Andrew Marantz, Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation

At Amazon, Andrew Marantz, Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.

A Fast-Growing Network of Conservative Groups Is Fueling a Surge in Book Bans

Good.

It's not like they're banning A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or To Kill a Mockingbird.

We're talking about perverted, nasty stuff that's powering the left's child-grooming pipeline.

At the New York Times, "Some groups are new, some are longstanding. Some are local, others national. Over the past two years, they have become vastly more organized, well funded, effective — and criticized":

The Keller Independent School District, just outside of Dallas, passed a new rule in November: It banned books from its libraries that include the concept of gender fluidity.

The change was pushed by three new school board members, elected in May with support from Patriot Mobile, a self-described Christian cellphone carrier. Through its political action committee, Patriot Mobile poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into Texas school board races to promote candidates with conservative views on race, gender and sexuality — including on which books children can access at school.

Traditionally, debates over what books are appropriate for school libraries have taken place between a concerned parent and a librarian or administrator, and resulted in a single title or a few books being re-evaluated, and either removed or returned to shelves.

But recently, the issue has been supercharged by a rapidly growing and increasingly influential constellation of conservative groups. The organizations frequently describe themselves as defending parental rights. Some are new and others are longstanding, but with a recent focus on books. Some work at the district and state level, others have national reach. And over the past two years or so, they have grown vastly more organized, interconnected, well funded — and effective.

The groups have pursued their goals by becoming heavily involved in local and state politics, where Republican efforts have largely outmatched liberal organizations in many states for years. They have created political action committees, funded campaigns, endorsed candidates and packed school boards, helping to fuel a surge in challenges to individual books and to drive changes in the rules governing what books are available to children.

“This is not about banning books, it’s about protecting the innocence of our children,” said Keith Flaugh, one of the founders of Florida Citizens Alliance, a conservative group focused on education, “and letting the parents decide what the child gets rather than having government schools indoctrinate our kids.”

The materials the groups object to are often described in policies and legislation as sensitive, inappropriate or pornographic. In practice, the books most frequently targeted for removal have been by or about Black or L.G.B.T.Q. people, according to the American Library Association. In Texas, 11 school board candidates backed by Patriot Mobile Action, the political action committee formed by the cellphone company, won in four districts this year, including Keller. The committee’s aim is to eliminate “critical race theory” and “L.G.B.T.Q. indoctrination” from schools, Leigh Wambsganss, its executive director, said on Steve Bannon’s show, “War Room.”

Even books without sexual content can be problematic if they include L.G.B.T.Q. characters, because they are “sexualizing children,” she said: “It is normalizing a lifestyle that is a sexual choice.”

“Those kinds of lifestyles,” she added, shouldn’t “be forced down the throats of families who don’t agree.”

By August, about three months after the new members were seated, the Keller school board had restricted or prohibited books containing profanity, violence, sex scenes or nudity. These changes resulted in the removal of at least 20 books from the district’s schools, including Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and several young adult novels with L.G.B.T.Q. characters, like Adam Silvera’s “More Happy Than Not.”

In November, the board added the ban on books that refer to gender fluidity. Laney Hawes, who has four children in Keller schools, was there that day. She and some other parents felt outflanked, she said, by deep-pocketed organizations whose actions can change longstanding policies in a matter of months.

“They ran on the campaign of, ‘We’re going to get pornography and sexually explicit books out of our school libraries,’” Ms. Hawes said. “The parents didn’t have a PAC. We couldn’t compete with these people.”

Individuals and groups opposing book restrictions say crafting a national response is difficult, since policies are set locally. But some are pushing back. The restrictions, said Emerson Sykes, a First Amendment litigator for the American Civil Liberties Union, infringe on students’ “right to access a broad range of material without political censorship.”

The A.C.L.U and other advocacy groups filed a federal civil rights complaint against the Keller school district, arguing that banning books about gender fluidity creates “a pervasively hostile atmosphere for L.G.B.T.Q.+ students.”

Librarians in Texas formed Freadom Fighters, an organization that offers guidance to librarians on handling book challenges. In Florida, parents who oppose book banning formed the Freedom to Read Project, which urges its members to attend board meetings and tracks the work of groups like Florida Citizens Alliance.

“We’re trying to document the censorship movement,” said Stephana Ferrell, one of the founders of Freedom to Read. “They don’t want to use the word ‘ban.’ Instead they remove, relocate, restrict — all these other words that aren’t ‘ban.’ But it’s a ban.”

