The Impending Thermidor Reaction in Jacobin America

It's Victor Davis Hanson, at American Greatness, "At peak woke, our reign of terror is beginning to lose momentum because its continuation would destroy all the work of 247 years of American progress and sacrifice":

The decade-long French Revolution that broke out in 1789 soon devolved into far more than removing the monarchy, as it became antithetical to the earlier American precedent. American notions of liberty and freedom were seen as far too narrow, given the state, if only all-powerful and all-wise, could mandate “equality” and force “fraternity” among its subjects.

Each cycle of French revolutionary fervor soon became more radicalized and cannibalistic—until it reached its logical ends of violent absurdity.

Originally, the idea of curbing the power of a Bourbon king through a parliamentary republic became lethally counter-revolutionary.

Soon even attacks on the Catholic Church and the abolition of the monarchy entirely were deemed insufficient. The king himself and his consorts had to be beheaded. Monasteries and churches were to be ransacked, and priests exiled or lynched.

The sometimes moderate Girondins, who favored constitutional government, were mostly executed by their former friends among the Montagnards. In turn, the latter were soon deemed too conservative for the emerging crazy Jacobins. So they, too, had to be decapitated. The ensuing year-long reign of terror guillotined thousands of innocents, deemed guilty of being guilty of something.

By 1793, the revolution had turned nihilist and suicidal. The foundational date of France was recalibrated (not as 1619 but) as 1789—or “year one.”

Jacobins sought to wipe out religion, both materially and spiritually. They replaced God, first, with the atheistic “Cult of Reason” and then a stranger still “Cult of the Supreme Being”—a dreamed-up, living, humanistic god that only the murderous Robespierre could fully envision, but eerily similar to our own Green New Deal deity.

The months of the year themselves were renamed, the days of the week renumbered and relabeled. Statues were toppled, first at night, later in shameless daylight. Place names were erased and renamed. The original revolutionary heroes were not to be mentioned; their uncouth successors deified. Money was printed to “spread the wealth”—until it was worthless.

Murderous cancel culture ran unchecked. Yesterday’s French revolutionary became today’s counterrevolutionary—and tomorrow’s decapitated.

Almost everyone who originally had opposed the absolute monarchy, and, like the Americans, wished for a constitutional replacement, was eventually executed by revolutionaries who were then executed by more radical revolutionaries. The longer and more radical the revolution ran, the meaner, dumber, and more deadly the revolutionaries who emerged from the woodwork.

Finally, what could not go on, did not go on, as French society unraveled. Then the so-called Thermidors put an end to the madness of the Robespierre brothers and their sidekick, the 26-year-old Saint-Just, and did to them what they had done to thousands.

The final revolutionary correction saw a Directory, then a Consulate, and finally the dictator Napoleon—the self-described emperor who claimed he was the final absolutist manifestation of the “Revolution.”

A Revolution of the Disingenuous

We are swept up in similarly scary revolutionary times, after the perfect storm of the 2020 rioting, the COVID destructive lockdowns, and a radical socialist takeover of the old Democratic Party...

Keep reading.

 

'The unsettling reality is that America in the not-too-distant future is going to have a lot in common with partial-collapse societies of Eastern Europe and Latin America where gangs have more power and influence than the government; where politicians pass the laws but gangs enforce the rules...'

At Gray Zone Activity, "The disturbing reality of America's future: This is the Gray Zone America you should be preparing for — not quite collapsed, but not quite standing."

Alleged Pedophile Throws Himself Under Wheels of Utility Van

Be sure to check the comments.

Paedophile hunters chasing a man who was allegedly attempting to meet underage children throws himself under an oncoming van! pic.twitter.com/MS3qqC9sdA

— Danny Tommo 🇬🇧 (@RealDannyTommo) April 18, 2023

Americans Pull Back From Values That Once Defined United States, Poll Finds

I teach this. My son was just saying, "This is nothing new to you." He's right. It's not. But it's cool to have a WSJ article I can share with my students and use in assignments.

See, at Wall Street Journal, "America Pulls Back From Values That Once Defined It, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds: Patriotism, religion and hard work hold less importance."

There's No Such Thing as Being Transphobic

It's Megan Murphy, on Substack, "Spoiler: it's because there's no such thing as a trans person":

The easiest way to combat transgender ideology is to simply not go along with it. Don’t play along with the notion that one must use “preferred pronouns.” (Sexed pronouns are not a matter of preference, they are not an opinion or a judgement, they are a matter of grammar.) Don’t play along with the idea that it is possible to be “born in the wrong body.” (You are born with a sexed body, and unfortunately you don’t get a say in that.) Don’t play along with the idea that it is somehow special or original to not relate to every single stereotype associated with "masculinity” or “femininity.” (No one does. We are have our own personalities and preferences, and while femininity is more commonly associated with females and masculinity with males, how we feel about those sterotypes does not dictate our sex. If it did, we would be changing sex all the time and we would all be “trans.”)

