left that has gone off of the rails. When billions in riot damage and dozens of murders by leftist organizations like Antifa and BLM are labeled mostly peaceful and downplayed, while January 6 is labeled tantamount to Pearl Harbor or September 11, Houston, we have a problem.

The primary issue with this assertion of extremism is who is making this assertion.  My friends, might I point out that it is the authoritarian spectrum that is making this assertion of extremism?

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The Times May Be A-Changin’

Over time, we’ve seen changes in focus by the hoplophobic elements of society. Originally, it was all about banning handguns or at least “Handgun Control Inc.” The “assault weapon”, that is, the AR ban of 1994-2004 followed, with no discernible effect on crime, homicide, etc. Movement mutation continued, with groups dropping wording advocating bans, moving to claims of fighting pure “violence” and promoting gun “safety”.

Now they want to address “root causes” of violence instead of just restricting legal gun ownership, though still advocating extending background checks while “not taking anyone’s guns”. Intervening within high-crime communities, and with those at high risk of committing and becoming victims of violence, is appropriate, though far more difficult than they may imagine.

Throughout, we’ve had no reason to believe that these anti-gun activists have had any real change of heart. Their “conversation” always comes around to the desirability of somehow limiting the rights of law-abiding American gun owners in some way, even if in “just” creating more hoops to jump through in order to purchase, keep or bear our arms.

However, there is a fundamental factor that will trump all their intentions, both open and disguised. That is us, the people (and voters) of democracies. As Andrew Breitbart famously said, “Politics follows culture” and culture is changing. Much of this is due to the past 2 years of violence approved and applauded by “progressive” politicians who thought this would garner minority votes. Their groupthink about ethnicity blinded them to the reality that people of all ethnicities, communities and societies want crime stopped lest it hit them.

People are simultaneously realizing that they can’t count on being protected and must plan to do that for themselves. Thus the huge rise in gun purchases by more diverse buyers than ever, including women, minorities (especially African-American women) and self-described liberals. It’s been speculated that this increase in valuing self-protection with firearms may transfer to an increase in valuing Second Amendment rights—and now, that’s no longer speculation.

The Trafalgar Group, a non-partisan polling operation, just released a poll in which over 84% of respondents believed that “strict gun laws” either make no difference in or worsen the current surge in retail thefts. Less than 16% believed such laws can make this better.

In November, Quinnipiac found that 48% of those surveyed opposed stricter gun laws versus 47% who support them—following a trend beginning in 2015, now over the tipping point to plurality opposition. Gallup’s polling in November correlates, with a new low of only 52% of Americans caring that “laws covering the sale of firearms” should be stricter (down from a high of 64% in 2019, falling through 57% in 2020).

Meanwhile, ABC/Ipsos found that 66% of Americans disapprove of how President Biden is addressing gun violence (which could imply wanting more or less strict laws). Republicans’ opposition to more gun laws has strengthened, Democrats’ preference for more strict gun laws is lessening, predictably. But the most important political demographic—independents—have shifted dramatically in favor of, shall we say, individual independence on this issue.

In the latest National Firearms Survey published in July 2021, nearly 1/3 of respondents acknowledged owning guns, more than half of those carry them and almost 1/3 of them reported having to use them defensively in one or more of the estimated nearly 1.7 million episodes of self-defense. In 82% of these DGUs, it wasn’t necessary to fire. Almost 80% of these incidents occurred in the defender’s home or on their property, with the rest mostly occurring in public or at work, still a very substantial number.

NSSF also found that 49% more Hispanic Americans (no, none use “Latinx”) purchased firearms in 2020 than in 2019. With 40% of all gun purchases during the past 2 years coming from new gun owners, it’s no surprise that Hispanics (as well as African-Americans) are increasingly voting more for individual rights than for government “protection”.  In Berkeley, California, of all places, the Latino Rifle Association has grown by hundreds of members since 2020. Its “leftists . . . socialists, progressives” members realize that “The police and the government aren’t taking care of me, so I have to do things on my own.”

Funny thing, that’s what conservatives have recognized for generations. And a much bigger organization, the National African-American Gun Association, has added tens of thousands of new members since 2016, accelerating (along with many local gun clubs oriented toward minorities) during the past 2 years.