According to a recent report from the free speech organization PEN America, there are at least 50 groups across the country working to remove books they object to from libraries. Some have seen explosive growth recently: Of the 300 chapters that PEN tracked, 73 percent were formed after 2020.

The growth comes, in part, from the rise of “parental rights” organizations during the pandemic. Formed to fight Covid restrictions in schools, some groups adopted a broader conservative agenda focused on opposing instruction on race, gender and sexuality, and on removing books they regard as inappropriate.

Other groups, like Florida Citizens Alliance, have been around for years. Established in 2013, the alliance has longstanding ties to Gov. Ron DeSantis: Its co-founders, Mr. Flaugh and Pastor Rick Stevens, served on the DeSantis transition committee. The group also has partnerships with over 100 other groups, including Moms for Liberty and Americans for Prosperity Florida, a local branch of a national group founded by the billionaires Charles and David Koch.

Five years ago, Mr. Flaugh and Pastor Stevens helped draft a bill that gave all county residents, not just parents, the power to challenge a book in a school district. Opponents say it contributed to waves of book challenges. The bill’s supporters, however, say local tax dollars fund the school system, so all residents have a right to influence how that money is spent.

“They’re the ones that pay for it,” said Representative Byron Donalds, who co-sponsored the bill when he was in the Florida Legislature...

Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison's book are for mature audiences, no doubt. But these groups should shy away from banning the classics and stick to banning the left's despicable LBGTQIA+ groomer literature. It's disgusting.

 

Four College Kids Were Brutally Murdered In Idaho But There's No Attack Angle for the Democrat Party So Their Deaths Don't Matter

At AoSHQ, "On November 13, between 3am and 4am, a killer crept into a house and butchered four people with a knife on the campus of the University of Idaho. They victims are not members of Democrat Grievance Group nor was the weapon used a Hate Weapon like a gun so the Corporate Propaganda Press has decided that these murders are Non-Useful --- Oh, also: The murders did not happen in NY, LA, or DC. Just some Flyover Country corpses. No big deal."

When Ideology Trumps Empathy

From Heather Mac Donald, at City Journal, "Progressives profess to care deeply about inner-city black Americans, but their voting patterns suggest otherwise."

'Democrats need to get the same treatment. Tit for tat/mutual assured destruction is the only way they'll learn...'

From Glenn Reynolds, at Instapundit, "Marjorie Taylor Greene says her legal bill is $700,000. ""Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) reelection was such a sure thing that she was projected the winner as polls closed on Election Day, but that didn’t stop liberal groups from challenging her right to be on the ballot. In addition to facing a well-financed upstart challenger in a race she won 66%-34%, she faced a challenge to having her name on the ballot by a group that labeled her an insurrectionist for defending some of those jailed in the Jan. 6 Capitol riots'."

Colorado Club Shooting Suspect is Non-Binary

Well, that fucked up the left's "right-wing hate" narrative, the motherfuckers. This was an LBGTQIA+ nightclub, and the smears were just too irresistible for the vile, demonic left. 

At Twitchy, "Stephanie Ruhle didn’t let new info about Club Q shooter disrupt her narrative about ‘the far Right’."

Also, "Watch Alisyn Camerota’s brain break as she reports that CO shooter is ‘non-binary’."

Main story at the New York Post, "Colorado Springs shooting suspect Anderson Aldrich is nonbinary: lawyers."

Why Elites Like Greta Thunberg Hate Capitalism

And she's so young. What a waste of a great potential.

From Michael Shellenberger, on Substack, "Free markets have lifted millions out of poverty, liberated women, and protected the environment. Why, then, are so many progressives against them?":

For the last three years, Greta Thunberg has said that her life’s purpose was to save the world from climate change. But last Sunday, she told an audience in London that climate activists must overthrow "the whole capitalist system," which she says is responsible for "imperialism, oppression, genocide... racist, oppressive extractionism." Her talk echoed the World Economic Forum's calls for a “Great Reset” away from fossil fuels and toward renewables. There is no “back to normal,” she said.

But her claims are absurd. The "whole capitalist system" has, over the last 200 years, allowed for the average life expectancy of humans to rise from 30 to 70 years of age. The "whole capitalist system" produces larger food surpluses than any other system in human history. And the "whole capitalist system" has resulted in declining greenhouse gas emissions in developed nations over the last 50 years.

Capitalism is far from perfect. It worsens inequality by making some people so rich that they can rocket into space on liquified hydrogen while leaving others too poor to afford natural gas. It is characterized by cycles of boom and bust that create frenzies of wealth followed by high unemployment. And it is constantly turning non-market relationships, including intimate ones, such as between parents and caregivers, into exchanges between buyers and sellers.

