At Amazon, Sohrab Ahmari, The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos.
Saturday, June 18, 2022
A Manifesto on National Conservatism
This is a clarifying document with much to like (even more so, seeing it moved one writer at the Washington Post to attack it as "fascist").
Some parts are just okay, though.
The document can't reconcile America's role as the "indispensable nation" in world affairs with the current domestic populist isolationist zeitgeist. The United States is simply too powerful to assume that we can completely shrink from what the authors call "liberal imperialism." Political fashions come and go. We've had major populist movements for reform previously, which, for example, later tailed-off into a more New Deal-style liberalism, that is, radical progressive statism, etc. The same in foreign policy. Should Russia and China agree to formally ally against the U.S., and to threaten U.S. interests beyond Ukraine --- say, with a Russian war in Western Europe or the establishment of Chinese forward operating bases in Latin America --- things will change, and the U.S., in its role as the world's liberal hegemon, will be forced to act according to the pressures of national security in an anarchic world of interstate competition and power shifts.
The manifesto's a product of the Edmund Burke Foundation and is endorsed by such big name MAGA-esque figures as Michael Anton, Victor Davis Hanson, and Julie Kelly, among others.
See, "National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles." It's a ten-point program. Here's 8-10:
8. Family and Children. We believe the traditional family is the source of society’s virtues and deserves greater support from public policy. The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization. The disintegration of the family, including a marked decline in marriage and childbirth, gravely threatens the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations. Among the causes are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life. Economic and cultural conditions that foster stable family and congregational life and child-raising are priorities of the highest order. 9. Immigration. Immigration has made immense contributions to the strength and prosperity of Western nations. But today’s penchant for uncontrolled and unassimilated immigration has become a source of weakness and instability, not strength and dynamism, threatening internal dissension and ultimately dissolution of the political community. We note that Western nations have benefited from both liberal and restrictive immigration policies at various times. We call for much more restrictive policies until these countries summon the wit to establish more balanced, productive, and assimilationist policies. Restrictive policies may sometimes include a moratorium on immigration. 10. Race. We believe that all men are created in the image of God and that public policy should reflect that fact. No person’s worth or loyalties can be judged by the shape of his features, the color of his skin, or the results of a lab test. The history of racialist ideology and oppression and its ongoing consequences require us to emphasize this truth. We condemn the use of state and private institutions to discriminate and divide us against one another on the basis of race. The cultural sympathies encouraged by a decent nationalism offer a sound basis for conciliation and unity among diverse communities. The nationalism we espouse respects, and indeed combines, the unique needs of particular minority communities and the common good of the nation as a whole.
RTWT.
'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.)
Mark Shields, TV Pundit Known for His Sharp Wit, Dies at 85
At the New York Times, "A former campaign strategist, he became a fixture in American political journalism and punditry and was seen on “PBS NewsHour” for 33 years."
He joined the Marines in 1960:
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...
Friday, June 17, 2022
'Afro' Hair Pick Statue to Commemorate Juneteenth Unveiled in Lafayette Square, New Orleans, Louisiana
This is just dumb.
Sorry not sorry.
Juneteenth is this coming Sunday.
#Juneteenth #Shaft #IsaacHayes 🎶🎶🎶 https://t.co/AgGSAelnLx
— Donald Douglas 📘 (@AmPowerBlog) June 18, 2022
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
Paige Spiranac Is World's Sexiest Woman
At Maxim, "WORLD’S SEXIEST WOMAN: PAIGE SPIRANAC IS MAXIM’S 2022 ‘HOT 100’ COVER STAR":
The beautiful influencer and world’s most followed golfer covers Maxim’s Hot 100 issue.
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?!!
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.
George Gascón's Policies May Have Directly Led to the Murder of Two El Monte Police Officers (VIDEO)
Gascón's recall can't come soon enough.
