The Great Sydney Sweeney Jeans/Genes Dustup of 2025

This is all so goddamned stupid that it is beneath us all to spend any time at all thinking about it.

Buuuut...

   This is how the left has operated for the last 50 years or whatever--the real left, the vanguard. Aside from the fact that it's used to advance their totalitarian politics...it's just idiotic. Even when this method--the method of wacko free-association--is applied to nonpolitical subjects...but of course everything is political, bigot!...it's revoltingly stupid.

   OMG...a person in a commercial acknowledged that genes exist!!!

   This, in fact, is a major ground for the outrage. As with open borders, the left didn't just wake up one day and say: OK, that's our view, then. They just slowly became more and more permissive about borders, slowly began using arguments that entailed that it was wrong to keep people out, wrong to kick people out...and so on...until finally they held a de facto open borders position. Kinda the same with...gasp!...genes! The left's de facto orthodoxy is blank slatism  and "social constructionism." Race has become "race" (in "scare quotes"), it is (of course) "socially constructed" (no scare quotes there, bigot!) and just what that means is...well, far too difficult and theoretical for you to understand...so just take their word for it... Now, infamously, they've begun to try to "deconstruct" the male/female distinction, too. Believing in genetic differences and natural kinds--verboten! If you believe that there are genetic differences among people, you must be a Nazi and think we should be stamping out some of the responsible genes. If you believe there are genetic racial differences, you must believe some races are morally superior and some inferior. Ditto sex.

   This ends up, in the gibberish-filled, sophistry-addled screeds of the left, meaning ...Genes...something something something...Hitler!!!

   And this, of course, is how our old friend Trofim Lysenko actually started out: denying the reality of genetics.

   As Cooke points out, there's also a double-standard here. Those standards are: 

[1] You evil Retrogrades are responsible for even completely daft, made-up implications and associations of your utterances that we spin out of our fevered, free-associative, Derridean/Freudian imaginations.

[2] No matter how clearly WE, the anointed, say something like 'we must dismantle whiteness' or 'defund the police,' we must never be held responsible for meaning what we meant.

   The Sweeny ad is pretty dopey stuff. The actual text/dialog confuses genes with their expression...OMG!...too bad Madison Avenue didn't hire me to critique their work! But the sophistical attempt to make it all Nazi is typical leftist bullshit.

   The left is forced to accept more and more insane views to defend pronouncements of this kind. They've got to deny one of the following in order to defend this latest bullshit:

[a] Genetics is scientific

[b] Genes are responsible for traits like blond hair, blue eyes, and general attractiveness

[c]  It's better to be attractive than unattractive

   Then, of course, there's the issue of intent. Did American Eagle--and Ms.Sweeny!--intend for this to be a call for eugenics--and Nazi eugenics at that!--? The left has two answers, and they flip-flop back and forth between them, depending on their rhetorical/political needs:

[i] Intent doesn't matter, bigot! We have already proclaimed the Death Of The Author! Interpretation is king! All that matters (waves hands) is interpretation! And we have so interpreted it!

[ii] Of course that's what they meant--what else could it possibly be?

   It's the irrationalism at the heart of all this that most repulses me. Its association with totalitarian politics is--almost--just icing on the cake...or whatever the opposite of that is...some bad thing that makes another bad thing worse...YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN

   Of course another, peripheral, danger here is that real racism and something like Nazism is actually starting to make noise on the fringes of the right... That's a real thing--but it's beside the point. People don't want to take on the behemoth of idiocy that is the intellectual left...it's much easier to say "Well, this could help out actual racists/Nazis." Thus tacitly falling into another standard leftist sophistry: the only way the left can be wrong is to inadvertently help out the right.

   It's not the only way--not by far--but it is a way.

Trump

Holy crap.

It's just started to dawn on me that Trump could be the best/most consequential President of my lifetime...

I mean...I was dragged kicking and screaming to supporting him. I basically sat the 2016 election out--partially because I was still listening to the Lying, Dying Fake News MSM, and thought there was no chance of him winning...but largely because I just thought he was not, in any way, an option. I thought--as I said many times--that he represented a reductio ad absurdum of American democracy...

   By 2016, the lefty-left had lost its mind years ago...but I still thought the Democrats would hold out. I thought HRC would basically do what Bill had done--stiff arm the crazy, PC left and move back to the center...

   So, anyway, I didn't vote for Trump in '16, and didn't even consider the possibility. If you'd have suggested that I'd support him one day, I'd have laughed in your face...

   But anyway...eventually the Dems capitulated to the insane left...and it became clearer and clearer that Trump was...hard as that was to believe...a pretty sane and reasonable person down underneath his wacko exterior...

   The Democrats are now so batshit crazy that voting for them is simply no longer an option...

   But the really surprising thing to me is that Trump has turned out not to be the lesser evil...because he's no kind of evil at all. He's a damn good President--for all his flaws--and he might end up saving the USA...hence Western Civilization...from the prope-Marxist/PC/Woketarian cult...

   I really cannot believe I'm typing these words...

Josh Hammer: Why Russiagate is the Scandal that Shouldn't Go Away

Contra McCarthy, Hammer says that the new info does warrant another investigation.

Jed Rubenfeld: Did Obama's National Security Team Break the Law?

Maybe?

Jack Butler: The Left is Still Denying Reality: Transanity and "The 4a.m. Club"

I've been mostly ignoring "The 4 a.m. Club"...despite the fact that it counts toward my longstanding prediction that, when political correctness arose again, so would New Age woo. It's a really fringe view, and just doesn't seem that significant to me.

   But the general phenomenon is very significant--the thing that PC and NAW have in common: the outright denial of plain facts.

   In fact, the Dems can't even admit the fairly low-grade, non-theoretical fact that transanity is a losing issue for them. Even if they can't bring themselves to admit that men are not women, they ought to be able to compare simple whole numbers less than a hundred... Even if they think that men can be women, they ought to be able to admit that most people disagree.

    But PC--basically the same thing as Woketarianism--is the subordination of facts to leftist politics. It's Lysenkoism expanded outside the bounds of science.

   Over and over and over the left simply refuses to acknowledge that the plain facts contradict their political commitments.

Tanden: "How Democrats Can Win on Immigration"

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[1] If Americans generally are idiotic enough to hand control of immigration back to the Democrats, I fear there's no saving us.

[2] I hope no one around here is stupid enough to trust the alleged polling data cited by Tanden. Most polls are basically just a variation on MSM news coverage. I hope Dems keep deluding themselves with them, though. I basically pay attention to Rasmussen and Atlas Intel. Rasmussen has its own bias, but it's pretty reliable--much more so than, say Gallup.

[3] The fact that these plans are floated by Tanden and the Center for American Progress...that alone should send you to red alert.

Look, Dems have proven beyond any appreciable doubt that they will lean as hard as possible in the direction of increased immigration, legal and illegal. They just showed us what they will do. It hasn't even been a year. For the love of God, is any sane person gullible enough to be taken in by this?

   Only after they've been beaten senseless (too late) over this for six months do some few of them offer to at least cover up their open-borders view with minimally rational plans. It's taken 4.5 years for them to even admit the most obvious relevant fact: that asylum is being abused.

   I used to favor this kind of position: crack down on illegal immigration, increase legal immigration.

   But now that we know what we're facing, we can't make such concessions.

   We need to absolutely crack down on illegals, and refuse to accede to any Democrat expansion of immigration until the Dems have been beaten into submission on that front. Otherwise we'll just see some massive expansion of legal immigration that just constitutes legalizing what was previously illegal. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.

   The op-ed's filler is, of course, bullshit. Blah blah cruelty, blah blah targeting poor abuela who's been here twenty years, blah blah blah. All bullshit and lies.

   As is generally the case these days, we face a choice between [a] a completely insane position, advocated by Democrats and [b] a modest, ordinary, centrist position advocated by Republicans. The former is: move as fast as possible as close as possible to open borders. The latter is: enforce existing immigration laws.

   The blue team's main "argument" here is: Oh, boo hoo, those poor people, how can you be so cruel as to enforce the law?