“Trans” is not a real, valid category with a coherent definition, which means that “transphobia” is also not a real, valid, or coherent concept. I realize some make the argument that being “polite” about such things is a better means to bring people over to “our side” or open people up to listening to our concerns, but I actually think it just creates an incredibly confusing conversation. It also opens us up to debates around things like “trans rights” (not a valid concept) or which kids are “really trans,” and therefore would benefit from being medicalized as “trans kids” (no child should be and there is no such thing as a “trans kid”).

I fail to see why lying is polite or useful when talking about things like legislation and policy. It certainly isn’t polite or useful when dealing with kids whose brains are not fully developed and are at risk of having their bodies destroyed for life on account of said lies.

You might like to think of yourself as a “live and let live” kind of person. You might think there are more important issues than transgenderism. You might think, “Why not just let some people identify however they like.” But we are talking about something much bigger: the truth. And reality. We are also talking about women’s rights and the safety and wellbeing of kids.

But if anything, truth and reality are hills worth dying on.

Trans activists are manipulating reality and impeding our ability to speak the truth via language. Don’t play along.

Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option

At Amazon, Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation.

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.

 

The Lonely American (VIDEO)

An outstanding segment, from Laura Ingraham:

Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men

At Amazon, Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It.

22-Year-Old Colorado Woman Enticed Tinder Date, Only to Duct Tape, Choke, and Stab Him – Then She Ordered Food from DoorDash: Police

It's hard out there. Dating that is. Pfft. Tinder. Swipe right. I'm glad I'm married --- and too old for this shit, anyway.

At the Blaze, "A 22-year-old Colorado woman is accused of committing several felony crimes against a man she had just met on Tinder. The woman duct-taped the 21-year-old victim, choked him with a belt, stabbed him, and then ordered food from DoorDash, according to police."

Nicholas Eberstadt, Men Without Work

At Amazon, Nicholas Eberstadt, Men Without Work: Post-Pandemic Edition.

Eliza Fletcher Murder: Memphis Kidnapping Suspect Cleotha Abston Held Without Bond (VIDEO)

This is a must-watched segment with Tucker Carson below.

An at Fox News, "Eliza Fletcher was jogging in the early morning when she was abducted. Memphis police announce they have located and positively identified Eliza Fletcher's body."

Bette Midler, Tipping Point

I don't know if we're tipping or not, though I wouldn't have thought old Bette would be sounding the tocsin.

On Twitter:

Tipping point? https://t.co/5B1wkJxssq

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) July 4, 2022

America Is More Fragile Than the Left Understands

From Victor Davis Hanson, at American Greatness, "Like a stunned adolescent whose reckless incompetence totaled the family car, the Left seems shocked that America proved so fragile after all":

The Left has been tempting fate since January 2021—applying its nihilist medicine to America on the premise that such a rich patient can ride out any toxic shock.

Our elites assume that all our nation’s past violent protests, all its would-be revolutions, all its cultural upheavals, all its institutionalized lawlessness were predicated on one central truth—America’s central core is so strong, so rich, and so resilient that it can withstand almost any assault.

So, we can afford 120 days in 2020 of mass rioting, $2 billion in damage, some 35 killed, and 1,500 police injured.

We can easily survive an Afghanistan, and our utter and complete military humiliation. There was no problem in abandoning some $70-80 billion in military loot to terrorists. Who cares that we tossed off a billion-dollar new embassy, and jettisoned a $300-million refitted air base, as long as our pride flags were waving in Kabul?

Certainly, we can afford to restructure all our universities, eliminate free expression and speech, and institute Maoist cultural revolutionary fervor in our revered institutions of higher learning—once the world’s greatest levers of scientific advancement and technological progress.

We can jettison merit in every endeavor, from banning the world’s great books to grading math tests to running chemistry experiments. And still, a resilient America won’t notice.

We assumed that our foundational documents—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—our natural bounty in North America, our cherished rule of law, our legal immigration traditions that drew in the most audacious and hardworking on the planet, and our guarantees of personal freedom and liberty led to such staggering wealth and affluence that nothing much that this mediocre generation could do would ever endanger our resilience.