Even our less demonstrative Anglophone cousins, Canadians and Kiwis, aren’t cooperating any more with government orders to turn in their newly banned guns than Americans have. Neither are turning in their formerly legal, acceptable firearms—only 160 of an estimated 100,000 affected firearms have been surrendered in Canada in a year and a half. In New Zealand, the 2019 ban of most repeating arms “has had no impact on a rise in gun crime and violence”, except for a steadily increasing rate of the offense of still possessing such firearms.

This is precisely the cultural change that precedes and triggers political change. Most Americans already knew that protecting individual rights is the uncompromisable basis of the success of American society and polity. Many others know that now and more are learning. While Donald Trump improved the Republican share of the Black and Hispanic votes (especially among men), this wasn’t about him or the party. It is about the importance of each person’s rights as an American.

Most expect that the Supreme Court will affirm the Second Amendment with a ruling in Bruen voiding New York City’s may- (= non-) issue handgun carry permitting, along with the 8 other states that persist in that tyranny. The “progressive” left will keep caterwauling if they don’t get their way. But should the decision go otherwise, their wailing would be nothing compared to the anger of the majority who are now convinced that individual rights are more important than political correctness. And that would assuredly lead to even greater political change in favor of ensuring those rights.

To paraphrase St. George Tucker, “the true palladium of liberty” isn’t just “the right of self-defence.” The right to keep and bear arms for the purpose of self-defense and opposing tyranny is necessary to a free people in a free state. But it is a means to the goal, along with representative democracy lustily embraced, which is “to keep our republic” (h/t B. Franklin). The ultimate mark of liberty is individual autonomy, where the rights of the individual are placed above government’s privileges, which are only bestowed by us individuals.

Third Worldizing America
Our elites, like the Third World rich, have mastered ignoring—and navigating around—the misery of others in their midst.

In a recent online exchange, the YouTuber Casey Neistat posted his fury after his car was broken into and the contents stolen. Los Angeles, he railed, was turning into a “3rd-world s—hole of a city.”

The multimillionaire actor Seth Rogen chastised Neistat for his anger.

Rogen claimed that a car’s contents were minor things to lose. He added that while living in West Hollywood he had his own car broken into 15 times—but thought little of it.

Online bloggers ridiculed Rogen. No wonder—the actor lives in multimillion-dollar homes in the Los Angeles area, guarded by sophisticated security systems and fencing.

Yet both Neistat and Rogen accurately defined Third Worldization: the utter breakdown of the law and the ability of the rich within such a feudal society to find ways to avoid the violent chaos.

After traveling the last 45 years in the Middle East, southern Europe, Mexico, and Asia Minor, I observed some common characteristics of a so-called Third-World society. And all of them might feel increasingly familiar to contemporary Americans.

Whether in Cairo or Naples, theft was commonplace. Yet property crimes were almost never seriously prosecuted.

In a medieval-type society of two rather than three classes, the rich in walled estates rarely worry that much about thievery. Crime is written off as an intramural problem of the poor, especially when the middle class is in decline or nonexistent.

Violent crime is now soaring in America. But two things are different about America’s new criminality.

One is the virtual impunity of it. Thieves now brazenly swarm a store, ransack, steal, and flee with the content without worry of arrest.

Second, the Left often justifies crime as a sort of righteous payback against a supposedly exploitative system.

So, the architect of the so-called 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, preened of the summer 2020 riotous destruction of property: “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.”

Third Worldization reflects the asymmetry of law enforcement. Ideology and money, not the law, adjudicate who gets arrested and tried, and who does not.

There were 120 days of continuous looting, arson, and lethal violence in summer 2020. The riots were variously characterized by the burning of courthouses, police precincts, and an iconic church.

And there was also a frightening riot on January 6, where a mob entered the Capitol and damaged federal property.

Among those arrested in the latter Washington, D.C. violence many are often held in solitary confinement or under harsh jail conditions. That one-day riot is currently the subject of a congressional investigation.

Some of those arrested are still, 10 months later, awaiting trial. The convicted are facing long prison sentences.

In contrast, some 14,000 were arrested in the longer and more violent rioting of 2020. Most were released without bail. The majority had their charges dropped. Very few are still being held awaiting capital charges.

