MLK Day 2021

A surprising headline at the Los Angeles Times, "Martin Luther King’s Promised Land may be closer than we think."

Plus, seen on Facebook earlier:

Staying Sane in a World Gone Mad

It's Robert Stacy McCain, at the American Spectator, "You’re not crazy; it’s the media who have lost their minds."

Lincoln Project Co-Founder John Weaver Accused of 'Grooming' Young Men, Offering Jobs for Sex

At Red State, "More 'Grooming for Sex' Allegations Surface Against Lincoln Project Co-Founder John Weaver."

And at the Other McCain, "Far Be It From Me to Repeat Salacious Gossip About RINO Backstabbers, But …"  

Psychological Analysis of the Capitol Riot

From a former colleague of mine, on Facebook:

This morning, I decided to watch Trump’s inaugural speech for the first time. It is the best speech I have ever seen him give. I can see why his followers were enthusiastic about him, as it was the epitome of a populist message. He sounded as though the public’s interest was the only thing that mattered to him. He seemed much more together and credible than that he does today. Too bad it was just rhetoric. It has become patently clear that, true to what is typical with narcissistic tendencies, Trump only cares about himself. Much lower down on the scale of concern are the current Trump loyalists, although they are prone to being thrown overboard whenever they cross him. It’s all so predictable, when you know the features of a narcissistic personality disorder (not to mention an antisocial personality disorder).

*****

To me, a former Republican, who feels that the party left me before I left it, the current Republican party seems to consist of delusional people, such as the QAnon folks; white supremacist groups; haters, who are [the] most scary at all, because they are directionless and have been observed to swing 180 degrees in their targets, but just seek some group to vilify; religious fundamentalists who are essentially one-issue voters and thus willing to sell their souls to the devil in a Faustian bargain in order to protect the unborn; and rational conservatives who wear masks, socially distance, well know that Biden won the election fair-and-square, but still believe that despite his massive character flaws, autocratic bent, and disregard for anyone but himself, Trump is still better for them and the country than those horrid Democrats. I suppose another category would be the ambitious politicians and corporate people who seek personal benefit from backing Trump, and care about little else. Although not Republicans, I would be remiss not to mention Putin, et al. as staunch supporters of Trump. I don't see any heroes here. Did I miss a group of noble Republicans that I missed because of my partisan blinders?

*****

Excuse me, I did miss one group of noble Republicans, those who established The Lincoln Project. They have sought to cajole their fellow Republicans into embracing the traditional values of their party. Out of concern for the survival of our democracy, and a desire to return the Republican party to the respectable values it has traditionally embraced, this group has been tireless in their efforts to bring our national politics back to normal.

"Noble Republicans."

Hardly.  *Shrugs.*

Glenn Greenwald Decries the Left's New 'War on Terror' (VIDEO)

If you're familiar with Glenn Greenwald, he's not necessarily a sympathetic character. But he's been out here for a long time, and for good or bad (sometimes very bad, considering his views on Israel, his collaborations with Julian Assange, etc.), he's consistent. I think for that, in a time like this, folks who normally would ignore him are ready to listen. 

I mean, he's now a regular on Fox News, if you can imagine that. 

With all that said, he's not wrong on this, and it's frightening. 

He's on Substack here, "Violence in the Capitol, Dangers in the Aftermath":

One is that striking at cherished national symbols — the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the Capitol — ensures rage and terror far beyond body counts or other concrete harms. That is one major reason that yesterday’s event received far more attention and commentary, and will likely produce far greater consequences, than much deadlier incidents, such as the still-motive-unknown 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting that killed 59 or the 2016 Orlando shooting that left 49 dead at the Pulse nightclub. Unlike even horrific indiscriminate shooting sprees, an attack on a symbol of national power will be perceived as an attack on the state or even the society itself.

There are other, more important historical lessons to draw not only from the 9/11 attack but subsequent terrorism on U.S. soil. One is the importance of resisting the coercive framework that demands everyone choose one of two extremes: that the incident is either (a) insignificant or even justifiable, or (b) is an earth-shattering, radically transformative event that demands radical, transformative state responses.

This reductive, binary framework is anti-intellectual and dangerous. One can condemn a particular act while resisting the attempt to inflate the dangers it poses. One can acknowledge the very real existence of a threat while also warning of the harms, often far greater, from proposed solutions. One can reject maximalist, inflammatory rhetoric about an attack (a War of Civilizations, an attempted coup, an insurrection, sedition) without being fairly accused of indifference toward or sympathy for the attackers.

Indeed, the primary focus of the first decade of my journalism was the U.S. War on Terror — in particular, the relentless erosions of civil liberties and the endless militarization of American society in the name of waging it. To make the case that those trends should be opposed, I frequently argued that the threat posed by Islamic radicalism to U.S. citizens was being deliberately exaggerated, inflated and melodramatized.