But capitalism is plainly better than any other system of economic organization yet devised. High levels of inequality are the result of more rich people, not more poor people, who are much better off under capitalism than feudalism or communism. The business cycle of booms and busts provokes manias and depressions, but it is much more efficient, and less oppressive than governments deciding what should be produced, by whom, and at what price. And while it’s true that capitalism undermines non-market relationships, that’s often a good thing, even in the case of childcare, since it allows women and others to be compensated for their labor.

Some of the people who have benefitted the most from industrial capitalism are people like Thunberg and her family. The remarkable wealth of their home nation of Sweden is due to the industrial revolution, which allows for a tiny number of people to produce food, energy, and other necessities for life so that the majority of Swedes can do other, less arduous, and more pleasurable things. The same is true across the West. In the U.S., just 2% of the population works on farms and just 8% in factories. And industrial capitalism allowed Sweden to create a generous social welfare state consisting of free health care, free education, and 480 days of paid leave for parents when a child is born or adopted. The Thunbergs are, by any global or historical standard, rich: the annual per capita income globally, according to the World Bank, is $11,000, which is less than the cost of the two chairs in Thunberg’s living room.

Capitalism is far better for the natural environment than feudalism or communism. Under feudalism, subsistence farmers rely on wood and dung for cooking fuels and must farm large tracts of land to produce a small amount of food. The industrial revolution not only liberated most people from back-breaking farming but also reduced the amount of land required, thanks to fertilizer, irrigation, and tractors. The same process allowed humans to switch from using wood to coal to natural gas and uranium as primary fuels.

The result has been the return, and “re-wilding,” of grasslands and forests around the world, including in Sweden. The reason is that market capitalism rewards economic efficiency and thus reduced natural resource use. Consider the whales. What saved them, in capitalist nations, was cheaper substitute oils, first petroleum and then vegetable oils. The Soviet Union, by contrast, kept whaling long after it was economically efficient to do so because whalers were protected from market competition.

All of this and yet, around the world, it is affluent and educated progressives like Thunberg who are anti-capitalist...

The Collapse of Biden's Woketopia

From Sasha Stone, on Subtack, "And the Realignment of a New America":

“I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions.” ― George Carlin

Joe Biden and the Democrats have a big problem. It isn’t just that they stand to lose in the midterm elections and maybe the Presidency in 2024. They stand to lose much more than that. They stand to lose everything.

The American people, by now, have had enough. They’re sick of cowards who cannot stand up to the activists who control them. They’re not just sick of them in Washington. They’re sick of them everywhere. They’re sick of being told what they can and can’t say, what they can and can’t think.

In 2020, a New Woke Order exploded on the streets. It looked a lot like the rehearsal at Evergreen and across many college campuses all over the country. It wasn’t all of the Zoomers leading the charge, but the activists have been loud and powerful. They have captured corporate America and nearly every cultural institution in the country. And they’ve captured Joe Biden and the Democrats.

Their activism, however well-intentioned, has all but wrecked Hollywood movies; almost every network or streaming series is infused with their doctrine. It is inescapable. It’s in public schools, museums, fast food advertising, library reading lists, and sports. Most of us are developing an immunity to anything we think might be “woke,” and we will avoid it as much as possible.

Most of us know that if there is some message buried in a book or a movie, we’re going to resent being drawn in for yet another lecture on how to be better, how to do better, and how to reorder our thinking to satisfy their unending critiques. It’s so bad that someone should start a website called “Is it Woke”? That would save consumers a lot of time and trouble.

The only reason we don’t hear about it more is that any dissent is viciously attacked until an apology is squeezed out like the last bit of toothpaste in an empty tube. It is too much trouble to endure all of that panic and hysteria. So most people keep their heads down and hope it will pass.

Joe Biden doesn’t yet understand this. Most Democrats don’t. Not even the new stars in the party like Gavin Newsome or Pete Buttigieg. Not even Beto. They falsely believe that is what they must do to win Twitter and win points on the Left. The exact opposite is true. Although one must develop “rhino skin,” like Elon Musk or Donald Trump, the future will be with those who push back loudly against this ongoing madness.

In the past, we might have had some reality checks with people like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Jimmy Kimmel, or SNL. But no. They’ve been sucked into the Body Snatchers, too, and their comedy isn’t comedy at all. They work for the Democrats, just like much of the media. It feels like being stuck inside a Twilight Zone episode where everyone is pretending like what is happening isn’t happening.