   Such bullshit can always be deployed

   I feel sorry for people living in shitty conditions who want to come here but can't do so legally. I'd do the same thing if I were them. But if they were me, they'd have to respond in the same way: No borders, no country. No border enforcement, no border.

Jenkins: The Real Russiagate Story

link

Turley: Key Russiagate Players Sweating It Out, Lawyering Up

Brennan, Clapper, Comey, McCabe.

   If you really care about "our democracy," to use one of the blue team's favorite phrases, you have to care that these men betrayed our trust and helped to undermine that democracy.

   I still encounter blue-team types who basically just refused to acknowledge that Russiagate was a Democrat hoax. There are more than a few out there who go even further, still insisting that Russiagate was real, still pushing the "collusion" tale. And I know people who hung on every twist and turn of the Mueller investigation...but suddenly lost interest in politics after his conclusions were handed down.

   I think it would be good to--in as dignified a way as possible--basically rub the Democrats' noses in this. It may be the only way to ever get them to face the facts.

   Of course, the media basically controls the public's interest throttle. They can't exactly turn it on and off...but they can wind it out or throttle it back toward idle. And there's no doubt what they'll try to do in this case.

   They were already quick out of the gate with the accusation that this was merely a way to take attention off the Epstein case.

Traverse City Wal-Mart Stabbing Spree Stopped by an Armed Citizen

Armed with a handgun, that is...
...but you won't see any reference to that fact in most of the MSM stories about the incident. All we're told is that the stabbings were stopped as a result of "citizen involvement."

Incidentally, don't forget to join the Virginia Citizen's Defense League if you're in the OD.

And, for that matter, even if you're not.

What to do When SCOTUS Fails to do Everything the Left Wants it to

Delicious progressive tears.

Turley: (Obama and) Brennan's Involvement in the Russiagate Hoax

Derp

I can't believe I ever take Brennan seriously anymore.

Must have spaced.

Brennan: Gabbard is Lying about the ICA

Very plausible, though not conclusive.

UK Police are More Concerned About Making Sure No One Mentions Child-Rape by Immigrants Than They are With the Actual Child-Rape by Immigrants

Hard to deny it at this point.

Greg Collard: Russiagate Explained: The Sins of the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment

I'm sort of reading all the stuff coming out on this pretty quickly, as I don't really have time to dive into it carefully right now.

So I have to just kind of bracket it all unless/until I get a chance to look at it more carefully.

Thus far I agree with Andy McCarthy: nothing too new(?)

My tentative-but-long-standing-guess: Obama was involved to a significant extent, but probably didn't do anything illegal.

If the show were on the other foot, and Trump had apparently ordered such dirty tricks against Obama, the MSM would write of nothing else. I'm sure we'd be told that there is no other explanation for the evidence, and all that.

But, be that as it may, I don't buy any of this talk about treason, and I find it repugnant.

Again, this is exactly the kind of hysterical hyperbole we fear from Trump.

You can't go around flinging charges of treason against former Presidents.

Yes, I know the Dems have done it against Trump for a decade. But, as usual, Trump escalates by doing the crazy shit the Democrats do...but doing it basically from the Oval Office...

Jean Garnett: The Trouble With Wanting Men; Or: Whatever Happened to Political Lesbianism?

Well, there's this.

    It's easy to make fun of such stuff. Whether there's any insight to be had from it, I don't know.

    One thing the essay illustrates pretty well is the overlap between middlebrow NYT-op-ed-level thinking (or at least writing) and thinking (or at least writing) in the weaker regions of academia. For one thing, they love coining new words, all with basically the same quasi-scholarly ring to them: 'heteropessimism,' 'heterofatalism,' 'hermeneutic labor,' 

Domestic pessimism (they still do less of the housework and child care); partner-violence pessimism (femicide is still gruesomely routine); erotic pessimism (the clitoris and its properties still elude many of them). And the petulantly proud masculinist subcultures that have arisen, at least in part, as reactions to these pessimisms keep coughing up new reasons to fear, rage against and complain about “men.”

References to "writer and gender scholar" x, "sexuality scholar" y and philosopher z pepper the essay. And, in fact, in amidst all that is a paragraph that illustrates on sad, dead-end trail branching off from the main trunk of bullshit studies that's been all the rage of late in academia: turning personal gripes into areas of "scholarship":

Is “heterofatalism” a useful concept? I took it up for a while, considered the positions. The writer and gender scholar Sara Ahmed has advanced the idea of “complaint as feminist pedagogy,” arguing that to bitch is inherently transgressive, a form of resistance, while the philosophy professor Ellie Anderson suggests that women venting their dating woes constitutes a kind of negativity as rebellion. Was that what my friends and I were doing over dinner? Rebelling?

Bitching as a political act of rebellion...perfect. There's a slice of the academic-middlebrow-media worldview for ya.

   Back in the day, there was a movement called political lesbianism: the view that women ought all to be lesbians for purely political reasons, regardless of anything about their innate sexual desire. One motive for this view was to prop up societism/blank-slatism: even sexual desire isn't natural, but merely culturally determined/inculcated. Another motive, of course, was to strike a blow against men, the hated oppressors. Never mentioned, of course, was that lesbian feminists wanted a bigger dating pool... (A similar motive lurks just barely beneath the surface of transanity...) But the stated motive was: women should just separate themselves from men. Why? Because men basically exist to rape and murder women, and women's only hope of avoiding these things was separatism.

   I never hear anything about lesbian separatism anymore...the new tactic is to keep pursuing men...but to complain about them all the time.

   I wonder whether maybe lefty women should take another look at separatism...it might be less irritating for all concerned...

Should You Be An Organ Donor?

Ehhh...this isn't the only story of this kind I've heard of late...

I think I might change by driver's license unless/until this bizarro shit gets straightened out.

Poll Results: Trump's Not So Great, But Much Better Than the Terrible, Terrible Democrats

I mean...Americans are obviously right about this...

   To quibble a bit, I'd actually say:

   Trump is a very good President precisely because he is saving us from Democrat insanity.

   If the Dems were currently even so-so, Trump might be a net negative.

   But as it is, he's not merely a better alternative, he's kicking ass and taking names in terms of reversing progressive lunacy.

Pure Retardium: Ashli Stevens, "Why Trump's Fast-Food Obsession Matters"

It's hard to pick the stupidest thing I've read this week...but forced to do so, I'd probably pick this.

   If you want to understand the crazy, pseudo-intellectual left, this would be a good entering wedge--and I may go through it in detail later.

   This is a good example of the madness that gripped academia 40 years ago: take your niche, bullshit, narrow, possibly pop-culturey area of obsession, and try to use it as a lens for making grand pronouncements about things that matter. See: feminist glaciology. Or feminist logic. Or feminst epistemology. Or feminist philosophy of science. Or, well, basically feminist anything... Or CRT. Or Queer theory...ad nauseam...

   Trump's not "obsessed" with fast food. Rather, he's a pretty ordinary American in this respect. And, no, you can't Gerrymander some profound insight into Trump on the basis of Quarter Pounders...even if you happen to know something about food, and wish that could make you an authority on Things That Matter...

Lionel Shriver, DJT, et al. on Mass, Unregulated Immigration and the Death of Europe

link

To repeat myself, IMO there's basically a two-tiered organization on the left, which can be roughly (though without bright clear dividing lines) divided into [1] the radical, nihilistic/communist vanguard, and [2] more ordinary, less-radical progressive majority (that is: majority among progressives, not among the entire population). The radical vanguard seeks the destruction of the West via propagating ideas like the Cloward-Piven strategy. Note that they are quite up-front about this. This radical vanguard recognizes mass, unregulated immigration as a method of destroying the liberal democracies and, especially, the roughly European world and, especially the USA. The trailing edge of progressivism doesn't seek destruction of the West, and wouldn't go along with it...so the leading edge translates Death to America into emotional appeals to kindness: Oh, those poor people...