A common denominator to recent controversies at the Justice Department, CIA, FBI, and Pentagon is that all these agencies under dubious pretexts have investigated American citizens with little or no justification—after demonizing their targets as “treasonous,” “domestic terrorists,” “white supremacists,” or “racists.”

In the Third World, basic services—power, fuel, transportation, water—are characteristically unreliable: In other words, much like a frequent California brownout.

I’ve been on five flights in my life where it was announced there was not enough fuel to continue to the scheduled destination—requiring either turning around or landing somewhere on the way. One such aborted flight took off from Cairo, another from southern Mexico. The other three were this spring and summer inside the United States.

One of the most memorable scenes that I remember of Ankara, Old Cairo, or Algiers of the early 1970s were legions of beggars and the impoverished sleeping on sidewalks.

But such impoverishment pales in comparison to the encampments of present-day Fresno, Los Angeles, Sacramento, or San Francisco. Tens of thousands live on sidewalks and in open view use them to defecate, urinate, inject drugs, and dispose of refuse.

In the old Third World, extreme wealth and poverty existed in close proximity. It was common to see peasants on horse-drawn wagons a few miles from coastal villas.

But there is now far more contiguous wealth and poverty in Silicon Valley. In Redwood City and East Palo Alto, multiple families cram into tiny bungalows and garages—often a few blocks from tony Atherton.

On the main streets outside of Stanford University and the Google campus, the helot classes sleep in decrepit trailers and buses parked on the streets.

Neistat was right in identifying a pandemic of crime in Los Angeles as Third Worldization.

But so was Rogen, though unknowingly so. The actor played the predictable role of the smug, indifferent Third World rich who master ignoring—and navigating around—the misery of others in their midst.

Refugees from Communist Countries Are The Canaries In The Coal Mine

What we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.” — Hegel

In the classic movie Alien, the crew of a spaceship accidentally brings a small specimen inside their ship when they land on an uncharted planet. As they resume their voyage, the alien transmogrifies into a bigger and deadlier form and begins to kill the crew one by one. At wit’s end, the few remaining crew members ask their android how to kill it. In a tone of incredulity, the android answers back, “You still don’t know what you’re dealing with, do you?”

People such as myself who have lived in countries controlled by Communist totalitarian regimes are thoroughly acquainted with their characteristics: censorship, divide-and-conquer tactics, fraudulent elections, mutilation of the arts and science, forbidding books, sadistic repressions, absence of comedy, snitching to authorities by friends and family members, constant propaganda, rewriting history books, toppling statues, relentless fanaticism, the rule of law jettisoned, political prisoners, self-censorship, propaganda posing as news, ruining the country’s economy, distorting the meaning of words. We can smell the stench of Communism, the plague of the 20th century, a mile away.

Except we can smell it here. Now.

We are the canaries in the coal mine.

I can give hundreds of instances of the above characteristics being carried out in America, which have been increasing in frequency and intensity. However, most people are unaware of them because the major propaganda outlets (CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, etc.) ignore them and, on the other hand, conservatives are notorious for only preaching to the choir and stubbornly and stupidly not reaching out to the general public because they are so lazy.

Equally affected by the news blackout of the propaganda outlets are the frantic warnings from immigrants from Communist countries. On several other occasions in various conservative outlets, I have expressed my alarm at what is happening and I could repeat myself here. Instead of writing yet another article sounding the alarm that the barbarians are not at the gates, but inside the gates, I will cite other refugees and dissidents if for no other reason that their voices deserve to be heard by more people, contrary to the efforts of the media hivemind to suppress them. Some may object to my merely listing their voices and that it is a long list. Well, the point is that it is a long list. So, you should pay attention.

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Quote O’ The Day
As you look at the insane reaction to the Rittenhouse verdict, it’s important to understand why we’re here and what kind of people we’ve dealing with.
–-Jesse Kelly

The Sky is Green Theory.

We’re at a place now in America like no other time in this nation’s history. A very dangerous place. You see, cultures are held up by pillars. Government, religion, sports, education, entertainment, etc..

Our pillars are all rotted with same sickness: Cultural Marxism

The wacko leftist on the street corner you used to mock as you drove by, he now brings you the news. He runs your FBI. He plays in the NBA. He pastors your church.