There are many reasons the Democrats might lose in a massive red wave on Tuesday. One of those is the pendulum shift we see throughout American history that bobs back and forth between liberalism and conservatism. But I would bet that many of these voters might not even want Republicans in power and disagree with their policies.

Still, they see in the MAGA candidates something they don’t see anywhere else: unapologetic resistance to the “woke” utopia that has been foisted upon us all.

This is why Kari Lake is burning up the polls. This is why Glenn Youngkin won and why Ron DeSantis is so popular. And it’s why Trump will likely breeze through to a win in 2024. Sure, they are also offering ways to rescue America from a collapsing economy, but what people fear the most is what they aren’t allowed to talk about.

The Democrats and their robot army on Twitter or in the mainstream media seem to think that continuing to demonize the other side will work to scare voters away from them. But to many people, that’s like trying to tell them not to get in the lifeboats as the Titanic sank, explaining that the people driving the boats protested the last election.

But let’s get specific about what we mean by “woke.” It doesn’t mean inclusion. It doesn’t even mean equity. It means that the answers to humanity’s problems have finally been solved. All you have to do is measure a person’s worth by status as a marginalized person. Meet the new utopia. Same as the old utopia.

They believe that America, and other Western nations, have been built as colonizing systems of oppression specifically to keep Black and Brown people down. They have an adjunct category now for whites. They can have protective status if they’re part of the LGBTQIA community. If they are disabled, if they have some mental disorder, or even if they are old. These things elevate those deemed oppressed, left out and shut out of the American way of life, which theoretically rewards high achievement.

Joe Biden and John Fetterman are cis-gendered heterosexual white men who would usually be on the list of oppressors. Still, both have miraculously transcended their identity to become part of a marginalized group. Fetterman is considered disabled, and Biden is incapacitated due to age.

There is nothing more the Left loves than incapacitated white men. If they can wrap their fingers around a pen, they can tell them where to sign. Disability is only a protected class if you are also ideologically compliant. Elon Musk has Asperger’s but do you think that wins him any points with the Woketopians?

If you don’t have protective status, you are on the other side, the “bad” side. You are someone with privilege. White privilege, pretty privilege, thin privilege, youth privilege, straight privilege, and able-bodied privilege.

Here is a sampling of different kinds of privilege from North Shore Community College...

RTWT.

 

FLAMING SKULL: 'Florida *Democrat* Election Official Blows Whistle of Longstanding ILLEGAL Practice of 'Ballot Harvesting' by Paying Mostly African-American Residents $10 Per Ballot'

 At AoSHQ, "'WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS "MISINFORMATION" ACCORDING TO THE TREASONOUS CRIMINAL GANGS CALLED THE DOJ AND FBI, DEFINED AS "TRUE FACTS WHICH CONTRADICT THE LIES OF THE REGIME'."

Yorba Linda Public School District Bans Critical Race Theory. Cal State Fullerton Retaliates by Pulling Teacher-Trainees from the District's Educational Programs

Critical race theory, arghh! It's the cancer of society, gawd.

CSU Fullerton's School of Education is literally punishng the Yorba Linda School District for the crime of its Board of Trustees prohibiting critical theory indoctrination of its students. Just one more salvo in the culture wars, one might say, and a particularly viscous one. 

At the Los Angeles Times, "After O.C. school district bans critical race theory, it faces Cal State Fullerton backlash":

Months after an Orange County school district banned teaching critical race theory, Cal State Fullerton has told school officials it is pausing placement of its student teachers in the system’s K-12 classrooms, citing concerns that district policies conflict with university goals that promote equity and inclusion in education.

Leaders in the university’s College of Education — among the biggest providers of teachers into the county’s public schools — told officials in the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District that they did not believe the district would be able to support its student teachers whose training is rooted in diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice and tenets of critical race theory, according to a statement from the college.

“Clinical practicums, fieldwork and student teaching are major components of effective teacher preparation,” Lisa Kirtman, dean of the College of Education, said in the statement. “It is critical that we place teacher candidates in districts that support their growth and development.”

She added that she is open to working with the district to provide learning experiences that value “freedom of thought and expression” for the diverse student population.

Kirtman was not available for comment Tuesday afternoon. In an email, a university spokesperson said “the situation is still unfolding.”

Six student teachers from Cal State Fullerton are working in the Placentia-Yorba Linda district this academic year, down from the 70 or 80 teachers that have typically been placed in the system.

In a message to families, district Supt. Michael Matthews said leaders in CSUF’s College of Education asked the district over the summer about its commitment to “providing a just, equitable and inclusive education” after the district board narrowly approved a measure in April banning the teaching of critical race theory...