   But the trailing edge has been brainwashed into accepting political correctness, the subordination of truth and reason to leftist politics. The left has adopted the Oh, those poor people view, as well as multiculturalism. Having adopted such views, the left [a] suppresses evidence of the destructive consequences of these views, and [b] refuses to acknowledge the evidence that does happen to slip through. Non-Westerners are good, and mass immigration is good, and multiculturalism is good, and any evidence to the contrary is racist--and you are racist if you do acknowledge that evidence. Mass, unregulated, Third-World immigration by feral young men simply doesn't exist. The left doesn't want to hear about it--and even if they do, they have been trained to simply not allow it to show up on their radar. If they did see what is before their eyes, they would regard themselves as racists--the very worst thing one can be.

   What the left has decided to value is good. It must be good. No amount of evidence can ever refute that. It is better to burn down the West and bring back a world of barbaric religion and unrestrained totalitarian government than to risk any suggestion that you might be racist--no matter how insane and unjustified. Hey, mass 

   Me, I'd like a world in which we can all live together in harmony despite cultural and racial/ethnic differences. But I'm not capable of simply ignoring the evidence that this isn't the way things are. And I'm not willing to risk the destruction of the West, science, and liberalism. And the solution is basically just to follow the damn law. We have immigration laws--but the left insists that we not stick to them. They insist that their crackpot, radically counterfactual view of humanity be affirmed now matter how obviously insane it is.

   What we need is to leave people to cluster into their ordinary, more-or-less natural clusters--to allow them to live in their own nations, with some degree of interpenetration. That's about as liberal as things can get. We can either have this kind rational, evidence-based, limited cohabitation...or we can have the destruction of the West and liberalism.

   If the U.S. is going to survive, it has to eschew open borders and go back to limited, regulated immigration with vetting. But, as the conservatives say: Import the Third World, become the Third World. Moderate, regulated immigration with vetting--and time for assimilation--strengthens the nation, liberalism, humanity and the world. Mass, unregulated, progressive-style immigration will lead to catastrophe.

   Even if you don't believe this--and I'd be willing to change my mind in the face of actual evidence--conservatism is the rational strategy here: we must not suddenly adopt a radical deviation from the status quo because a bunch of radicals with orange hair take to the streets shrieking RACIST at us. We could begin to study the problem and evaluate the radical leftist open-borders alternative...but only adopt it in the face of basically ironclad evidence and experimentation in its favor. That is: if we concluded that it would not destroy the world. Which evidence, of course, will never actually show up, because the view is nuts. But aside from that: the left does not want to actually submit its almost-uniformly-insane views to inquiry. That would queer the whole deal in their eyes. Half the point is radical, sudden change as a leap of faith. To require actual inquiry into the costs and benefits of their dogmas is to already have lost the faith. Evidence is racist, bigot.

   To repeat myself again: the slogan of the contemporary left is or ought to be Credo quia absurdum est.

Fenn and Micelli: Leading Medical Journals Care More About DEI Than About Major Diseases

DEI is a huge crock of shit that should be mercilessly stamped out from every institution.

Noah Rothman: Happy "Earth Overshoot Day": According to the United Nations, You're Already Dead

link

I reckon they'd take a particularly dim view of my Nissan Xterra pro-4X.

In addition to all its horrifying-to-leftists offroad equipment, it gets 17 mpg.

Allegedly.

But not actually.

Actually, it gets less than that.

To make matters worse, it's got one of VA's Gadsden Flag license plates.

Good thing I'm not all that wild about Trump or I'd get a bumper sticker just to really drive 'em nuts.

Winsome Sears 10 Points Behind Spanberger?

Well, 3-12 points, or whatever.

I'm afraid the OD is in big trouble. If the blues take the Governorship and keep the General Assembly, we are screwed. NoVa has become a political anchor around the neck of the Commonwealth.

VDH: The Damage Caused by the Russiagate Hoax

I generally agree, though I'm skeptical about some of his points.

Seems to me that we face two very similar situations here--though the evidence of Obama shenanigans is much stronger than the evidence of Trump-Russia collusion.

But when Trump was accused, all the media's guns immediately turned on him...whereas now that Obama is accused...all the media's guns again turn on Trump... Outlandish accusations against Trump: he is obviously guilty and there's no rational alternative!  Plausible but unproven accusations against Obama: Trump is guilty of making unproven accusations!

I wish the Trump administration had taken the high road and merely laid out the evidence against Obama instead of leaping to "treason!", the nuclear option.

But that's not the kind of thing we can expect from Trump.

Instead, he's basically lowering himself to the Democrats' level.

Strassel: The Democrats' "Autopsy" Flop

Agreed: 

... 

Yet the mainstream media’s willful insistence that the loss must be put down solely to Biden/Harris is equally comedic. The coverage is almost desperate to insist that the left’s only problem is the messenger—and the means of messaging. Which puts the media in the exact same spot as the “autopsy” it ridicules, as that document is headed to a finding that the party needs someone who does a better job of “connecting” and “explaining,” and who doubles down on organizing. 

What both camps studiously ignore is the voter verdict. That is, the voters who last year decisively rejected the progressive agenda that defines today’s Democratic Party. A real autopsy would focus almost entirely on the unpopularity of the ideas that animate the political left: open borders, unrestrained spending, union power, climate diktats, police-bashing, anti-Israel sentiment, identity politics. It would note not just the polls showing this rejection, but the proof in the form of recent, extraordinary demographic shifts that show a left losing its grip on whole categories of once reliable voter groups.

A real autopsy would meditate on the disconnect between a nation that wants the freedom to build, grow and achieve, and a Democratic Party increasingly obsessed with locking up and redistributing a government-micromanaged ecosystem. It might even consider a case study of, say, San Francisco, for some evidence of how its policies fail in practice, and how voters respond on issues like crime or education. A few liberal policy wonks are feeling out a new direction—see the talk of an “abundance” agenda—yet party leaders have so far resolutely refused to go there.
An honest examination would drill in to the failure of eight years of lawfare, the party’s decision to weaponize government for political gain. It would ask if the partisan ambitions that fuel the progressive left’s calls to end the legislative filibuster, nationalize election laws, pack the Supreme Court or abolish the Electoral College are worth the distrust they sow among average voters who want stability. It would question what internal or cultural dysfunction allowed an entire Democratic establishment to salute a misguided leader, and worse, to excoriate those rare individuals (Dean Phillips) with the backbone to warn of a coming trainwreck.
None of this will happen, for a simple reason. The progressive left remains a minority in the liberal movement, but its true believers nonetheless occupy all the positions of power, including the leadership of the DNC (and most Beltway press jobs). They won’t criticize their basic world view.

... 

Taibbi: The Smoking Gun Proving Obama's Involvement in Russiagate

This does seem to me to be the strongest case for the relevant conclusion.

It's just a hypothesis, though: given the facts available to us, the most natural explanation for the about-face in question is that Obama basically ordered it.

But it's not proof, and--according to McCarthy--it's not a crime.

Worse than Watergate, I'd say. And it ought to sink--or further sink--the Dems electorally for a decade.

But it won't.

Again, my prediction is that the Pubs will do enough stupid shit to revive the Dems...maybe even if they remain crazy radical Woketarian cultists.

This loose talk of treason could be the first step down the path of reviving the Dems.

McCarthy: Obama was Complicit in Russiagate "Up to His Neck"...but he Violated No Laws and Cannot be Prosecuted

McCarthy is the authority I look to on this stuff.

NRO: Russiagate, Revisited

Again, I think the NRO is exactly right about this.

Conservatives/Trump have gained the upper hand recently mainly via one not-even-really-a-tactic tactic: responding to Democrat extremism by occupying the sane, centrist ground.

   This is another opportunity to do the same thing...but my guess is that Trump is too mad to go that route. Instead, he's going to take the path of equal and opposite crazy.

   I don't really blame him, TBH. The Democrats have been grotesquely despicable in their anti-Trump character assassination efforts. In fact, that's their general strategy against all their political opponents. But obviously the Trump case has been more prominent.