At the Los Angles Times, "L.A. Dist. Atty. Gascón’s policy may have led to reduced prison time for man who killed El Monte officers":
The man who shot and killed two El Monte police officers Tuesday could have faced significantly more time in prison when he was last charged with a crime. But one of Dist. Atty. George Gascón’s most heavily criticized policies probably resulted in a lower sentence, according to documents reviewed by The Times. Justin Flores, 35, who also died in Tuesday’s confrontation, was charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm and methamphetamine when he was arrested by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies in 2020. Flores had been convicted of burglary in 2011. Burglaries are strike offenses, which make suspects charged with later crimes eligible for harsher sentences. Flores’ earlier conviction means he had one strike against him when he was charged in 2020. But the prosecutor assigned to the case, Deputy Dist. Atty. Larry Holcomb, said he had to revoke the strike allegation after Gascón took office, according to a disposition report reviewed by The Times. That’s because the new D.A. had issued a “special directive” that barred prosecutors from filing strike allegations on his first day in office. Gascón’s policy regarding strikes was later deemed illegal by a Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge, after the union representing rank-and-file prosecutors sued, seeking an injunction. In February 2021, Judge James Chalfant ruled Gascón’s policy violated California’s “three strikes” law, which requires prosecutors to file strike allegations whenever a defendant has a previous serious or violent felony conviction. An appellate judge upheld Chalfant’s ruling earlier this year. Flores pleaded no contest to being a felon in possession of a firearm in 2021, and prosecutors agreed to drop all other charges, records show. Though the gun conviction alone could have sent him to prison for up to three years, by pleading no contest, Flores was instead sentenced to two years’ probation and 20 days in jail. There is no guarantee Flores would have still been in jail Tuesday, when he shot and killed El Monte Police Cpl. Michael Paredes and Officer Joseph Santana as they responded to a reported stabbing at the Siesta Inn. But the removal of the strike allegation certainly cost prosecutors leverage when negotiating a plea, according to criminal justice experts. Laurie Levenson, a professor of criminal law at Loyola Law School, said the blanket policy to disregard strike allegations was always going to run into trouble. “If you are going to implement a blanket policy, you are always in danger of having a Willie Horton moment,” she said, “where that decision applied to one case results in a horrible outcome.” Horton was convicted of first-degree murder in Massachusetts and sentenced to life in prison without parole. He escaped while on a weekend furlough program in 1986, then brutally raped a woman and assaulted her boyfriend. The Horton case was used in an infamous attack ad against then-Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, who was running for president in 1988 against George H.W. Bush. Gascón has moved away from such blanket policies in recent months. Prosecutors can now request approval from a committee to either try juveniles as adults or pursue special circumstances allegations in murder cases, tactics Gascón had initially outlawed when he took office. At least two such cases are now being reviewed by committees...
Still more.
Energy Inflation Derails Biden's Climate Agenda
Well, I guess that's one good thing about inflation.
At the Wall Street Journal, "Under the president’s watch, emissions have risen, renewable-energy development has slowed and oil and coal use is up":
WASHINGTON—President Biden came to office vowing to cut dependence on fossil fuels, putting environmentalists in charge of energy policy and asking Congress for billions of dollars to fund a transition to cleaner energy. Seventeen months later, greenhouse gas emissions are up, renewable-power development has slowed, and oil and coal consumption are on the rise. The biggest aspects of the green agenda are stuck in Congress, while Mr. Biden, facing surging energy prices and inflation, urged U.S. oil refiners this week to expand capacity. Domestic oil and gas production has increased since Mr. Biden came into office and is projected to rise to record highs, but that has just inflamed concerns from environmentalists that Mr. Biden is backing away from his green agenda. “I thought the country had turned a corner,” said Mary Nichols, a former California regulator and longtime environmental leader, “that the country was headed in the right direction.” “Now this last year or two leaves you wondering whether that is true,” Ms. Nichols said. Mr. Biden reaffirmed his environmental commitments Friday at the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, a virtual summit he hosted with representatives of more than 20 countries and international groups, including the European Commission and China. “The critical point is that these actions are part of our transition to a clean and secure long-term energy future,” Mr. Biden said, adding later, “The science