So much leftist race-ideology hogwash being rammed down the throats of our kids. The School of Education's condescension is despicable. 

RTWT.

Meet the Temporary Republicans Saving U.S. From the Left

From Sasha Stone, on Substack, "Meet the Temporary Republicans ---- Who Will Save the Country from the Left": 

“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.” ― Theodore Roosevelt.

What did Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill all have in common? They could see the threat and had the courage to confront it.

Tulsi Gabbard is the one Democrat who could not only recognize the threat of the modern-day Democratic Party but also dares to lead a movement to help take them out of power. And they must be taken out of power until they can get a grip and restore some sanity to the party and the country.

You see the “Temporary Republicans” mostly on Twitter anonymously or in comment sections. But don’t be surprised if you see them turn out in November.

They are parents whose children’s lives or businesses were destroyed by crippling lockdowns. Parents whose toddlers were forced to wear masks inexplicably. Even questioning the absurdity of such an illogical command was verboten....

The “Temporary Republicans” like me will return to being liberals once the Democratic Party returns to liberalism. Right now, though, they have become a puritanical cult that separates children from their parents, separates all of us from our biology, common sense, and rights under the Constitution.

For us Temporary Republicans, we have run out of options. There aren’t many alternatives in a two-party system like ours. We're stuck until we can find a way to have more than just two parties. We must throw our weight behind the best bet to take the Democrats out of power.

We’ve almost become numb to how quickly our rights have been infringed with the forced compliance over vaccines, lockdowns, and masks, and the double standards on denying the results of an election or a violent political protest. We just live with “cancel culture” now as though it’s our new normal. Most of us are still afraid to say what we really think online and sometimes in front of our friends. Maybe all of that won’t end in one election, but it’s a start.

A grassroots movement like MAGA is what has always ensured America has a healthy Democracy. Once our government, media, and powerful monopolies set about silencing them, dropping their social media sites like Parler, calling them terrorists and extremists — that tells you just how afraid they are of anyone threatening their power.

The sense of urgency comes because we are at a dangerous crossroads. Already an entire generation has come of age online, the Zoomers. Every generation that comes after them will have their entire lives online. They will have been conditioned and curated from childhood to follow Big Tech's dictates, which will control every aspect of their lives...

RTWT.

 

The Democrats' Willie Horton Problem

At TIPP Insights, "Diana Allocco lays down the facts regarding the Willie Horton case and how Democrats have forgotten the vital lessons from the unfortunate incidents":

“One of my objectives, quite frankly, is to lock Willie Horton up in jail.” — Joe Biden, Senate Judiciary Committee Chair, bragging Democrats were tougher than Republicans on criminals, 1990.

The nation’s 2022 top-tier fear is crime. Three quarters of Americans say violent crime is a major problem, and getting worse. Democrats’ cashless bail laws, attacks on police, and other liberal soft-on-crime policies have unleashed unrestrained criminality across the country, particularly in Democrat-run cities, where dangerous criminals are no longer locked up in jail. At all. “Arrested-and-released” is now the most common phrase in every crime article.

And this is not just theory to people, or some kind of political talking point. According to a recent Golden/TIPP poll, a record 16 percent of Americans themselves or a family member have been victims of crime — and the distressing numbers are particularly elevated among African Americans, Hispanics, and urban voters, where close to 25 percent — one in four — are crime victims.

Republicans are campaigning hard for the midterms on the real problem of crime — and gaining traction everywhere. The Democrat response: “That’s racist! It’s Willie Horton all over again! Shut up!” ....

To Democrats, Willie Horton is shorthand for: “Racist Republicans using racist dog whistles to get racist votes.” Democrats spit out this name like a two-word incantation, with total confidence that few current voters have any idea what the real story is. Well, let me lay out some essential details — because everything you think you know about Willie Horton is bull...

Leftists are desperate. People are increasingly frustrated with Racism! Racism! Racism! all the time. It's near the bottom of priorities that Americans say are important this year.

In any case, click through at that top link to read the rest. Lots of links embedded in the piece.

Democrats Mad They Might Lose Power to Censor (VIDEO)

It's Saagar Enjeti:

Cato Institute Economist: We Only Fetishize Manufacturing Jobs to 'Keep White Males With Low Education In Powerful Positions'

At AoSHQ, "You know what I'd like to import from China? You know what, motherfuckers? How about we make you eat the fucking bugs?"