   The HRC campaign wove a web of lies for a conclusion that, technically, could have led to Trump's execution (though, of course, that was unlikely). And more-or-less the whole blue team hopped on board, despite the laughable bullshittery of the case. It was obvious--to me, at least--by late 2017 that the Steele Dossier and the whole Russiagate case was a crock of shit. But you simply could not talk sense to Dems about it. More than one normally reasonable Democrat of my acquaintance insisted to me that there was no other possible explanation of the evidence--than that Trump had "colluded" with the Rooskies. No other even possible explanation! 

   And this was just one prong in the Dems' multi-pronged lawfare attack. James's bullshit real estate case against him, E. Jean Carroll's patently loony rape fantasy--these costing him, what, $450m and $100m respectively? Utter madness. I sort of can't blame Trump for wanting to crush these people. I certainly would.

   But that's why people like me shouldn't be President...

   One reason, anyway.

   But, even if understandable, the line Gabbard is spouting just doesn't seem defensible.

   Maybe there's more evidence. But what we've been offered thus far just won't do the trick.

   Again, I'm willing to follow the evidence wherever on this one...but it doesn't lead to the conclusion the Trumpistas are claiming it leads to.

U.S. Olympic Committee Quietly Bans Men from Women's Sports in Accordance with Trump Executive Order

It is, of course, madness that this is necessary.

Eli Lake: Gabbard is Wrong about a "Treasonous Conspiracy"

This seems exactly right to me, and it's backed up by Andy McCarthy, who's been all over the Russiagate hoax:

Andrew McCarthy, the author of an early debunking of Russiagate, Ball of Collusion, and a former assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, told me on Sunday, “There is nothing new in email communications DNI Tulsi Gabbard is hyping as a bombshell. We have known for years that Obama-era national security officials promoted a bogus Trump-Russia collusion narrative fabricated by the Clinton campaign. Gabbard now claims inconsistency between what intelligence officials were saying around the time of the 2016 election and thereafter, but there is no contradiction.”
One area where Gabbard does bring new information to light is the revelation of a whistleblower inside the intelligence community who did not believe that the intelligence supported the conclusion in the January 6, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that “the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.” The release from Friday includes this tantalizing quote from the whistleblower: “As for the 2017 ICA’s judgment of a decisive Russian preference for then-candidate Donald Trump, I could not concur in good conscience based on information available, and my professional analytic judgment.”
This is not the first time this issue has been raised. The 2018 report from Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence also found that the intelligence did not support the assertion that the Kremlin favored Trump in the 2016 election; rather, its goal was to stoke chaos inside the U.S. political system.
All of these are important points for the historical record. But they hardly amount to the “treasonous conspiracy” that Gabbard is accusing Trump’s political opposition of fomenting.

So this seems to be just a mirror-image of Russiagate itself: exaggerating the available evidence to torpedo political opponents by libelously accusing them of treason.

   However, we don't really know what Obama's role was in promoting the Russiagate conspiracy theory, I have little doubt that Trump is playing a significant role in this one.

   Now, Trump has been right about a lot of such stuff--and he was impeached for being (apparently) right about Biden-family influence-peddling in Ukraine. He was notoriously wrong about Obama's birth certificate--though he did eventually admit that.

   But, anyway, this seems to me to be Trump's (righteous) anger at the Democrat sleaze machine getting out of control. I'm happy for Gabbard to declassify the relevant documents. But wild claims of treason against a former President, unsupported by the evidence is just the sort of bullshit that even those of us unplagued by TDS have been dreading.

Michael Lind: Trump is Ruling America Like a Petty, Vindictive Mob Boss

Some of this is hysteria--as you won't be surprised to learn...

But some of it seems pretty much right, unfortunately.

Some of the hysteria:

Trump has yet to dissolve Congress with a whiff of grapeshot in the manner of Cromwell, or to send members of the opposition party, not just illegal immigrants, to the new “Alligator Alcatraz” detention centre in Florida. The progressive Democrats and Never-Trump Republicans who think they live in Weimar America will continue to be disappointed when there is no Reichstag Fire or Enabling Act. 

Some of the stuff Lind gets right:

[A] Ever since the celebrity property developer descended the golden escalator in Trump Tower on June 16 2015 to announce his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, many have warned he would become a fascist dictator and predicted that he and his followers would replace democracy in America with an authoritarian police state. But the comparison between Trump and dictators like Mussolini and Stalin was always absurd. 

[B] Unusual as he is compared to other American presidents, Trump resembles a figure familiar in American local politics in all regions of the country: the sleazy city mayor who, without using direct coercion, strong-arms others into doing his will. [my lettering]

Now, Democrat lawfare is severely damaging the country...and I'd love to see Perkins Coie spectacularly self-destruct in some particularly embarrassing way...but...it's not clear to me whether Trump's lawsuits are laudable cases of giving the Dems their own medicine...or lamentable cases of being just as bad as the other guys.

   I'm not wild about Trump's lawsuits...and I could pretty easily be persuaded that they are abuses of power. OTOH, they do seem awfully similar to Democrat lawfare...and if they constitute the legitimate fighting of fire with fire, then I'm for them.

   I'm undecided on this point.

   HOWEVER: crazy shit like forcing the Redskins to revert to their old name, or trying to revoke Rosie O'Donnell's citizenship...well...Lind certainly has a point in such cases. This is the kind of stupid shit that made people like me hesitant to vote for Trump. I hope this is just late-night Twixxer ranting...though late-night Twixxer ranting is one of the things I dreaded about a second Trump term... Still, that's better than him being serious about such bullshit.

Peter Wood: Shared Governance and Academic Freedom at UVa

The Deep Academy not only went along with the Woketarian decimation of universities over the last half-century and especially over the last decade, it was at the forefront of that initiative. It was the origin of the ideas and the tip of the Lysenkoist/politically-correct spear. Then when Trump pushed back, the DA immediately began fighting back with all its might and wiles.

   I'm an enthusiastic defender of academic freedom...but...

   Ryan has no legitimate academic freedom defense I can see. That's just a misapplication of the concept.

   And, more importantly: we face a situation now in which the academy has gone off the rails. Appeals to academic freedom are being used to promote the ideological capture of academia. We face a conflict between (a) the survival of the institution as a mechanism for the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge, and (b) the re-engineering of universities into re-education camps.

   Because of the unhinging and ideological capture of the professoriate, a pure and unmitigated commitment to academic freedom would be tantamount to acquiescing to further degradation of the institution. We recognize academic freedom, at least in large part, as a mechanism for preventing ideological capture and control of the institution by, e.g., the government. But we now face a case in which the call is coming from inside the house...

   The Deep Academy is basically saying: We have academic freedom, and that means we are free to abandon the telos of the university and replace it with the aims of our totalitarian politics.

   Among other things, here we have an instance of the Paradox of Tolerance. We've established a liberal mechanism for defending the autonomous mission of academia, but an illiberal faction has seized control of the institution, and is using our liberal safeguards against us.

   But classic defenses of academic freedom include limits--professors are not free to say absolutely anything in their classes. They're not free to engage in irrelevant religious or political proselytizing, any more than they're free to turn their classes into infomercials for their business interests.

   Although the government can't ban such activities, it can--if its goal is to restore objectivity/balance to the institution--elect not to fund institutions that engage overmuch in them. And states can act even more directly. This power has to be used judiciously. If it's used to further the ideas and ideals of conservatives, rather than to save the institutions by restoring objectivity, then we'll just face two problems instead of one.

   Well, lots of objections arise here. But that seems to me to be the basics of our situation...

NPR Chief: Defunding NPR is RRRRRRAAAAAAAAAZZZZZZZZZIIIIIIIIIZZZZZZTTTTT

Well, of course.

As we've been commanded to believe, everything is racist...

So how is defunding NPR different than everything else?

Kimball: Obama was "Something Like a Prime Mover" of Russiagate

I'm not convinced of that given a quick read of some of the new evidence. But, then, I haven't really been focusing on that new evidence.

   I'm willing to believe that Obama was "something like" a "prime mover"...but I just don't see it at this point. But for years we've had reason to believe he was involved in some way.