And because all the pillars believe the same thing, you no longer have a check and balance cultural system. If the government lies, the media should be there to expose it. A huge Hollywood star should expose it. The pillars check each other in a healthy society.

But we don’t have that. And because we don’t have that, they don’t feel the need to shade the truth or manipulate a story. They now can simply invent something out of thin air and they know no other pillar will check them on it.

The Kyle Rittenhouse case red-pilled a few more million:

Half this country believes Kyle Rittenhouse illegally crossed state lines with a weapon and murdered two people. Half of those people think the ones “murdered” were black.

Some will believe anything to get ahead:

Which brings us to the Sky is Green theory. It sounds crazy, but The System could wake up tomorrow and convince half this country that the sky is green.

News program after news program would have “experts” on to discuss the newly green sky. Professors would teach about it. Our entertainers would all have a video up on Instagram about it in short order.

Our brain dead athletes would repeat it. Nike would be running commercials showing a green sky by the end of the week. Every Hollywood movie would have a green sky.

And the shaming would begin. Oh the shaming. Anyone talking about a blue sky would be treated like some deranged conspiracy theorist. Families would divide over it. Facebook would ban you for discussing “blue skies”.

You get the idea. Because there are no longer cultural checks outside of a few people with balls on the Right, we now live in a time when a huge percentage of your countrymen occupy a world of make believe.

I don’t know the solution for this. I genuinely don’t. But I do know we won’t last much longer this way. This nation does not exist in its current form 100 years from now unless this is fixed.

In Eastern Europe under communist rule, ordinary people had only contempt for the dwindling minority of the population who listened to the state propaganda and appeared to believe it. No checks and balances there either.

And how did that end? The communist fantasies grew too divorced from reality, until one glorious day in 1989 the even people who profited from the communist system realized they were being left behind by the West — and communism ended.

Thanksgiving: The Left Desperately Wants to Cancel the Great American Holiday.

I’ll publish a tribute to the pilgrims on Thursday in honor of Thanksgiving, but today, let’s check the polar opposite of the honesty, humility, and gratefulness we should celebrate this week.

Thanksgiving, of course, is a uniquely American holiday celebrating how English settlers and Native Americans overcame cultural and linguistic barriers to share a meal and initiate a worldwide model for tolerance and cooperation. Oversimplified? Maybe, but it’s mainly correct.

And it is surely more accurate than proclaiming Thanksgiving to be about murder, greed, and bigotry.

Yet in a weekend segment for — you guessed it — what MSNBC called “The Thanksgiving history you’ve never heard,” a person called Gyasi Ross shouts from a pre-written, Howard Zinn-influenced screed:

“The truth is that pilgrims did not bring turkey, sweet potato pie or cranberries to Thanksgiving. They could not. They were broke! They were broken! Their hands were out! They were begging! They brought nothing of value. But they got fed! They got schooled! Instead of bringing stuffing and biscuits, those settlers brought genocide and violence. That genocide and violence is still on the menu! And state sponsored violence against Native and black Americans is commonplace!”

I’ve heard this before. It’s not original.

I am sure Ross knows all this information because he — a rapper and storyteller from Seattle — was in the arena 400 years ago for a first-person account.

Ross’ hateful rant reminds us that not only is dangerous revisionist history alive and well in left-wing cable news, but also, no matter the topic, progressives and their media allies will always change the subject back to their favorites: race and hating America’s founding.

The Washington Post, for example, recently informed us, “Just as Native American activists have demanded the removal of Christopher Columbus statues, they have long objected to the popular portrayal of Thanksgiving.”

This crazed essay was written by their traffic reporter, I kid you not!

And yet with 2,500 words, she didn’t tell the paper’s self-loathing readers that Native Americans themselves abhor Thanksgiving or admire political correctness (recall how 9 in 10 weren’t offended by the Washington Redskins’ name before white progressives forced a change two years ago), but rather “Native American activists” are angry about Thanksgiving. Activists, by definition, are regularly irate.

People are free to hate since we do not live in the left’s beloved socialist regimes where they can be jailed for unpopular views.