Republicans Intensify Attacks on Crime as Democrats Push Back

 At the New York Times, "With images of lawlessness, G.O.P. candidates are pressing the issue in places where worries about public safety are omnipresent. Democrats, on the defensive, are promising to fund the police":

In Pennsylvania, Republicans are attacking John Fetterman, the Democratic Senate candidate, as “dangerously liberal on crime.”

Outside Portland, Ore., where years of clashes between left-wing protesters and the police have captured national attention, a Republican campaign ad juxtaposes video of Jamie McLeod-Skinner, a Democratic congressional candidate, protesting with footage of rioters and looters. Ms. McLeod-Skinner, an ominous-sounding narrator warns, is “one of them.”

And in New Mexico, the wife of Mark Ronchetti, the Republican nominee for governor, tells in a campaign ad of how she had once hid in a closet with her two young daughters and her gun pointed at the door because she feared an intruder was breaking in. Though the incident happened a decade ago, the ad accuses Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, Mr. Ronchetti’s Democratic opponent, of making it “easier to be a criminal than a cop.”

In the final phase of the midterm campaign, Republicans are intensifying their focus on crime and public safety, hoping to shift the debate onto political terrain that many of the party’s strategists and candidates view as favorable. The strategy seeks to capitalize on some voters’ fears about safety — after a pandemic-fueled crime surge that in some cities has yet to fully recede. But it has swiftly drawn criticism as a return to sometimes deceptive or racially divisive messaging.

Crime-heavy campaigns have been part of the Republican brand for decades, gaining new steam in 2020 when President Donald J. Trump tried to leverage a backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement to vilify Democrats. But two years later, left-wing calls to defund the police have given way to an effort to pump money back into departments in many Democratic-led cities, raising questions about whether Republicans’ tactics will be as effective as they were in 2020, when the party made gains in the House.

Republicans are running the ads most aggressively in the suburbs of cities where worries about public safety are omnipresent, places that were upended by the 2020 protests over racial injustice or are near the country’s southwestern border. In some of the country’s most competitive Senate races — in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — Republican candidates have pivoted to a message heavily aimed at crime.

“This is something that crosses party lines and everyone says, ‘Wait a minute, why isn’t this something that is dealt with?’” said Mr. Ronchetti, whose state has experienced an increase in violent crime this year. “You look at New Mexico: People used to always know someone with a crime story. Now, everyone has their own.”

Polling shows that voters tend to see Republicans as stronger on public safety. By a margin of 10 percentage points, voters nationwide said they agreed more with Republicans on crime and policing, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll released this month.

National Republican strategists say they always planned to use crime as a so-called kitchen-table issue, along with inflation and the economy. Now, after a summer when Democrats gained traction in races across the country, in part because of the upending of abortion rights, Republican campaigns are blanketing television and computer screens with violent imagery.

Some of the advertising contains thinly disguised appeals to racist fears, like grainy footage of Black Lives Matter protesters, that sharply contrast with Republican efforts at the beginning of Mr. Trump’s term to highlight the party’s work on criminal justice overhauls, sentencing reductions and the pardoning of some petty crimes.

The full picture on crime rates is nuanced. Homicides soared in 2020 and 2021 before decreasing slightly this year. An analysis of crime trends in the first half of 2022 by the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan policy and research group, found that murders and gun assaults in major American cities fell slightly during the first half of 2022, but remained nearly 40 percent higher than before the pandemic. Robberies and some property offenses posted double-digit increases.

Candidates on the right have tended to be vague on specific policy details: A new agenda released by House Republicans proposes offering recruiting bonuses to hire 200,000 more police officers, cracking down on district attorneys who “refuse to prosecute crimes” and opposing “all efforts to defund the police.”

Still, Republicans see the issue as one that can motivate their conservative base as well as moderate, suburban independents who have shifted toward Democrats in recent weeks.

In the past two weeks alone, Republican candidates and groups have spent more than $21 million on ads about crime — more than on any other policy issue — targeting areas from exurban Raleigh, N.C., to Grand Rapids, Mich., according to data collected by AdImpact, a media tracking firm.

But those attacks are not going unanswered: Over the past two weeks, Democrats have spent a considerable amount — nearly $17 million — on ads on the issue, though the amount is less than half of what Democrats spent on ads about abortion rights over the same period...

 

Isn't It Common Sense to Protect Our Borders (VIDEO)

Here's Will Witt, for Prager University:

The Day After One of His Cultists Murders What He Claims Is an 'Extremist Republican' 18-Year-Old Boy, Joe Biden Urges His Demented Followers to ... 'Fight Extremist Republicans'

 At AoSPHQ, "Via Twitchy, despite having just incited one of his crazed followers to murder a teenager in the name of "fighting Republican Extremists," Joe Biden put out a statement telling his cultists to... fight Republican extremists some more."