But such inheritances are not written in stone. America, as the world’s only successful multiracial democratic republic, was always fragile. It was and is always one generation away from disappearing—should any cohort become so foolish as to mock its past, dismantle its institutions, revert to tribalism, redistribute rather than create wealth, and consume rather than invest.

We are that generation. And we have an accounting with nature’s limitations, given there is always a corrective, not a nice one, but remediation nonetheless for every excess.

Our major cities are no longer safe. Somehow, the Left has nearly wrecked San Francisco in less than a decade. A once beautiful and vibrant city is lawless, dirty, toxic, often boarded up, and losing population. It has turned into a medieval keep of well-protected knights in secure fiefs while everyone else is engaged in a bellum omnium contra omnes.

But such inheritances are not written in stone. America, as the world’s only successful multiracial democratic republic, was always fragile. It was and is always one generation away from disappearing—should any cohort become so foolish as to mock its past, dismantle its institutions, revert to tribalism, redistribute rather than create wealth, and consume rather than invest.

We are that generation. And we have an accounting with nature’s limitations, given there is always a corrective, not a nice one, but remediation nonetheless for every excess.

Our major cities are no longer safe. Somehow, the Left has nearly wrecked San Francisco in less than a decade. A once beautiful and vibrant city is lawless, dirty, toxic, often boarded up, and losing population. It has turned into a medieval keep of well-protected knights in secure fiefs while everyone else is engaged in a bellum omnium contra omnes.

We know it is so because California public officials talk of anything and everything—Roe v. Wade, transitions to electric cars, hundreds of millions of dollars in COVID-19 relief for illegal aliens—to mask their utter impotence to address feces in the street, the random assaults on the vulnerable, and the inability to park a car and return to it intact.

Ditto the Dodge City downtowns of Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Baltimore, Washington, and a host of others. In just four or five years, they have given up on fully funding the police, aggressive prosecutors indicting the violent, and ubiquitous civil servants ensuring the streets are free of trash, vermin, flotsam, jetsam, and human excrement.

There are natural reactions to such excess. The most terrifying is that our once-great cities, especially their downtowns, will simply shrink into something like ghost towns—our versions of an out-West Bodie, or an abandoned Roman city in the sand like Leptis Magna, or a Chernobyl.

But the culprit will not be a played-out mine, or encroaching desert, or a nuclear meltdown, but the progressive leadership of a worn-out, bankrupt people who no longer possess the confidence to keep their urban civilization safe and viable. And so, they either fled, or joined the mob, or locked themselves up in fortified citadels, both in fear to go out and terrified of losing what they owned...

Still more.

 

To Trump's True Believers, January 6th Was an Act of Faith, Ashli Babbitt's a Martyr, and White Is Not Only a Race, But a Spiritual State

Following-up, "Georgia Election Worker Shaye Moss, And Her Mother and Grandmother, Terrorized by Trump Followers After 2020 Election (VIDEO)."

At Vanity Fair, "January 6 Was Only the Beginning":

"Although no one believed in civil war, the air reeked of it…" — Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, recalling 1860.

1. It’s Cool

We watched her die before we knew her name. We watched almost in real time, or soon enough after, her death looped and memed before the fight was over. But then, the fight’s still not over. A video gives us a crowd throbbing against two wooden windowed doors, one reinforced glass pane spiderwebbing, three Capitol Police officers, standing between the glass and members of Congress on the other side. We don’t yet know to look for her, but she’s there on the screen, the only woman, up front (“a firecracker,” her friends will say), screaming at cops. (“Joking,” her defenders will claim.) There’s a knife in her pocket. She shouts: “Just open the door!” It’s barricaded. “Break it down!” chant the men. One screams at the cops, “You lied!” The cops said there was nobody on the other side. They can see them. Congressmen. Traitors. A young man wearing a black T-shirt and $325 Canada Goose aviator fur hat, shouts “Heyyy!” He stretches out his arms, pulsing veins—he has already punched the glass, hard—and opens his hands. “Fuck the blue!” shouts the crowd. A man wearing a yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flag tied like a bib beneath his MAGA hat hands Goose a black helmet with which to hit the glass.

Goose lines the helmet with his hat, to cushion his fist. The cops slide out of the way. (“Escape route,” one will later tell investigators; they thought they were going to be killed.) “Go! Get this shit!” the videographer shouts. They get that shit—pounding the reinforced glass.

“Gun!” the videographer yells. Two hands emerge from behind a pillar on the other side, aiming.