Aaron Mate: Russiagate Architects Suppressed Doubts to Peddle False Claims

This is all consistent with things we already had good reason to believe, IMO. It does seem to give us some additional reason to think that Obama was involved in pushing the IC to exaggerate their confidence level. That's significant, but not, so far as I can tell, treasonous.

   Of course I still oppose throwing around the 't' word in such cases.

   This seems to me to be analogous to the Bush '43 administration's push to exaggerate evidence of WMDs--utterly indefensible...but not treasonous.

   That is, assuming that I understand what treason is--though I only understand the ordinary concept, not the legal concept.

   Of course exaggerating the strength of your own evidence, like exaggerating the weakness of your opponents' evidence, is one of the most common errors in reasoning people make. So in that sense there's nothing really astounding here.

   What's shocking, I think, is how easily IC safeguards against this sort of thing are circumvented.

[Obviously: Mate has known biases, but he's pretty good, so I'm provisionally accepting his word for it with respect to the content of the new documents.]

DNI Gabbard Releases Declassified Info on Russiagate Hoax

I don't exactly understand this. It seems more suggesting than decisive. This certainly isn't dispositive evidence that Obama et al. lied in order to undermine Trump. Even the worst-case scenario doesn't seem like a coup exactly...though I suppose it would be the rough moral/political equivalent of a coup. 

   It's long been clear that skullduggery by the deep-state blue team was a real possibility. Though it seemed to me most likely that it was the HRC campaign and its operatives like Elias that were responsible. There's reason to believe that Obama and Biden were involved in some way...but the most conservative hypothesis seemed/seems to be that the HRC campaign tricked the IC into believing the hoax based on the Steele Dossier.

   I'm not interested in rushing to judgment here. And I certainly hope that this isn't true and Obama, at least, wasn't involved.

   But we've had information for years that does not look good.

   Anyway, I don't see any option but to wait and see what further evidence is produced.

"The Republican Plot to Uneducate America"

I really disagree with this.

The main Republican goal is to save academia by punishing it for having become a vehicle for promotion of leftism.

As with NPR, academia could stop all this by returning to some semblance of objectivity.

And as for "free" college--i.e. you and me paying for other people's BS gender studies degrees--no. Terrible idea. So many students are already at university basically pro forma... Almost the last thing we need is even more students with even less skin in the game. 

Glenn Ellmers: ICE and the Screams of the Damned

On the nihilism of the violent, contemporary left.

A Slice of Contemporary Academia: The 2025 "Imagining America" National "Gathering"

Pretty standard gibberish from the weaker regions of academia.

To the extent that I can make heads or tails of this, it seems like an thinly-disguised open-borders thing.

Roger Hutson Opposed Trump; But Six Months in, He's "Very Impressed"

This is basically my arc with respect to Trump.

Philip W. Magness: The 1619 Project has Failed. Why do Academicians Take it Seriously?

link

Answer:

Because the left is governed by political correctness / Lysenkoism: the subordination of evidence and truth to leftist politics. The 1619 project was always absurd. But its aim is not to find the truth. The "architect" of the project, NHJ, has admitted that the aim of the project is to get reparations for slavery, not to represent the truth about American history.

You can't understand the left without understanding political correctness.

More on the "project," from Jason Riley.

Of course the right has had a tendency to minimize the sin of slavery...but it didn't raise the principles underlying that denial to the level of axioms of inquiry. The right, at least, tends to maintain a belief in reason, evidence and objectivity. Thus it can be shamed into admitting its errors. The left, not so much. In fact, another candidate for an axiom of the left: credo quia absurdum est.

Sarah Jones: It's OK to Go No-Contact with Your MAGA Relatives

For those who think the Litt piece on no-contacting your conservative friends and family, there's this.

It's bad enough that these people think this is ok...but don't forget: their political views are largely insane. So they're not just, say, cutting off some genuinely Fascist uncle or something...they're cutting off their parents and siblings because those people don't share their lunatic beliefs in open borders, female penises, and lab-leak denialism...

David Litt: Is It Time to Stop Snubbing Your Right-Wing Family?

The phrase that forced itself, unbidden, onto my mind while reading this was: insufferable asshole...

To summarize: though my MAGA brother-in-law is wrong about everything, he's got something I want (knowledge of surfing)...so I decided not to cut him off for his political beliefs.

   He never, e.g., acknowledges that his faction was wrong about COVID, the vax, or lockdowns, he refuses to acknowledge that vax skeptics were largely right, and never (unless I'm forgetting something...but I can't stand to read it again) acknowledges that he was wrong to treat vaccine-hesitancy as a reason to cut off friends and family.

   Of course the right and the left were both wrong about the vax--the left was flat-out crazy about it, and notably wrong about its efficacy, especially with respect to transmission. The right--much of it, anyway--was wrong to think that it was extremely ineffective and extremely dangerous. As I understand it, the vax turned out to be fairly effective at decreasing the severity of symptoms, and reasonably safe for most people.

   Anyway, I might go into more detail about the post in question in more detail later...but it wears its smug stupidity on its sleave, so I don't think I really have to.

   Note that Litt was a speechwriter for Obama.

NYT: Is Pilates Political? The Method of Bullshitting on the Pseudo-Philosophical Left

Well, yes, of course...it's an axiom of the totalitarian left that everything is political.

   From the same faction that brought you women have penises and feminist glaciology:

Ms. Monaco-Vavrik studied political science and communications at Davidson College. It became a habit, she said in a recent interview, to “always connect random things that don’t seem to relate.” In that moment, she juxtaposed two concepts that had been on her mind: Pilates and President Trump.
Grinning at the camera, and lip-syncing to a popular TikTok clip about the Broadway musical “Wicked,” Ms. Monaco-Vavrik made her case: “Does anyone want me to explain the connection between the popularization of Pilates & running instead of strength training… and the rise of extreme American authoritarianism?”

This is a great example of the continental literary/sophistical/pseudo-philosophical method:

[1] Take two unrelated things, and, via sheer bullshitting, make up some faux-plausible--and preferably political--connection between them.

[2] Assume the authoritative attitude of the possessor of esoteric knowledge: not Is there a link between these things?, but: Would you like me to explain the link to you?  I.e.: There is a link (we do not question this); I know what it is; do you want to know?

   Ms. M-V also admits that this is the method she was taught in the seething vat of stupid that is the leftist humanities, social studies, etc.:  "Connect random things that don't seem to relate."

Such a method will, on average, yield bullshit. Which, as we know, it does. (And, note, this was the upshot of the Sokal II hoax: it's easy to use the method of bullshit to get whatever predesignated political conclusion you want...and the "scholars" "working" in such areas can't tell bullshit from non-bullshit.) There are no links of the kind sought by Ms. M-V's intellectual faction between the vast majority of things chosen specifically for their apparently irrelevance to each other.

   Also note: any other method founded on the first method will have to emphasize the production of bullshit. If you choose n things specifically because they seem to be irrelevant to each other with respect to some kind of relation, R, and then try to link them with respect to R, then, in order to avoid the conclusion that they are unrelated (and that is never the conclusion--negative conclusions are even less welcome in the non-sciences than in the sciences), you're absolutely going to have to bullshit.

   And, again, this is exactly what we see, and what we have seen for 50 years, from the pseudo-philosophical left.

[Addendum: Of course this method of bullshitting shows up over and over again specifically with respect to the left's obsessions with race and sex/"gender." The left can and does argue e.g. that everything is racist (a) because it is politically committed, antecedently, to the proposition that everything is racist, and, (b) because the method of bullshitting means that any link at all, no matter how tenuous and ridiculous, counts as a link. This is also how they argue for the proposition that everything is political.]

Shapiro and Arm: Trump Can Unmask the Protest Class

link

The progressive left now seems to think that it's permissible for them to wear masks to break the law, and it's permissible for them to dox, harass and terrorize all who oppose them--including LEOs--but it's not permissible for LEOs to cover their faces in order to avoid harassment.

   Obviously it would be better if all LEOs were unmasked. And the left could make this possible tomorrow--if they would act like reasonable citizens of the polity and cease to use harassment of LEOs and their families. 