Jonathan Tobin on Martha's Vineyard

He's a very thoughful man.

On Twitter.

Liberal criticism of @GovRonDeSantis' Martha's Vineyard stunt illustrates cluelessness about the consequences of the open-borders immigration policies they support. I explain in @JNS_org. https://t.co/sDz4KtofEU

— Jonathan S. Tobin (@jonathans_tobin) September 21, 2022

Loving Liberals of Martha's Vineyard Force Illegal Aliens on Bus to be Concentrated at a Camp Run by the Military

Leftists are absolutely enraged at how easily Ron DeSantis exposed their hypocrisy. This is a stunning move, and it worked. 

At AoSHQ, "Update: The Illegals Are Thanking DeSantis For Busing them to Martha's Vineyard."

None of this is about politics. None of this is about race. It's about class: progressive elites mistaking economic privilege for higher virtue—even while expelling the very people their lawn signs promise are welcome—then imposing the cost of their vanity on the working class.

— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) September 18, 2022

America Surrenders to Woke Plague

Here's VDH, at American Greatness, "America Delira":

We went mad because we easily could. And we could, not because we were poor and oppressed, but because we were rich and bored.

Travel abroad and or talk to pro-American foreigners here, and you will be surprised at what they say. It is not boilerplate anti-Americanism of the usual cheap Euro style. And their keen criticism is not just that we are $30 trillion in debt, dependent on China, with a corrupt elite, or have gone insane inventing the most lurid crimes to put away the supposedly predetermined guilty Donald Trump.

Instead, they express disbelief, worry, lamentation even, that the one solid referent in the world has gone, well, completely rabid. They are terrified after the Afghanistan debacle that their old ally or new homeland, the once constant America, is delirious, incompetent, and self-loathing, and now there is no plausible alternative to the old American deterrence.

So, they wonder who will resist China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea—and are silently petrified to go it alone without the United States.

They seem staggered by the very ideas that now emanate from the United States: that nonexistent borders are desirable; that once rarified institutions like the FBI or CIA now function like the Stasi of old; that the very idea of meritocracy is considered racist; that one incorrect word can destroy a life-long career; that there are three or more sexes, not two; that biological men with male genitalia and physiology can compete, and destroy decades of advances, in women’s sports; that race is the sole mode of self-identification; and that half of America dislikes American customs, history—and the other 50 percent of the population—as much as do its enemies.

Onlookers no longer see American universities as free-wheeling bastions of unfettered research and expression. Rather they watch dreary (and sometimes scary) places where conformity to the old Soviet-style is enforced—or else.

There is an apprehension that Russian hypersonic missiles are superior to America’s, that China could easily sink the Pacific fleet if it got too close to a blockade of Taiwan, that America is now reconciled to a nuclear Iranian theocracy, that North Korea will try something stupid soon—and that the American military is now somehow different, somehow less lethal.

Dogma and Stalinist-like orthodoxy now plague our films, our fiction, our research, and even our scientific inquiry. Public policy discussion of real problems like long COVID can be as much about what race is affected the worst by it—and thus which diabolical actor or demographic is to blame—rather than a Marshall Plan rush to find a cure for everyone.

A discussion of Homer’s Odyssey in college is likely to be a Sovietized melodrama of rooting out the sexists and racists in the preliterate bard’s cosmos, rather than why and how such an epic has enthralled audiences for over 2,700 years. The subtext is that we are growing poorer, weaker, and more ridiculous—an acceptable price if we can at least prove we are woke.

So, what made America unhinged?

The Woke Plague

Wokeness is a large part of it. Properly understood, wokeness is simply the doctrine that all perceived inequality must be the result of culpability, not personal behavior or conduct. There is no role for chance, individual health, inheritance, or character that make us different. There are no cosmic forces like globalization that transcend race.

What’s left instead is a nefariousness that divides the world into a collective binary of the noble victimized and their demonic oppressors. Thus, the duty of government and righteous egalitarian culture is to divide the country, in post-Marxist style, to identify the victims/oppressed, and to redistribute power, money, and influence to them. That allows the anointed to condemn the victimizers/oppressors collectively and to stigmatize, ostracize, and enfeeble them.