Fourteen seconds left. Does she hear them shout “gun”? Can she make out the warnings Michael Byrd, a plainclothes lieutenant in the Capitol Police, will say he delivered? That the man standing beside her will say, “She didn’t heed”? “Please,” Byrd will say he shouted. “Stop! Get back!” She doesn’t. He aims. There are more videos. There she is, bobbing up and down, straining. Her long, smooth face, her dark golden hair, her golden skin. She has come to this moment—seven seconds—from Ocean Beach, California, where she lived in a bungalow beneath avocado and lime trees. Little woman. Five foot two, 115 pounds, her mother will say. One hundred ten, according to Representative Paul Gosar, the Arizona Republican who’ll make her name into a martyr song, “#onemoreinthenameoflove.” She’s 35; or in her “20s,” one witness will say; or “16, supposedly,” guesses another man, each aging her backward, into the imagined innocence of girlhood.

Goose smashes the glass.

“Go!” she shouts. She’s boosted up. She crouches on the sill, her Trump flag like a cape tucked under a red-white- and-blue backpack, like some absurd American bird.

The gunshot sounds like a cannon. Glock 22, .40 caliber. Big gun. One boom.

She falls back. Her hands fly up, open, empty, raised to her temples. As if rather than a bullet there’s an unsettling thought.

Nobody tries to catch her.

“#Sayhername,” the patriots will tweet, delighting in their appropriation of a campaign created for Black women. It’s grotesque. But the dead are the dead, no matter what they died doing. So, yes, her name: Ashli Babbitt. She wasn’t a hashtag. As a girl in rural Lakeside, California, she’d ride her horse to the 7-Eleven. She was a scrapper. “She just did boy things,” her brother will say. She joined the Air Force at 17. Two wars, eight deployments, 14 years. Her favorite movie was The Big Lebowski. Her thing was the shaka. “Hang loose,” thumb and pinkie. (Her last words, as she bleeds on the Capitol floor, according to a witness: “It’s cool.”) She did not climb the ranks, but she did marry, and then divorce, and in between she voted for Obama, and she fell in love with a Marine named Aaron Babbitt, and there was some trouble with his ex, who in 2016 claimed Ashli rammed her car three times, but Ashli was acquitted and anyway, maybe love is like that sometimes, at least for Ashli in 2016, since that was when she fell hard for Donald J. Trump. “#Love,” she wrote beside his name that Halloween, in the first of more than 8,000 tweets. “She was all in,” says Aaron, who did not share her devotion. She believed Trump was “one of gods greatest warriors.” She thought she’d be his “boots on the ground.” She wanted to be “the storm.” She had a husband and together they had a girlfriend; she had four younger brothers and parents who loved her, and in the end, she left them all. What’s left is a meme, “Ashli Babbitt,” on Twitter and Fox and Newsmax and Telegram, where she dies on permanent repeat for a man who won’t, in fact, say her name for half a year, until the day it proves useful, when the Trump Organization is indicted for tax fraud. He’ll issue a one-sentence statement: “Who shot Ashli Babbitt?” That he knows is beside the point. Who shot her? They did. The enemy.

2. Sacramento, California

The Justice for Ashli Babbitt Rally opens with a prayer, asking God to bless Ashli’s family, sitting in a row of white “Justice 4 Ashli” T-shirts, and to work on the hearts of the “opposition,” which, whether I like it or not, is me. Ashli’s mother, Mikki Witthoeft, has already told me this morning that she wouldn’t talk to me. “Media,” she’d growled. “Goddamned media,” she’ll clarify when she takes the podium.

Leading the prayer is a “patriot” pastor called JP. He looks like an especially dangerous mushroom. JP wears a black floppy sun hat, mirrored shades, a stars-and-stripes gaiter, green half gloves, and utility-belted jeans that puddle around his ankles. His black T-shirt features in golden letters a “battle verse” popular with patriots, Joshua 1:9. “Be strong and courageous,” the Lord instructs Joshua as he readies to storm Jericho and, at God’s command, to slaughter all—“man and woman, young and old.”

We’re on the west side of the California State Capitol. The rally was called by a group named Saviors of Liberty, hatched in a pickup truck three weeks prior by a couple of white dudes drinking beer and thinking about all that was wrong in the world and how they might fix it by building a supergroup of right-wing fraternal organizations. They’d need new T-shirts. Lady Liberty bleached white on a field of black, looking in sorrow on a red-and-black American flag, vertical so that its stripes appear to bleed. Packed into these T-shirts are muscle-bound men, some bulked up by bulletproof plates, many flexing studded leather gloves. Many are Proud Boys.