But the rest of us should not pay attention to whatever cancel culture crusade the banal wokesters are onto this week. They’re brainwashed, deranged, and unhappy. We Americans prefer gratitude in the face of adversity.

Actually he is racist if he really supports that marxist organization. However, he just may be to0 naïve, or ignorant, to understand what they’re all about. But he has had his eyes opened on the state of the justice system.

Rittenhouse: ‘I’m Not a Racist Person — I Support the BLM Movement’

Kyle Rittenhouse, who was recently acquitted by a Kenosha, WI jury on multiple charges, including murder, told Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson that he actually supported peaceful demonstrations and the Black Lives Matter movement.

He also insists he is not racist during a preview of an interview set to air on Monday on FNC’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

“This case has nothing to do with race,” Rittenhouse said. “It never had anything to do with race. It had to do with the right to self-defense.”

“I’m not a racist person,” he continued. “I support the BLM movement. I support peacefully demonstrating. I believe there needs to be change. I believe there’s a lot of prosecutorial misconduct, not just in my case but in other cases. It’s just amazing to see how much a prosecutor can take advantage of someone.”

The reaction to the Rittenhouse verdict will be a sorting hat for America

And the Governor of California:

These men know that happened and have an army of lawyers that could explain it to them in detail.

The point is the narrative uber alles.

This will be used to sort Americans.

Did you watch the trial and come to your own conclusions based on the evidence?

Or

Did you accept the narrative and engage in the 14 month Two Minute Hate against the target designated?

Are you still one of those knuckle draggers who has to see things with their own eyes and have their own thoughts?

Or

Are you one of the Good People who accepts the opinions of the Credentialed Experts™?

This is the same sorting we saw with mask mandates and COVID compliance.

When all the data came out, do you still doggedly believe in masks and gloves and performative COVID ablutions, or did you go back to your normal life?

We know that people who supported Kyle before the trial were punished on social media and elsewhere, just like those who propagated “COVID misinformation.”

The ultimate goal is to sort us into the compliant and free thinkers with punishments and rewards dolled out accordingly.

Just to point out, in case you were wondering. Drs. Wintermute & Hemenway are leftists and rabidly anti-gun/anti-self defense .

More Than Gun Violence That Differs Between US, Other Places

So-called gun violence is higher in the United States than in other first-world nations. It’s a point that is continually brought up, in part because we also are the only first-world nation to actually respect people’s gun rights.

As we’ve noted in previous posts, ABC News has been running a series about rethinking firearm-related violence here in the United States. We’ve poked an awful lot of holes in some of their stories, and today’s isn’t likely to be any different.

You see, they’re focused on comparing the United States to other countries on this subject.

The United States has a gun violence epidemic, and it’s not one shared by its peers. The nation that by one estimate has more guns than people has the highest rate of firearm deaths compared with other high-income countries. Mass shootings, an all-too-common occurrence in the U.S., are also exceedingly rare in peer countries — where governments have often been quick to pass gun reform in the wake of such tragedies.

“Compared to the other peer countries, basically what we have is lots and lots of guns, particularly handguns, and we have by far the weakest gun laws. Not surprisingly, we have huge gun problems,” David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, told ABC News. “I think if we had basically the gun laws of any other developed country, we’d be better off.”

It’s unclear if gun prevalence definitively impacts gun violence, though research by Hemenway’s center has found links between a large number of guns and more firearm homicides, suicides and accidents. The implementation of new gun restrictions has also been associated with a drop in firearm deaths, a 2016 review of 130 studies across 10 countries found.

The U.S. is “not necessarily a more violent society than others,” Dr. Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis, told ABC News.

“What we have is unique access to a technology that changes the outcome — firearms,” he said.

It’s not uncommon to compare the U.S. with other developed countries, especially after yet another horrific mass shooting. There are developing countries with higher rates of firearm deaths than the U.S., though comparing gun violence among peers helps to control for other factors, Hemenway said. And while there are lessons in other nations’ policy measures that could help address the problem here, because the U.S. is on such a different plane when it comes to civilian gun ownership, it will also take more research and multiple, targeted solutions to address the scope of the problem, experts said.

“Other countries do better. We should be able to figure out how to do better,” Hemenway said.