Every agency available—government, popular culture, science, history, literature, the arts, the university, the media, big tech, the corporate boardroom, and Wall Street—must be subordinated and recalibrated to spot supposed inequality so that they can fix it through reparatory discrimination. All being equal and poorer is preferable to all being richer, but with some richer than others.

Sometimes the effort manifests in reparatory commercials where 40 to 50 percent of the actors are black. Is that corporate America’s way of helping stop the carnage in Chicago—from a safe distance? Sometimes the effort is media-based and designed to ignore self-confessed racial motives in violent crime when the black perpetrators deliberately target white or Asian victims. And sometimes, there is a general exclusionary rule that media grandees can openly generalize and stereotype all whites as toxic—in language that would earn their firings if applied to any other groups. Is the theory that a white assembly-line worker without a college degree born in 1990 properly owes society for the purported sins of the long dead?

Wokeness is also, at its most basic, a selfish creed. We still gladly use the very institutions and infrastructure we inherited from our ancestors—from Stanford University to the Hoover Dam—and then damn them as inferior to our standards. Left unsaid is that our generation can neither create a new major research university nor build a monumental dam.

The wealthiest and most deductively biased among us are the most likely to project their hatreds onto the middle classes that lack their prejudices. Generally, the immigrant poor and dispossessed who enter America know why they came and thus see it as their salvation. In contrast, the more elite and blessed the immigrants who thrive in America, the more likely they are to chomp the hand that fed them.

Woke must destroy its critics. And who are they? The age-old individualist. The traditional outspoken. The familiar maverick. The unbeliever. The apostate. Anyone who believes woke is really a familiar and ancient evil with a mere 21st-century face, our version of the Inquisition but supposedly redirected to noble justice, cruel Jacobinism now masked in enlightened racial clothes, or toxic Bolshevism with an iPhone.

Can you have wokeism without Twitter and Facebook, a cancel culture, censors, and an array of punishments?

No more than you could have the witch trials without Reverend Samuel Parris’ mass hysteria, or the Reign of Terror without Robespierre and the guillotine of his “Committee of the Public Safety,” or the purges without Stalin and Beria, or the loyalty oaths without Joe McCarthy.

So, cancel culture itself is always dangerous and led by rank opportunists and careerists disguised as social justice warriors—as we know from ancient scapegoating, ostracism, exile, and modern Trotskization.

The Cowards and Bullies of Cyberspace

But the rise of the internet and social media empowered Orwellian cancellation in two dangerous ways.

One was instantaneous accusation, verdict, and punishment accomplished online in a nanosecond. Up popped the Covington High School kids standing face-to-face with the pathological liar and phony activist Nathan Phillips.

A millisecond later, the Twitter lynch mob judged the teenagers—white, male, with MAGA hats, and unafraid—as victimizers and the provocateur Phillips—the noble Native American—a victim. And that was that. The lives of the former were nearly ruined, the latter sanctified—all without any desire for facts, context, or the truth.

The faker Jussie Smollett spun a preposterous lie about being attacked by the usual white cyclopses and hydras (again, with the de rigueur MAGA hats). Smollett spun “facts” that only proved he was a racist and an inveterate liar. And then we were off to the races.

Everyone from Kamala Harris to Nancy Pelosi rushed to post first their condolences and outrage, in order to deify the faker Smollett and to demonize “them”—that is, the nonexistent “MAGA” assaulters. Lunatic condemnations arrived at electronic speed. Apologies for being a patsy, fool, a bully, and a racist never materialized.

We had learned nothing from the Duke Lacrosse hoax and so that is why we trump it now with the Duke volleyball ruse. The point in America now is not the truth, much less justice—but career and agenda-driven revenge for not quite getting the attention, the influence and the bounty that others are perceived to enjoy.

One second a news flash blared that the FBI was at Mar-a-Lago. The next moment, “presidential historian” Michael Beschloss was out of his Twitter cave, comparing Trump to the guilty Rosenbergs who were executed in the 1950s for espionage. And a breath later, former CIA director Michael Hayden, chained to his keyboard, had tweeted his approval of an envisioned judge, jury, executioner sentence for the now guilty traitor Trump. Then a day or two storing or selling “nuclear secrets” went the way of “I have here in my hand a list of 205 . . . names.”

Anonymity of the cyberworld, of course, adds to the dramatic lynchings. The cowardly posters dream up silly pictures and fake names as their IDs. And then post hourly, assured that if they lie, they smear, they fabricate there are never consequences. The Twitter or Facebook bully is not like someone known, in person or in print, defaming openly. A Samuel Johnson definition of social media might be “instant character assassination of the innocent by the anonymous without consequences.”

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