A rally organizer keeping a lower profile is a woman named Chelsea Knight, an administrator of Placer County, California, for Trump and a co-administrator, with her husband, Victor Knight, of a Telegram chat group called 1488, which surely has nothing to do with the “14 words” embraced by white supremacists—prattle about protecting white children—and 88, as in the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, which times two in the idiot math of fascism equals “Heil Hitler.” That’s Victor’s thing. He’s the one with an SS Totenkopf skull tattooed on his left fist. Victor’s here too, and that plus the 90-something-degree heat on the sunblasted concrete, plus antifa’s promise to disrupt, may explain the low turnout.

Antifa does arrive. A column of mostly black-clad, black-masked protesters coming from a rally on the other side of the Capitol for what should have been Breonna Taylor’s 28th birthday. The Saviors are ready. A Savior in a skull mask takes the first shot at the tallest antifa, a beanpole in black but for his fists and the pale skin around his eyes. Saviors call him Nosferatu. He’s skinny but he knows how to take a punch; it bounces off his head, and you can almost hear him smile beneath his mask. “That’s a pussy-ass move right there,” Nosferatu says.

Another Savior throws a punch. The cops observe. Then an antifa protester takes a swipe. The cops charge—at antifa. An antifa cries to the police even as they shove her backward.

“Shut up, fat ass!” a right-wing streamer screams.

“Fuck yourself, faggot!” she answers.

“These cops want to let us go at ’em,” comments the man next to me. It’s one of the speakers, Jorge Riley, an indicted J6er.

“They don’t have any worries about what the outcome would be,” says a Savior.

Riley smiles. He wears his black hair in a ponytail and a black leather vest over a black T. “I’m a French-speaking Native American Jew,” he likes to say. “For Jesus,” he sometimes adds. He waits for a laugh. He invaded the Capitol with three white feathers braided into his hair, three streaks of black paint running down each cheek. In a video, he boasts: “I may or may not have rubbed my butt on Nasty Pelosi’s desk.” Before January 6, Riley held positions in the local Republican establishment. Two days after the insurrection, he posted his address on Facebook: “Come take my life. I’m right here. You will all die.” The FBI, he thinks, didn’t get it. The “joke,” the threat, was for antifa. “I got six charges,” he crows. He says he likes cops, except the cop who shot Babbitt.

“You feel like the cops are on your side?” I ask.

“Obviously!” He swings his arms open. “They’re here protecting me.” He turns to a woman beside him and asks for the name of the officer who killed George Floyd. “And they only prosecuted him,” continues Riley, “because these people”—the protesters—“threw a fit.” A white cop’s nine-minute knee on a Black man’s neck? “Somebody doing their job.” A Black cop’s split-second shot at a white woman leading a mob? “Assassination,” Riley agrees with another of the speakers today.

Such is the seesaw reality of January 6. “No cops were hurt,” Riley says. More than 150 were hurt. Five would die. Riley says it was a lovefest, J6ers and cops hugging it out after a friendly tussle. Delusion? No—his smirk bespeaks self-awareness. Disinformation? Too obvious. More like lucid dreaming: a deliberately surreal assault. I think of a Telegram message one of the Proud Boy organizers sent on January 6: “I want to see thousands of normies burn that city to ash today.” It wasn’t their own crimes that thrilled them, it was the prospect of drawing the many into their boogaloo vision. The city still stands. But in my mind—in the imagination of anyone who even now marvels at how close we came; how close we still are—it burns. The coup was a bust. The psyop? Victory.

Here, in Sacramento, the speaker at the podium, a former TV host named Jamie Allman—taken off the air of a St. Louis ABC affiliate after he tweeted his desire to “ram a hot poker up the ass” of a Parkland shooting survivor—declares January 6 “one of the most beautiful days I’ve seen in America.”

In the back of the crowd, protesters challenge patriots to define “Nazi.”

“We love America,” says one.

“If Ashli Babbitt were here,” continues Allman, “I guarantee you she’d be out there”—on the edge of the fighting—“talking to those people.”

“Scum!” a patriot screams at the protesters.

“Ashli Babbitt does not want you to be afraid,” Allman says, “ever again.” Present tense. Ashli Babbitt lives, in the hallucinatory. Allman says the patriots will return to Washington, to remember her. Ashli Babbitt dies, in perpetuity.

“I suffered,” says Riley. “But I didn’t pay the price Ashli did. I’m like the guy from 300. I lived to be able to tell her story.”

At the podium, Allman: “What her death does, when we compare it to Crispus Attucks, is—it calls for a revolution!”