Hemenway is essentially arguing that the only real difference between these other nations and the United States is our lack of gun laws and that we really should embrace how the rest of the developed world treats firearms.

Well, that might be a compelling argument if it wasn’t premised on such a faulty concept.

The United States is a unique experiment, one that may look like the other developed nations of the world, but isn’t, and for a number of reasons. One of those is indeed our Second Amendment protections of our right to keep and bear arms, but there are other differences as well.

For one thing, we tend to be more racially diverse.

England, as an example, is 87.2 percent white and only three percent black, three percent Indian, 1.9 percent Pakistani, two percent mixed, and 3.7 percent other.

Meanwhile, we’re only 61.6 percent white, 12.4 percent black, 10.2 percent classified as multiracial, six percent Asian, 8.4 percent other, 1.1 percent Native Americans, and 0.2 percent Pacific Islander. Then, by ethnicity, they have 18.4 percent Hispanic. In other words, we’ve got a lot more ethnicities trying to share this patch of land.

Now, I’m not saying that any of these minorities are more prone to violence than anyone else, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility that all these ethnic groups rubbing together may create some kind of tension that we just haven’t resolved that results in that violence. After all, we live in a time when everyone is accusing everyone else of being racist. It’s possible that racial animosity–which goes in all directions–may result in people feeling like they don’t have to play by the rules.

Or, it may have no difference. We simply don’t know, but it is a data point that shows there are differences between us and many other developed nations.

But that’s only one potential difference.

Let’s also talk about poverty. America is the land of opportunity, but it’s also the land of falling on your butt if you’re not careful. Many people do just that and rebuild. Others don’t and some start off on their butts and foster resentment.

Among the 38 nations that make up the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the majority of which are developed nations, the United States has the fourth-highest poverty rate. The three nations with more poverty? Chile, Israel, and Mexico. Of those three, only Israel can be universally considered developed and they have a problem with violence as well, though theirs comes in the form of terrorism.

So it’s not difficult to see that the United States has some stark differences that separate it from other developed nations. Poverty alone may account for all of the difference. This holds up upon more localized examination.

After all, we think of cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Saint Louis as being extraordinarily violent, but even there, you’ll see that the violence is generally localized. Where? In the poorer neighborhoods in the city.

In other words, poverty within our cities also seems to have a direct correlation with violent crime in our country. That’s poverty that doesn’t show up in other nations for various reasons.

Where is that in Hemenway’s examination?

It’s not there because it’s not useful for him to push his preferred narrative. It’s just that simple.

And I haven’t even gotten into all the nations with strict gun control laws that have much worse violent crime rates than we have.

So don’t come to me about what other countries do or don’t do. Those countries aren’t the United States, so their experiences are largely irrelevant.

The Farce of American Despotism.

The Soviets had the gulag, we have “cancel culture” in our universities and a brittle obsession with race and weirdo sexuality everywhere. 

Reflecting on Joe Biden’s disastrous “town hall” with Anderson Cooper on Thursday, The Spectator’s Dominic Green asks a question that has to weigh heavily on the mind of every American adult: “Is it more worrisome that Joe Biden might not be in charge, or that he actually is in charge?” I have long argued that allowing Biden to appear in public is a form of elder abuse, and I have speculated that he really is not in control of his actions but is manipulated, puppet-like, by a shadowy cadre of unnamed string-pullers I have called “The Committee.”

I do not have any proof that such is the case. I infer the existence and machinations of The Committee from Biden’s ostentatious incompetence and apparent senility. Has any president in the history of the Republic overseen such a destructive litany of failures so early in his tenure? Observers around the world caught their breath in August as our botched exit from Afghanistan went from appalling to something much worse and more deadly. What will be its defining image? The desperate Afghans clinging to and then falling from the landing gear of a transport plane as it took off from the Kabul airport? Or will it be the images of the slaughter perpetrated by a suicide (that is, a homicide) bomber outside the airport, an incident that killed some 170 people include more than a dozen U.S. military personnel?

Or maybe it will be the image of the drone strike launched in retaliation for that slaughter, a strike that was supposed to have targeted an ISIS-K operative but in fact killed zero terrorists and instead blew to bits 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children. The United States initially said they had obliterated an ISIS-K operative along with the collateral damage, but eventually they had to admit that, nope, they got no bad guys, just 10 innocent Afghans.