   I'm strongly inclined to agree with Shapiro and Arm here: enforce existing anti-masking laws and pursue enhanced sentences against masked rioters.

   We should make it clear that, so long as protests are peaceful and law-abiding, their speech will fully protected. But violence and destruction of federal property will not be permitted. And: wearing masks while committing such crimes will carry additional penalties.

Trump Administration to Cut Off Funds for "Gender" Mutilation Treatments for Minors

It's abject insanity that this was ever permitted.

NPR: Government Media is a Lifeline: Gutting it Hurts Everyone

It certainly doesn't hurt everyone...but that's a pretty ordinary kind of hyperbole. I'll allow it.

link

I make the same argument here as in the case of DEI:

Look, leftists: if you think it's that important, stop using it to illicitly advance your radical politics.

But, of course, advancing their radical politics is the point...

If, say, PBS/NPR were objective...if they gave sympathetic representations of both sides of issues and arguments...the right would be far less devoted to getting rid of them, and progressives would be far less devoted to keeping them.

I can't even listen to NPR anymore. It's largely radical progressive propaganda.

Get rid of it/them.

Greg Ip: Trump Is Winning His Trade War

No idea whether this is right.

Pinkert and Greene: The Fusion of Anti-Zionism and "Social Justice"

They are united around a shared desire to see the destruction of the West.

Reason TV: Snowden Was Right; Now Trump Should Pardon Him

I've been shamefully slow to think much about this case:

The Editors: The Return of the Housing Monsters: Fannie and Freddie--Private Profit, Public Risk

Again, I only barely understand this...but my inclination is to agree with the WSJ here.

Heat Buckles Streets in Cape Girardeau

Missouri weather sucks.

Yinka That Guy...On, Y'know...The Crazy

It's becoming more and more difficult to distinguish progressivism from mental illness...

List of Coalition Air-To-Air Victories in Desert Storm

You may notice a pattern with respect to the victorious coalition aircraft...

Bloomberg’s Antigun Nonprofit Targets a Mom-and-Pop Store

The left has made it clear that it aims to gut both the first two Amendments.

Kinda surprising to me that they haven't come out in favor of quartering troops in our houses...yet...

Zachary Faria: The Left's Obsession With Illegal Immigration Gets Weirder

link

I'd like to point out, yet again, that I pointed out 20 years ago that the left was moving closer and closer to an open-borders position. I got nothing but flack for that. But, as is now obvious, I was right.

But even that was merely to say, in effect, that the left no longer considered illegal immigration a bad thing.

As Faria points out, the left has now shot past that position and moved--as the left almost always does--further left. Now it seems to think that illegal immigration is a positive good.

This is a known sub-theme of the left's ceaseless move leftward: what they once argue should be tolerated they later argue is good...then obligatory. This is related to their known defensive/offensive arc: when they're busted doing something, they first deny they're doing it. Then they say that they're doing it, but it's ok. Then that they're doing it...and it's a good thing!...then that it's obligatory...then that it's impossible not to do it... (See, e.g.: CRT, restrictions on free speech, the rejection of objectivity).

WSJ: Trump Is Not Rebuilding the Military

Trump gets it from both directions on this. Depending on who you listen to, he's either increasing money to the military, thus violating his pledge to cut spending (overall), or he's failing to rebuild the military. I guess you can say he shouldn't have promised both these things. They're both possible...but doing both is unlikely.

WSJ: Lower Recession Risk, Better Job Growth; Was Trump Right Yet Again (Re: Tariffs This Time)

link

My Response to the Shrieking Lefty Open Borders Rioters

VDH on "the Epstein List"

Sounds plausible--but obviously there are other explanations.

I haven't really been that interested in this, and so haven't been following it closely or thinking much about it. But I'd already been wondering whether maybe the people visiting Epstein's island and riding on his plane weren't really involved in his perversions and sex crimes. That is, that maybe his sexual obsessions and his pursuit of famous acquaintances weren't largely--though perhaps not entirely--separate.

   One argument on the right is: if there are no clients, then why is Maxwell in jail?

   That seemed initially plausible to me...but, again, I didn't follow the case closely. When I looked it up, the argument lost its plausibility: Maxwell is in jail for abusing girls and trafficking them. Another cursory search seemed to indicate that trafficking is transporting. So was Maxwell convicted of transporting girls to be exploited by her and Epstein? If so, no clients are necessary.

   Anyway, I hadn't thought about the blackmail hypothesis...but that does seem plausible.

   Also anyway: many on the right seem to think that this is obviously a coverup--that there obviously were/are clients and almost certainly a list. And anyone who doesn't see that is just being stupidly naive.

   But I don't see it.

   I don't have any special knowledge or insight here. But that seems to be the position most of us are in most of the time with respect to these big, marquee questions/issues. Suspension of judgment seems to be my only real option here...well...other than actually learning something about the case...which honestly probably isn't going to happen.

Tariffs Again

I'm still not convinced by the adamantly anti-tariff position...but Trump's shenanigans on this front do seem pretty nutty. Maybe he's right--he often is. But I'm concerned--and, of course, confused.

David Ditch: One Big, Beautiful and Historic Welfare Reform

Big if true.

NRO: Trump's Reckless New Tariffs

"President's should not behave this way, and they can't."

Seems like a fair summary to me...but, again, I don't understand this stuff.

But this is the kind of loose-cannon-y behavior we (or I at least) fear from Trump.

WSJ: The Economic Drain of Mass Deportation

Ok. The main objections to waves of illegal immigration aren't economic.

And every policy has advantages and disadvantages.

And, of course, I have little reason to believe these numbers...but they don't seem prima facie crazy.

Anyway, like many Americans, I'm willing to take some economic hit to preserve the, y'know, nation...

And let's be realistic: the administration isn't going to deport 20-30 million illegal aliens.

My guess is that they're cranking out so much sound and fury to encourage "self-deportations."

I certainly agree that what we need is a sliding scale here. Criminals and welfare leaches need to be kicked out post haste. It'd be good to deport those who flooded in during the Biden years... But those who have been here for, say, 30 years and have been valuable residents of the USA? Look, nobody is in a rush to get rid of such people. There is, actually no way the administration is ever going to get that far down on the list. Nobody wants it to happen, and it isn't going to happen. The administration will be lucky to get rid of the very most egregious offenders. 

Epstein Apparently Killed Himself After All

I've never cared that much about this, and I've generally thought that he probably did kill himself. I mean, he seems to have been a scumbag, and so it was good that he got busted. It's just not a drama that captured my attention. There's plenty of looniness and there are plenty of puzzles. All I'm saying is that, if you'd forced me to bet on it, I'd have bet on the suicide hypothesis. I've jokingly echoed the MAGA mantra "Epstein didn't kill himself"...but, then, I've occasionally also said--also tongue in cheek--that jet fuel can't melt steel beams. I mean...no joking matters...but who can resist every now and then?

Anyway. I'm not all bent out of shape about this one like some people are.

Jason Riley: Trump is on a Roll, But Shouldn't Get Overconfident

Agreed, unsurprisingly.

   Though I disagree with Riley about one thing: it's common for people to say that Trump was elected primarily for economic reasons. I, of course, voted for him (somewhat reluctantly) because of the non-economic (some people say "cultural," but that's not quite right) issues. Some of the headliners: gender ideology and transanity, illegal immigration, DEI, etc.

   Of course I may not be representative of the average Trump voter.

   One more thing: this seems like just the sort of situation Trump could screw up, e.g. with some stupid pronouncements or dopey tweets...

   But his staff may be helping to keep him out of such trouble this time.

   What's really amazing is that he's got so much support despite the titanic, unhinged propaganda effort conducted by the mainstream media and the rest of the big blue machine. It's hard to figure how popular he'd be in the absence of that massive brainwashing initiative.

$200 Tax Stamp on Suppressors Reduced to $0

Woohoo!

Gonna get me one...or...several...now!

Musk's New Political Party

I mean, ok, but I doubt this has much chance of changing anything significantly.

He doesn't seem to have thought this out, IMO.