“It calls.” The myth of history is calling the patriots. The “spirit of 1776” and 300, the 2006 CGI blood opera, 300 Spartan warriors’ battle against an overwhelming Persian horde until all but one Spartan falls. Attucks, the first man to die in one war, and the fictional Spartan warrior who was the only survivor of the latter, the source material of which is a comic book. Sacrifice stripped of history. “Trial by combat,” as Rudy Giuliani promised on January 6, hours before the mob made it real. “The first Patriot Martyr of the Second American Revolution,” an Oath Keeper posted before anyone knew who the martyr was, only that hers was the mythical victimhood of a white woman, killed by a Black man, they could now claim...

Keep reading.

What happened to Ashli Babbitt, and the official whitewashing after her death, is the most infuriating thing about January 6th.

Georgia Election Worker Shaye Moss, And Her Mother and Grandmother, Terrorized by Trump Followers After 2020 Election (VIDEO)

Citizens' fear from the repercussion of voting isn't a thing I've ever contemplated. I always thought the intimidation and violence of Southern Blacks was historical, like marchers being beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama during the King Years.

It's cliche at this point to say American politics is ugly and vicious. I know personally from the left's lying, low-down attempts to cancel me, to get me fired ten years ago from my teaching position, that ideological hate drives political polarization. I was physically attacked when I covered the Hamas/International ANSWER demonstrations in Los Angeles. I finally quit reporting them, it got so bad. You get a target on your back.

But I've never been targeted at my home. I've never had to relocate to a safe house for months because of my politics and teaching. Imagine the nightmare that Shaye Moss and her family have been living since November 2020, when President Trump called her out by name during his efforts to overturn the Georgia election results. His words set off mobs of MAGA supporters on campaigns of terror. I want to continue loving President Trump for his time in office before the 2020 election. But everything that happened after that makes me sick. 

The more I see of it, of Trump's very own words, on audio and video, broken down and put in context, makes me hope that he's not the GOP nominee in 2024. Right now I favor Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and pray to God he wins and that the conservative movement can start over and rebuild under new leadership. 

There's too much hate in this country. Had not the "Big Lie" taken over Republican politics after the election, and had not January 6th not happened, I'd be the world's biggest supporter for Trump 2024. Now I just can't.

The story's at the New York Times, "‘There Is Nowhere I Feel Safe’: Election Officials Describe Threats Fueled by Trump":

“Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?’’ Ruby Freeman, a Black election worker from Georgia, told the Jan. 6 committee.

WASHINGTON — Rusty Bowers, the Republican speaker of Arizona’s House, braced every weekend for hordes of Trump supporters, some with weapons, who swarmed his home and blared videos that called him a pedophile.

“We had a daughter who was gravely ill, who was upset by what was happening outside,” he said. She died not long after, in late January 2021.

Gabriel Sterling, a top state election official in Georgia, recalled receiving an animated picture of a slowly twisting noose along with a note accusing him of treason. His boss, Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, recounted that Trump supporters broke into his widowed daughter-in-law’s house and threatened his wife with sexual violence.

And Wandrea Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, two Black women who served as election workers during the pandemic in Georgia, suffered an onslaught of racist abuse and were driven into hiding after Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Donald J. Trump’s lawyer, lied that they had rigged the election against Mr. Trump.

“I’ve lost my name and I’ve lost my reputation,” Ms. Freeman said, adding as her voice rose with emotion, “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”

Election official after election official testified to the House Jan. 6 committee on Tuesday in searing, emotional detail how Mr. Trump and his aides unleashed violent threats and vengeance on them for refusing to cave to his pressure to overturn the election in his favor.

The testimony showed how Mr. Trump and his aides encouraged his followers to target election officials in key states — even going so far as to post their personal cellphone numbers on Mr. Trump’s social media channels, which the committee cited as a particularly brutal effort by the president to cling to power....

Ms. Moss, who goes by Shaye, and her mother became the targets of Trump supporters after Mr. Giuliani falsely accused them in a Georgia State Senate hearing of passing around USB drives like “vials of heroin or cocaine” to steal the election from Mr. Trump.

What her mother actually handed her, Ms. Moss testified on Tuesday, was a ginger mint candy.

But Mr. Giuliani’s claim — later elevated by Mr. Trump himself, who referred to Ms. Moss by name more than a dozen times in a call with Mr. Raffensperger — tore across far-right circles of the internet. Soon after, the F.B.I. informed Ms. Freeman that it was no longer safe for her to stay at her house.

The urgency of that warning became clear after Trump supporters showed up at the door of Ms. Moss’s grandmother. They forced their way into her home, claiming they were there to make a citizen’s arrest of her granddaughter.

“This woman is my everything,” Ms. Moss testified about her grandmother. “I’ve never even heard her or seen her cry ever in my life, and she called me screaming at the top of her lungs.”