I argued that not because I believed the threat was nonexistent or trivial: I lived in New York City on 9/11 and remember to this day the excruciating horror from the smell and smoke emanating throughout Lower Manhattan and the haunting “missing” posters appended by desperate families, unwilling to accept the obvious reality of their loved ones’ deaths, to every lamp post on every street corner. I shared the same disgust and sadness as most other Americans from the Pulse massacre, the subway bombings in London and Madrid, the workplace mass shooting in San Bernardino.

My insistence that we look at the other side of the ledger — the costs and dangers not only from such attacks but also the “solutions” implemented in the name of the stopping them — did not come from indifference towards those deaths or a naive views of those responsible for them. It was instead driven by my simultaneous recognition of the dangers from rights-eroding, authoritarian reactions imposed by the state, particularly in the immediate aftermath of a traumatic event. One need not engage in denialism or minimization of a threat to rationally resist fear-driven fanaticism — as Barbara Lee so eloquently insisted on September 14, 2001...

Lots more at that top link.

Who Controls the Narrative?

Hmm.

It's going to be one helluva long fight, people. 

'My daughter has already noticed that the folks in her circle who are most into ‘activism’ of various sorts are mostly the ones whose careers and lives seem to be going the worst.” And this is certainly not a coincidence. Political “activism,” as promoted by the Left, is entirely destructive in its goals. An eternal war against an unacceptable status quo appeals to malcontents and misfits...'

That's Glenn Reynolds, quoted at the Other McCain, "The Enemies of Happiness."

Portland's antifa scum as a case in point:

Why White Lives Don’t Matter

At the Other McCain:

No, I’m not talking about this — not yet, maybe later today — but rather about an interesting fact you probably haven’t noticed: Nobody cares how many white suspects get shot by cops. And I mean absolutely nobody cares. Certainly no black person has ever bothered to investigate how often the police shoot white suspects, but white people don’t care, either. Like, if I got pulled over by cops tomorrow and became belligerent when they tried to arrest me, nobody would care if this resulted in me being shot to death. My own family wouldn’t really care. My friends would be like, “He probably had it coming. He was always an idiot.”

There would be no protest marches. Benjamin Crump wouldn’t be all over CNN complaining about the “excessive force” if I got shot by cops. And this is not just true me, but of any other white person.

Keep reading.

What to Expect After the November Election

Chaos, in a word, and also "coup."

Lots of theories going around about what's going to happen in the election aftermath. Unless Trump or Biden wins a landslide, expect days or week of delays, protests, and riots. See Michael Anton, at the American Mind, "The Coming Coup?" And FWIW, at the Daily Beast, "The Left Secretly Preps for MAGA Violence After Election Day."

And Tucker's on the case:

Jonathan A. Rodden, Why Cities Lose

Jonathan A. Rodden, Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide.

Riots and Demonstrations from Portland to Jerusalem

From Caroline Glick:

Over the past several years, public discourse in the United States has seen a lot of new lows. It saw another one this month when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi referred to federal officers in Portland, Oregon as “stormtroopers,” that is, Nazi Brownshirts.

In a tweet on July 18 and in subsequent remarks, Pelosi accused the federal forces deployed to Portland of “kidnapping protesters and causing severe injuries in response to graffiti.”

Pelosi’s allegations would cause a political earthquake – if they were true. But they aren’t true. And the fact that she slandered federal officers as Nazis is a deeply disturbing testament to where the Democratic Party – of which she is the senior elected official – stands today and what its intentions are.

For the past two months, the progressive city of Portland in the progressive State of Oregon, has been the scene of chaos and rioting. The liberal media have misleadingly characterized the riots as “peaceful demonstrations.”

Night after night, hundreds of “peaceful demonstrators” have vandalized and destroyed stores and other businesses, transforming downtown Portland into a war zone. Over the past five weeks, the focal point of the violence has been the federal courthouse.

“Peaceful protesters” from Antifa and other radical groups have been attacking the federal courthouse in Portland with incendiary devices including pipe bombs and commercial grade fireworks. Federal officers charged with guarding the courthouse have been blinded with lasers and attacked with stones, metal balls shot from slingshots, bricks and two-by-fours, among other things.

The rioters are backed in their efforts by city and state officials as well as national Democrats who have castigated federal forces protecting the courthouse as “occupiers,” the “Gestapo” and of course “stormtroopers.”

As for the alleged “kidnapping” of peaceful protesters, local journalist Andy Ngo explained this week that Pelosi’s statement channeled Antifa propaganda.