Then, of course, there's the unseemly feud between Trump and Musk. They've both done great things for the country, but they're also both spazzes who don't seem to be able to control their mouths or their thumbs. Neither has the right temperament to be setting the tone of the debate.

   The more substantive question is: is the OBBB good or bad? Or, rather: is it good enough? Or, rather: is it more-or-less the best we can reasonably expect to get under prevailing circumstances?

   If Musk is right, and it's a catastrophe, then, of course, he's justified in saying so and pushing against it.

   Once again, though, I have no idea.

NEJM, the Medicalization of Everything, and the Political Corruption of Expertise

This is a good example of the kind of crackpottery we find on the elite left.

   Find some way in which some policy or other affects medical care / health. Then find some doctors or medical researchers willing to represent themselves as experts on these grounds. Then assert or suggest that the original policy is, therefore, in effect a medical matter--ergo the docs are experts who get to pronounce the policy good or bad.

   And--surprise--the progressive position is always the position supported by medical science--"the science" relevant to the matter at hand.

   This is the same kind of argument we get from progressive medical types concerning firearms: firearms affect people's health, doctors (and medical researchers) are the experts on health, ergo doctors (etc.) get to determine what firearm policy should be.

   Oh and, of course, there is the de rigueur conflation of legal with illegal immigration. Even I'm surprised at how resolutely dishonest the left is on this point. You'd think that the steadfast refusal to acknowledge a crucial distinction in a debate would eventually cause the public to simply discount the pronouncements of the offending faction. And maybe it has, outside the True Believer class. But the left has demonstrated its almost preternatural ability to ignore politically incorrect or otherwise inconvenient facts...

   Anyway, in this case, the position of the authors seems pretty much immediately contradictory. It seems to be: we can't run the health-care system without (illegal?) immigrants, because they are willing to accept unfairly-low wages... Now, normally the left stops here, suspending its histrionic obsession with "social justice"...  But the NEJM authors go on to say: And we've got to raise these wages. So...we can't run the system without illegal immigrants who accept low wages...but we've got to raise their wages because--etc. 

   Do these people every listen to themselves? Or read their own articles?

The Big, Beautiful Bill: "Jet Fuel for the Economy," or Literally the Holocaust of "Structural Racism"?

Mike Johnson: probably somewhere in the vicinity of the truth, I'd guess.

Carmen James Randolph: LOL

It's the same old bullshit from the Democrats every single time anymore. Like half of progressivism comes down to That's racist...

   But note that it's not just racist...it's "structural racism at its most deadly" [my emphasis] Wow! You'd have thought maybe the middle passage or the Holocaust...but I guess you'd have been wrong. Bigot.

   Anyway, I don't even pay any attention to such bullshit anymore. When the answer is the same every time...and it's always wrong...eventually you have to start doing logical triage... 

   And as for Planned Parenthood: if they want funding, they need to stop transing kids and whatnot. I'm generally a libertarian about abortion, but the left's torrid love affair with it is just too damn weird for me.

   Anyway, as for the particulars Randolph is on about: could be, I guess. But I'm skeptical.

WSJ: GOP Gambles on Trump Accounts; Dems Could Turn Them into UBI

link

   Universal Basic Income, IMO, should be regarded as the ultimate nanny-state boondoggle. Or, well, a boondoggle, as I understand it, is just an unproductive undertaking, a waste of money. UBI is the kind of thing likely to wreck lives and nations. It's an empirical question, of course...but I don't want the experiment run here. Let Minnesota wreck itself. That's kinda what the laboratories of democracy are for... 

   What no one should disagree with--but many progressives will, of course--is that [a] proponents of UBI must carry a very heavy burden of proof, and [b] the idea must be extensively tested before nationwide implementation is even considered. That is: conservatism must regulate any serious consideration of UBI. But this is almost just a characterization of the difference between conservatives and progressives (and, I must regretfully add: liberals). The left errs, in large part, by advocating for ceaseless, radical change based on ill-considered and largely untested hypotheses. They never stop pushing for likely-to-be-catastrophic change... This is why slippery slope arguments so often turn out to be sound when directed against the left. There's no doubt that the Editors are right--if Democrats see an opportunity to move these "Trump accounts" in the direction of UBI, they're likely to take it.

   But, furthermore, my own rather watery conservatism in this domain basically amounts to the thought--a radical departure from my view even a decade ago--that we're better off keeping the tax codes simple. There are all sorts of tweaks and fancy policies that might work if not for the law of unintended consequences... But, in fact, are likely to be a wash at best.

   Of course I don't know anything about any of this, so that's a relevant factor here if you're a stickler for that kind of thing...

Julian Epstein: How Trump Became Washington's Unlikeliest Centrist

link

I don't see why it's unlikely.

To repeat myself repeating myself:

The left has radicalized to such an extent that it's ceded the center to the Republicans.

   The hysterical, fiction-based TDS of the left has been more durable than I might have thought. Most people I know are academicians or in the penumbra of intellectuals/pseudo-intellectuals that have academia as their center of gravity. They hate / are horrified by Trump, and will never change their minds. Arguing with them is a waste of your breath. It is just about exactly like arguing with a Christian about Jesus. If you think you're going to move someone out of the wagon-ruts worn into the terrain of their thought over decades of life...well, uh, you're wrong. To think that Trump is anything less than Hitlerian, they would have to renounce all their previous, impassioned, public declarations, admit they've been wrong about fundamental things their entire lives, accept ostracism from their tribe...and resign themselves to being seen as, basically, an evil person by their entire social group. It's a lot easier to just turn a blind eye to the evidence and remain in the comfortable embrace of warm, blue fantasies...

   Anyway: yes, Trump's basically a centrist. As others have noted, he's damn close to being a mid-'90s Democrat. He was a mid-90's Democrat. But 2008 Obama is too conservative for 2020s Democrats...

   Well, nothing new here.

   Just saying that it's not as surprising as this op-ed makes it out to be.

Democrats Re: Independence Day

It's becoming more and more difficult to distinguish progressivism from mental illness.

NSFW:

Susan Crabtree: OMB Says States Use Education Grants for Radical Left-Wing Agenda

[1] This is undoubtedly true.

[2] Only a very few cases are cited in the article, however.

[3] As to the legal question of whether the administration can stop payment after Congress has allocated the funds...no idea. But I'm skeptical.

But look: K-12 and universities could end this kind of dispute right now by doing one simple thing:

Ending their leftist indoctrination and other misuse of public fund for leftist activism.

That is: live up to their public and pedagogical responsibilities.

It would be easy: just stop cheating.

Their argument seems to be:

It's bad for the government to bust us for misusing government funds, violating the public's trust and abusing students...because its efforts to stop us from doing those things might undermine some legitimate programs, too...

It's not like we're talking close calls here. Just stop using tax money on your loony political bullshit.

Though, again: the examples given in this piece aren't as outrageous as one might think. The most outrageous one seems to be hearsay.

WSJ: No One is Gutting the Safety Net

Big if true.

Who understands this stuff, anyway?

Not me, that's for sure.

I spend way too much time reading about it, and I have no idea who's right.

   I think we tend to fall back on our general political worldviews in such cases. And currently I'm inclined to think that the Republicans are more reasonable about...just about everything. The monstrous spike in Medicaid expenditures since '19 seems unlikely to be explained by a spike in genuine need...or so I guess.

   The Dems have repeatedly shown themselves to be driven by excess and misplaced sympathy--sympathy for illegal aliens despite the costs to the nation and its citizens; sympathy with "trans" "kids" despite the costs to girls' athletics, non-"trans" children swept up in the hysteria, and society at large; sympathy with criminals despite the cost to law-abiding citizens... We know that their general orientation disposes them to prefer giving out unwarranted benefits rather than to drawing lines and saying no sometimes.

   Anyway, I suppose I think: let's try it the Republicans' way for awhile.

   See what happens.

Independence Day!

249 years!

I remember the Bicentennial well...holy crap...

Trump's Lawfare Against the Free Press

I also don't know what to think about this.

The MSM is a giant vat of crap that's pulled out all the stops to get Trump (and the Pubs)...and part of me thinks: fight fire with fire.