While in hiding, Ms. Moss and Ms. Freeman continued to face threats explicitly invoking their race, including a comment that Ms. Moss and her mother should “be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.”

“A lot of them were racist,” Ms. Moss said. “A lot of them were just hateful.”

Both women testified that nearly two years later, they were still haunted by the threat of violence. Ms. Moss recalled listening to the audio tape of Mr. Trump attacking her and her mother and immediately feeling “like it was all my fault.”

“I just felt bad for my mom, and I felt horrible for picking this job,” she testified, growing emotional. “And being the one that always wants to help and always there, never missing not one election. I just felt like it was — it was my fault for putting my family in this situation.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, quietly responded from the dais.

Ms. Freeman testified that she no longer went to the grocery store, and felt nervous every time she gave her name — once proudly worn bedazzled on T-shirts — for food orders.

“There is nowhere I feel safe,” Ms. Freeman testified. “The president of the United States is supposed to represent every American. Not to target one.”

'Orange Man Bad!'

At the Other McCain, "‘Orange Man Bad!’ Trump Still Living Rent-Free in the Left’s Collective Head."

Quoting Glenn Reynolds, who quotes the article on the "Progressive Meltdown":

Woke white people are annoying, stupid, and frequently vicious. Fortunately they’re also usually self-destructive and incompetent. But ultimately, this is just Trump exercising a magical power to destroy his enemies via their own ideology:

Sooner or later, each interview for this story landed on the election of Trump in 2016 as a catalyst. Whatever internal tension had been pulling at the seams of organizations in the years prior, Trump’s shock victory sharpened the focus of activists and regular people alike. The institutional progressive world based in Washington, D.C., reacted slowly, shell-shocked and unsure of its place, but people outside those institutions raced ahead of them. A period of mourning turned into fierce determination to resist. Spontaneous women’s marches were called in scores of cities, drawing as many as 5 million people, a shocking display of force. (Their collapse in a heap of identitarian recriminations is its own parable for this moment.)

 

How Meltdowns Brought Progressive Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History

At the Intercept, "Elephant in the Zoom":

EVERYONE ACKNOWLEDGED THAT Zoom was less than ideal as a forum for a heartfelt conversation on systemic racism and policing. But the meeting was urgent, and, a little more than two months into the Covid-19 lockdown, it would have to do.

During the first week of June 2020, teams of workers and their managers came together across the country to share how they were responding to the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis and to chart out what — if anything — their own company or nonprofit could do to contribute toward the reckoning with racial injustice that was rapidly taking shape.

On June 2, one such huddle was organized by the Washington, D.C., office of the Guttmacher Institute, the abortion rights movement’s premier research organization.

Heather Boonstra, vice president of public policy, began by asking how people were “finding equilibrium” — one of the details we know because it was later shared by staff with Prism, an outlet that covers social justice advocacy and the impacts of injustice.

She talked about the role systemic racism plays in society and the ways that Guttmacher’s work could counter it. Staff suggestions, though, turned inward, Prism reported, “including loosening deadlines and implementing more proactive and explicit policies for leave without penalty.” Staffers suggested additional racial equity trainings, noting that a previous facilitator had said that the last round had not included sufficient time “to cover everything.” With no Black staff in the D.C. unit, it was suggested that “Guttmacher do something tangible for Black employees in other divisions.”

Behind Boonstra’s and the staff’s responses to the killing was a fundamentally different understanding of the moment. For Boonstra and others of her generation, the focus should have been on the work of the nonprofit: What could Guttmacher, with an annual budget of nearly $30 million, do now to make the world a better place? For her staff, that question had to be answered at home first: What could they do to make Guttmacher a better place? Too often, they believed, managers exploited the moral commitment staff felt toward their mission, allowing workplace abuses to go unchecked.

The belief was widespread. In the eyes of group leaders dealing with similar moments, staff were ignoring the mission and focusing only on themselves, using a moment of public awakening to smuggle through standard grievances cloaked in the language of social justice. Often, as was the case at Guttmacher, they played into the very dynamics they were fighting against, directing their complaints at leaders of color. Guttmacher was run at the time, and still is today, by an Afro Latina woman, Dr. Herminia Palacio. “The most zealous ones at my organization when it comes to race are white,” said one Black executive director at a different organization, asking for anonymity so as not to provoke a response from that staff.

These starkly divergent views would produce dramatic schisms throughout the progressive world in the coming year. At Guttmacher, this process would rip the organization apart. Boonstra, unlike many managers at the time, didn’t sugarcoat how she felt about the staff’s response to the killing.