General Mark “White Rage” Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, initially called the attack a “righteous strike,” but then walked that back to describe it as a “heart-wrenching” “horrible tragedy of war.” Meanwhile, Joe Biden himself called the evacuation from Afghanistan an “extraordinary success.”

I wonder what the hundreds of Americans stranded in Afghanistan think about that? The administration initially said that everyone who wanted to get out could get out, then it acknowledged that a handful of Americans were left behind, then “about a hundred.” That number has just been adjusted up to more than 400. I wonder, too, what the families of those murdered by the Taliban, and then hanged from construction cranes as “examples” to the populace, think of that judgment? Something similar, I suspect, to what the husband and children of Negar Masoomi, the pregnant policewoman who allegedly was murdered in front of them by Taliban agents in September, think.

But whether Joe is calling the shots or is merely the Howdy Doody mannequin manipulated by others, it is clear for all to see that the United States, as Green puts it, is “heading nowhere good.” And the volume keeps getting turned up on the awfulness.

Everyone has minuted the disaster at our southern border, where thousands upon thousands of illegal aliens are pouring into the country, only to be packed off and resettled in a town near you. It was horrible a couple of months ago. Now it is a screaming catastrophe, as another huge caravan of migrants is wending its way through Mexico towards America. Just so, inflation had spiked over the summer, but now it is out of control, the worst in decades, a situation compounded by a crippled supply chain as hundreds of cargo ships loiter off the coasts of California and New York, unable to make port or be unloaded.

Meanwhile Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s transportation secretary is off on paternity leave with his hubby and their adopted child. Santa is predicted to be leaving the North Pole a little light this holiday season, since many of the gifts people ordered will be delayed. And it’s a good thing his sleigh is powered by reindeer, since gas is going to be awfully dear by Christmas. At some spots in California, it is already north of $8 a gallon.

Last week,  the world, including our so-called “intelligence” services was surprised the the news that the Chinese had recently  tested a nuclear capable hypersonic rocket. The news of that broke right around the time that the State Department issued a tweet proudly announcing “International Pronouns Day.” “Today on International Pronouns Day,” it read, “we share why many people list pronouns on their email and social media profiles.”

Noting that until recently, the United States set “the global standard in political imagery,” Green argues that that day has passed. “The US no longer defines that global standard,” he writes.

The Chinese are the masters of political performance these days, whether it’s allegorical nationalist ballets at sporting events or the other nationalist ballet, the synchronized ovation in the Great Hall of the People. Yet our politicians feel they have to keep up with the old American standard. The result, as it was for the Soviets, is farce. We are now beating ourselves at our own game.

Indeed. And one result of that farce is that the mummers’ play of political correctness increasingly substitutes for serious politics, even as the ideology of wokeness replaces genuine enlightenment. “Twenty-first century America,” Green rightly comments, “is a shadow of its former self, so its politics have become a shadow play of propaganda.”

Marx famously adapted Hegel’s observations about history repeating itself, noting Hegel forgot to add that it does so first as tragedy, then as farce. That is the mode of American despotism at the moment. The Soviets had the gulag, we have “cancel culture” in our universities and a brittle obsession with race and weirdo sexuality everywhere. Are we supposed to be proud or alarmed that Rachel Levine, (né Richard) is the first “transgender” Assistant Secretary of Health and four-star admiral? Tocqueville saw the essentials of our peculiar servitude in his brilliant analysis of “democratic despotism.” Naturally, though, he missed some of the more farcical aspects for who, in 1830, could have predicted “International Pronouns Day” or phenomena like Rachel Levine?

Montesquieu put his finger on our situation when, in Considerations of the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, he noted that “in a free state in which sovereignty has just been usurped, whatever can establish the unlimited authority of one man is called good order, and whatever can maintain the honest liberty of the subjects is called commotion, dissension, or bad government.” Montesquieu was talking about the moment when the Roman republic gave way to the autocracy of Augustus. Mutatis mutandis, what he says applies equally to our situation in which sovereignty has been usurped and concentrated in the hand of a tiny oligarchy that mouths clichés about “our democracy” the better to subvert it.