Ngo told Fox News, “That’s an Antifa talking point that is being repeated by sympathetic media.”

He explained that federal officers charged with protecting federal property are using plainclothes agents in unmarked vehicles to peacefully apprehend leaders of the violence. This is a routine, entirely legal tactic which Ngo explained is only being castigated now is because “it is quite effective.”

On the face of it, as Democratic politicians, Pelosi and her colleagues in Congress and Oregon should support the federal forces trying to end the riots. After all, like New York, Chicago, Minneapolis and Los Angeles, Portland is a Democratic city. The businesses being destroyed are owned by their voters.

So why are Pelosi and her partisan colleagues and their media adjuncts instead depicting the rioters rendering downtown Portland a war zone as “peaceful protesters” and slandering the law enforcement officers defending federal property as Nazis?

The obvious answer is politics. The Democrats support the rioters because as they see things, the longer chaos reigns in the streets of America’s cities, the better their chances of defeating President Donald Trump in November.

The Democrats have a number of resources that the Republicans lack and the riots bring them all to bear. They have fanatical progressive activists angry that Bernie Sanders isn’t the nominee but willing to burn America.

They have wall to wall support from the media from NBC to the New York Times to Facebook and Twitter.

The Democrats have limitless funds to maintain the violence and mayhem indefinitely. This week, Alexander Soros, George Soros’ son announced that the family foundation has earmarked another quarter billion dollars to Black Lives Matter. And the Soroses are not alone.

As the past four years of Trump-Russia mythology and legally baseless, politicized prosecutions and investigations have shown, the Democrats control much of the so-called Deep State which controls the levers of the permanent bureaucracy.

The Trump-Russia collusion narrative largely disintegrated under the weight of evidence and the absurd impeachment process over the past several months. And with its decline the Democrats began casting about for a new cause.

They found it with the coronavirus pandemic. In one fell swoop, the virus from China swept away Trump’s fast-growing economy with record low unemployment across all ethnic and racial groups.

With schools abruptly closed and jobs abruptly lost the optimistic America of 2019 became the destabilized, poor, frustrated and insecure America of 2020.

Yet, despite the best efforts of the commentators, support for Trump was not falling apart, at least not enough to ensure an electoral victory for Joe Biden. And Americans were beginning to figure out a way through, as the rising stock market indexes indicated.

But then came the riots. The proximate cause of the riots and protests was the police killing of George Floyd. But their context was the pandemic and the elections in November. The riots gave the Democrats a way to galvanize their radical progressive base (on the streets, in Congress and in the media) around their favorite issues – race and identity politics.

For the Democrats, the best part of the riots is that unlike the pandemic, for demonstrators and their media flacks, it is easy to make the case that Trump is to blame.

Trump’s in charge and America is burning. Trump’s to blame. Trump’s in charge and there is racism in America. Trump’s to blame.

If Trump quells the riots, he will be guilty of police brutality, (with stormtroopers) – thus proving the point. If he fails to quell the riots, he is an ineffective boob. And so, with a bottomless pit of money, the riots will continue, at least so long as the Democrats feel they benefit from them, and they haven’t figured out something else to do...

Still more.

'Largely Peaceful,' Translated to English, Means Violent

It's Michael Barone, at the Washington Examiner, "Intensifying Into Violence":

60 days of demonstrations in cities like Oakland, Portland, and Seattle are described as “largely peaceful."

Any “peaceful demonstration” capable of “intensifying” into setting fire to a courthouse was never really “peaceful," writes @MichaelBarone.

https://t.co/Xk11wTy3R8

— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) July 30, 2020

"Protestors in California," tweeted ABC News, about an incident in Oakland, "set fire to a courthouse, damaged a police station and assaulted officers after a peaceful demonstration intensified."

If you'd presented your ninth-grade teacher with that sentence in your weekly writing assignment, she might have taken out her red pen and asked you, "How does a peaceful demonstration intensify?"

This sentence, however, was written not by a ninth-grader but by an adult, a professional journalist working for one of the world's major television news organizations. It was not an accident. As Modern Age editor Daniel McCarthy noted, "George Orwell could not improve on this."

Any "peaceful demonstration" capable of "intensifying" into setting fire to a courthouse, damaging a police station and assaulting law enforcement personnel was never really "peaceful" in the first place.

As The New Criterion editor Roger Kimball wrote, "the overriding criterion for choosing which narrative to plug" is which "will do the most damage to Donald Trump and Republican prospects in the November election."

The narrative that serves that purpose is that the demonstrations that broke out after the May 25 death of George Floyd are peaceful, and the demands of many demonstrators to "defund" the police are a reasonable response with no downside risk. Video footage suggesting the contrary has appeared sparingly, if at all, on broadcast news, CNN and MSNBC...