tells us that the window for action is rapidly narrowing.” At home, however, Mr. Biden’s agenda has run into the reality of rising oil prices, punishing inflation and policy conflicts. Mr. Biden pledged last year to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 50% to 52% below 2005 levels by 2030. But doing so will require Congressional approval of measures such as tax incentives for clean energy, analysts say. Coal-state Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.), who derailed Mr. Biden’s roughly $3.5 trillion climate and social spending bill last year, has been negotiating with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) on a new bill that would include the tax incentives, but a deal is far from certain. The stakes for Mr. Biden are high. High inflation and record gasoline prices at the pump are a political liability heading into the midterm elections, where Republicans have a chance to seize majorities in the House and Senate. At the same time, Mr. Biden risks losing support among young and progressive voters by seeming to back away from his green agenda, activists and political analysts said. “It is hard to forever turn people out when you’re not producing results,” said Bill McKibben, an environmentalist and co-founder of 350.org, a group dedicated to stopping the use of fossil fuels world-wide. “Especially among young voters who care about this immensely there seems to be real signs it’s doing damage.” Administration officials say they are still on course to meet their climate goals, citing measures including executive actions to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, spending to build out an electric-vehicle charging network and the rejoining of international climate talks. Mr. Biden wants clean energy “installed here, deployed here and exported from here,“ Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said. ”He has taken steps in every single aspect of that to make those things happen. It doesn’t happen overnight.” Some of the problems bedeviling Mr. Biden were triggered by events beyond his control. The economy’s sharp rebound from the pandemic fueled higher demand for energy, raising costs. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine further taxed energy markets, leading Mr. Biden to label rising gas costs as “Putin’s price hike.” Administration critics, however, say White House policy conflicts and political miscalculations made things worse as oil prices rose from roughly $53 a barrel when Mr. Biden took office to nearly $120 now. One problem, these people say, was a too-rosy view of how smoothly the U.S. could move off fossil fuels. Mr. Biden used his first day in office to block completion of the Keystone XL oil pipeline and freeze new oil and gas leases on federal land. “Unfortunately, what we have seen since January 2021 are policies that send a message that the administration aims to impose obstacles to our industry delivering energy resources the world needs,” Bill Turenne, a spokesman for Chevron Corp., said in a statement to reporters Wednesday. Mr. Biden is now asking oil-and-gas companies to pump and export more in response to soaring prices and war in Europe, leaving him open to criticism from Republicans that his early decisions fed the problem and from environmentalists that he was backtracking on his climate agenda...
Wednesday, June 15, 2022
The January 6th Committee Is Pure Political Theater (VIDEO)
From Julie Kelly, at American Greatness, "January 6 for Non-Dummies":
During another public hearing on Monday, the January 6 select committee featured a witness so irrelevant that his appearance should prompt even the most ardent defender of Nancy Pelosi’s illegitimate inquisition to question the committee’s real purpose. Former Fox News talking head Chris Stirewalt, fired by the network shortly after the Capitol protest for calling the state of Arizona for Joe Biden early on election night, told his sob story to a presumably slim viewing audience. The washed-up commentator, however, is the last person with any insight into the events of January 6, 2021. Stirewalt’s performance—similar to the overwrought speechifying by committee members last Thursday—is another headfake designed to turn attention away from the truth about what happened that day and in the months leading up to the brief disturbance that resulted in the deaths of four Trump supporters. A well-oiled fog machine operated by the Department of Justice, congressional Democrats, NeverTrumpers, and the national news media is once again pumping lie after lie into the body politic in a last-gasp attempt to destroy Trump and the powerful political movement he created. For nearly 18 months, American Greatness has covered this issue like no other outlet. So, as the committee continues its dog-and-pony show on Capitol Hill this month with an eye toward producing a long list of legislative “fixes,” the Justice Department inexorably moves to criminally charge Donald Trump for his alleged involvement, and the media takes another extended nap on its purported fact-checking duties, American Greatness here provides the definitive list of what people need to know about January 6, 2021, and related hype...
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