“I’m here to talk about George Floyd and the other African American men who have been beaten up by society,” she told her staff, not “workplace problems.” Boonstra told them she was “disappointed,” that they were being “self-centered.” The staff was appalled enough by the exchange to relay it to Prism.

The human resources department and board of directors, in consultation with outside counsel, were brought in to investigate complaints that flowed from the meeting, including accusations that certain staff members had been tokenized, promoted, and then demoted on the basis of race. The resulting report was unsatisfying to many of the staff.

“What we have learned is that there is a group of people with strong opinions about a particular supervisor, the new leadership, and a change in strategic priorities,” said a Guttmacher statement summarizing the findings. “Those staff have a point of view. Complaints were duly investigated and nothing raised to the level of abuse or discrimination. Rather, what we saw was distrust, disagreement, and discontent with management decisions they simply did not like.”

A Prism reporter reached a widely respected Guttmacher board member, Pamela Merritt, a Black woman and a leading reproductive justice activist, while the Supreme Court oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization were going on last December, a year and a half after the Floyd meeting. She offered the most delicate rebuttal of the staff complaints possible.

“I have been in this movement space long enough to respect how people choose to describe their personal experience and validate that experience, even if I don’t necessarily agree that that’s what they experienced,” Merritt said. “It seems like there’s a conflation between not reaching the conclusion that people want and not doing due diligence on the allegations, which simply is not true.” Boonstra did not respond to a request to talk from either Prism or The Intercept.

The six months since then have only seen a ratcheting up of the tension, with more internal disputes spilling into public and amplified by a well-funded, anonymous operation called ReproJobs, whose Twitter and Instagram feeds have pounded away at the organization’s management. “If your reproductive justice organization isn’t Black and brown it’s white supremacy in heels co-opting a WOC movement,” blared a typical missive submitted to and republished on one of its Instagram stories. The news, in May 2022, that Roe v. Wade would almost certainly be overturned did nothing to temper the raging battle. (ReproJobs told The Intercept its current budget is around $275,000.)

That the institute has spent the course of the Biden administration paralyzed makes it typical of not just the abortion rights community — Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and other reproductive health organizations had similarly been locked in knock-down, drag-out fights between competing factions of their organizations, most often breaking down along staff-versus-management lines. It’s also true of the progressive advocacy space across the board, which has, more or less, effectively ceased to function. The Sierra Club, Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, the Movement for Black Lives, Human Rights Campaign, Time’s Up, the Sunrise Movement, and many other organizations have seen wrenching and debilitating turmoil in the past couple years.

In fact, it’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult. It even reached the National Audubon Society, as Politico reported in August 2021:

Following a botched diversity meeting, a highly critical employee survey and the resignations of two top diversity and inclusion officials, the 600,000-member National Audubon Society is confronting allegations that it maintains a culture of retaliation, fear and antagonism toward women and people of color, according to interviews with 13 current and former staff members.

Twitter, as the saying goes, may not be real life, but in a world of remote work, Slack very much is. And Twitter, Slack, Zoom, and the office space, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former executive directors of advocacy organizations, are now mixing in a way that is no longer able to be ignored by a progressive movement that wants organizations to be able to function. The executive directors largely spoke on the condition of anonymity, for fear of angering staff or donors.

“To be honest with you, this is the biggest problem on the left over the last six years,” one concluded. “This is so big. And it’s like abuse in the family — it’s the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about. And you have to be super sensitive about who the messengers are.”

For a number of obvious and intersecting reasons — my race, gender, and generation — I am not the perfect messenger. But here it goes anyway...

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Our Civilizational Destruction

I can't disagree with Ms. Allie:

It doesn’t really matter what anyone thinks, the sexual depravity and gender nonsense our country celebrates signals civilizational destruction. You don’t have to believe it. You can insist otherwise all you want. But it’s a fact that we will all be forced to face soon.

— Allie Beth Stuckey (@conservmillen) June 17, 2022

Uvalde, Texas, Has Hired Private Law Firm to Argue That It Doesn't Have to Release Public Records Related to the Mass Shooting at Robb Elementary School

Holy shit wtaf?!!

At Vice,  "Some of the records relating to the Robb Elementary School shooting could be 'highly embarrassing,' involve 'emotional/mental distress,' and are 'not of legitimate concern to the public,' the lawyers argued."

The records are "highly embarrassing" to the Police Department, causing the police chief and officers severe "emotional/mental distress" from fear of losing everything, hence for all of those who fucked on May 24th, the actual truth of events is "not of legitimate concern to the public."

Now if the city wins the case, this is one summer of urban rioting, right there at Uvalde City Hall, the Police Department, and Robb Elementary, that I could support. Damn.