More.

Interactive Cover

Click through, at the New Yorker:

An early look at next week’s cover, "Say Their Names," by @KadirNelson: https://t.co/Nj3q09OrOL pic.twitter.com/a3w3l1XESb

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) June 14, 2020

Also:

Like men who saw the scroll of #MeToo testimonies & interrogated women, asking “Is it really that bad?,” the shock of Floyd’s death is itself a barometer of inequality, evidence of who has moved through life free of the burden of such terrible knowledge. https://t.co/7Ci2bv3ToO

— jelani cobb (@jelani9) June 14, 2020

It's performative journalism.

Professor William Jacobson on Laura Ingraham's Show (VIDEO)

Professor Jacobson is so mild-mannered it's almost funny. That this man is a "threat" to black lives is hilarious.



And in case you missed it, at Legal Insurrection, "There’s an effort to get me fired at Cornell for criticizing the Black Lives Matter Movement."

BONUS: From Jonathan Turley, "Cornell Professors Declare 'Informed Commentary' Criticizing the Protests as Racism."

The Defund the Police Lies (VIDEO)

A great segment, with Laura Ingraham:

Defund the Police Movement Based on Lies

At NYP, "The movement to defund police is based on nothing but lies."

https://t.co/TpGXVxQ7SY

— Kyle Smith (@rkylesmith) June 7, 2020

Curfew is Costly for Night-Shift Workers

It's hard out there, and leftists make it harder for everybody.

At LAT, "For night-shift workers, curfews can be costly."

For night-shift workers, curfews can be costly https://t.co/vsh7cgsYlR

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) June 5, 2020

The Systemic Collapse of American Society

Wow.

This is something else, at the Unz Review, "The Systemic Collapse of the US Society Has Begun."

"The systemic collapse of the US society has begun" - the Saker https://t.co/2rbW3ZD36u

— The Unz Review (@UnzReview) June 5, 2020

Terrifying Collapse of Rule of Law Across America

I've been waiting for this, from Heather Mac Donald, at City Journal, "Darkness Falls: The collapse of the rule of law across the country, intensified by Antifa radicals, is terrifying":

Savagery is spreading with lightning speed across the United States, with murderous assaults on police officers and civilians.

Welcome to a real civilization-destroying pandemic.

My latest @CityJournal https://t.co/mTZef4vnZP

— Heather Mac Donald (@HMDatMI) June 1, 2020

This pandemic of civil violence is more widespread than anything seen during the Black Lives Matter movement of the Obama years, and it will likely have an even deadlier toll on law enforcement officers than the targeted assassinations we saw from 2014 onward. It’s worse this time because the country has absorbed another five years of academically inspired racial victimology. From Ta-Nehisi Coates to the New York Times’s 1619 project, the constant narrative about America’s endemic white supremacy and its deliberate destruction of the “black body” has been thoroughly injected into the political bloodstream.

Facts don’t matter to the academic victimology narrative. Far from destroying the black body, whites are the overwhelming target of interracial violence. Between 2012 and 2015, blacks committed 85.5 percent of all black-white interracial violent victimizations (excluding interracial homicide, which is also disproportionately black-on-white). That works out to 540,360 felonious assaults on whites. Whites committed 14.4 percent of all interracial violent victimization, or 91,470 felonious assaults on blacks. Blacks are less than 13 percent of the national population.

If white mobs were rampaging through black business districts, assaulting passersby and looting stores, we would have heard about it on the national news every night. But the black flash mob phenomenon is grudgingly covered, if at all, and only locally.

The national media have been insisting on the theme of the allegedly brutal Minneapolis police department. They said nothing as black-on-white robberies rose in downtown Minneapolis late last year, along with savage assaults on passersby. Why are the Minneapolis police in black neighborhoods? Because that’s where violent crime is happening, including shootings of two-year-olds and lethal beatings of 75-year-olds. Just as during the Obama years, the discussion of the allegedly oppressive police is being conducted in the complete absence of any recognition of street crime and the breakdown of the black family that drives it.

Once the violence began, any effort to “understand” it should have stopped, since that understanding is inevitably exculpatory. The looters are not grieving over the stomach-churning arrest and death of George Floyd; they are having the time of their lives. You don’t protest or mourn a victim by stealing oxycontin, electronics, jewelry, and sneakers...

RTWT.

James Damore at Portland State University

From Andy Ngo, at Quillette, "Damore, Diversity, and Disruption at PSU."

We invited @JamesADamore to speak about viewpoint diversity & his memo. Some were determined to shut us down. Full video: https://t.co/nmoWgMTmi7 #JamesDamorePSU pic.twitter.com/0BDdKf1K4a

— Andy C. Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) February 26, 2018