But I certainly don't like the idea of the Administration suing for these kinds of things.

But, again, I'm so ignorant of the legal (etc.) details that I don't really know what to think.

What's Going on With the Budget?

I never understand this stuff.

In vague, general terms, it's seemed to me that the Dems are dedicated to cranking up both government spending and taxes. The Pubs have claimed dedication to lowering taxes and shrinking government and government spending. We're headed for deficit disaster (allegedly), and the question is: which side will blink first?

   Unfortunately, the Pubs have been more dedicated to cutting taxes than they've been to reducing spending. So we've really got two parties on the more spending side. This seems to leave us with no good options with respect to taxes: raising them is bad, but, given greater expenditures, so is not raising them.

   But I don't really understand anything about this stuff.

   I'm getting old enough now that I've gotta start at least acknowledging that I'll retire some day. Needless to say, I'd like more money rather than less. But I don't see how we can avoid cutting benefits. If we have to do it, we have to do it.

   I'm set up to get particularly screwed in all this, since my parents believed the tall tale about paying money into the system and then getting it back someday. So they got my brother and me Social Security numbers as soon as they could, and we started paying in. My father had a rather short-lived bus company, driving his co-workers up to McDonnell-Douglas, and my brother and I got paid for some of our work for the company. So I've been paying in since I was very young. But anyway, the point is: if anybody should be ticked off at the thought of benefit cuts, it's me. But what's bad for me personally isn't always bad for the nation.

David Strom: Medicaid Cuts Affect Mainly Able-Bodied Men Who Won't Work and Illegals; Dems Claim No Illegals Get Medicaid, But Sue to Prevent Cutting Them Off

Big if true.

Both those claims are empirical ones. I don't know whether they're true or not.

But, if they are, we should hope there'd be no disagreement about cutting these people off.

What's really crazy is that a significant sub-group of Democrats do disagree.

Strom writes:

Democrats are playing a verbal shell game, pointing to federal law to say that Medicaid dollars can't legally go to illegal aliens, so there is no money to be saved by cutting those funds off. At the same time, they are suing to hide the legal status of recipients to prevent them from facing ICE deportations--in other words, they are illegally spending Medicaid dollars for illegals and want to hide them from the feds.

If true, this doesn't exactly show that Dems don't want to cut off illegal Medicaid recipients, but just that they don't want Medicaid to be used to out them as illegal. 

   But this at least shows that they think it's better to pay benefits to illegals than to use Medicaid to reveal their status. And that comes to basically the same thing. There's no reason to think that Medicaid is special in this respect. Their real position is that we shouldn't use any means to reveal people's status as illegal. And, of course, no illegals (or virtually none, at least) should be deported. And, furthermore, they ought to receive Medicaid and other benefits. Let's not beat around the bush here. The fact that there's a narrow, winding justification for their position that doesn't exactly come down to open borders is just a distraction.

   Once again, we have a Republican party that--whatever its flaws--has a set of sane, ordinary, long-standing, commonsense positions here: people should only come into the country legally; those who come in illegally should be deported; and they damn sure shouldn't get benefits like Medicaid.

   The Dems, on the other hand, have gone so radical that--as I first noted nearly 20 years ago--their position is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish from open borders. Now, 20 years on, this could hardly be clearer: we must not stop them at the border, but once they're in the country, they cannot be removed. In fact, we shouldn't even seek to know whether someone is here legally or not. And from that it basically follows that they should have all the benefits of citizenship. If you don't believe that, consider the fact that some blue cities and states have made it legal for illegals to vote in local elections...

   Remember also that slippery slope arguments are commonly sound against the left--it's part of their worldview that we should always be moving farther left. We see this dynamic in the debate over the status of non-heterosexuals and other sexual minorities. The started with the reasonable claim that we ought not discriminate against non-heterosexuals. And they were right about that, and conservatives were wrong. But we've been on a slippery slope since then, through same-sex marriage (which I generally supported/support)...then very rapidly to "women have penises," to the brainwashing and sexual mutilation of children, and to the re-engineering of society to bring it into alignment with this gender pseudoscience. And, of course, the left isn't done. They're already floating trial balloons about the next front in their assault on the status quo: normalizing (and legalizing) polygamous marriage, pedophilia, and even zoophilia...

   A similar slippery slope has driven the left's positions on race. We went from Racism is bad to Racism is the founding principle of America, all whites are racist by definition, oh and there's no such thing as race...

   Anyway. There's nothing worth arguing about here, IMO...other than the empirical claims. Anyone illicitly receiving government benefits should be kicked off the rolls. 

Frederick Kaufman: Trump's Big, Beautiful Mess

I don't understand this stuff.

All I can really do is hope for the best...whatever that might be.

The Trump-Musk Slapfight

What an embarrassing spectacle.

   They've both done good things for the nation--Musk mainly with respect to Twixxer and free speech, IMO.

But neither one of them seems to have the temperament required to play such important roles in the government of the world's only superpower--or "hyperpower" as some characterize it.

   Trump's always been a desperate roll of the dice. He's right--extremely right--about a lot of things. And even if he botched the job--and thus far he isn't--he'd still be playing a crucial role in history by boxing out the now-virtually-insane Democratic party...

   But he remains--to a large extent, anyway--a loose cannon. He's largely kept it between the ditches to this point (to mix metaphors)...but it's not going to be a big surprise to anyone if puts us into a ditch at some point.

   OTOH, all he has to do to remain a net positive is occupy the office. Keeping the Democrats out of power unless/until they come to their senses is, I think, his most important role. And that part he cn't really botch.

   OTOOH, I think we also desperately need another Republican to win the Presidency in '28...and, of course, we need to keep at least one house of Congress--which shouldn't be that difficult. I still hope that the '24 loss will slap some sense into the blue team, though there's no sign of that yet. Maybe that's not all that surprising. Seems like the losing party has to go through a denial/excuse-making phase before it's psychologically capable of facing at least some of the facts. Usually this takes the form of an insistence that the losing party's ideas/policies are good/popular...but their "messaging" failed. And that's where the Dems are now. If they haven't started to moderate by next year at this time, though, it'll be time to up our FretCon level, I think.

   Trump's actual actions are generally good. But his words matter, too.

Worse Than Watergate?: CIA Says Obama's Trump-Russia Collusion Hoax was Corrupt from the Start

Big if true...but the MSM will kill this story no matter what.

Me, I just want to know the truth about all this...but the outlines of the truth have been fairly easy to discern for seven years now...

H. R. McMaster: Trump Ends the Folly of De-Escalation with Iran

I trust McMaster.

E. Ensler: "How Do We Resist and Rise? We Have to Believe That the Impossible is Possible"

facepalm

We're probably past the point of needing any more glimpses into the tortured minds of progressives. But, y'know, here's another one or whatever.

   Note that one of the contemporary alleged horrors she enumerates, right up there with assassinations, is "removing the 'T' from 'LGBT'"...

   As for cops wearing masks: yeah, I don't like that either. But the left has made it clear that it will attack people's families and try to wreck their personal lives if they cross them. This isn't ICE's preference, and it isn't their fault. If the left would stop being totalitarian psychopaths, it wouldn't be necessary. And, of course, the left's mobs of retarded, puerile Blackshirts are themselves wearing masks in order to make it more difficult to hold them to account.

   The left has long denied that there even IS a personal sphere that should be kept separate from the political sphere. "The personal is political" has long been one of their creepy totalitarian maxims.

   The spread of mass hysteria on the left has been horrifying in its own right. But, of course, it also brings with it the threat of radicalization on the right. We've just lived through a decade in which the left was wrong about just about every important issue. Which is what happens when you radicalize so rapidly and thoroughly. As the conservatives sometimes say, Democrats keep taking up the 20 side of 80-20 issues: depolicing, men are women, "transing" kids, open borders, DEI, mandatory vaccines, mandatory masks, mandatory lockdowns...just for starters. But this means that conservatives have a lot of leeway--the route is open to them to radicalize and maintain power...all they have to do is keep to a slightly less insane form of radicalization and they'll still be better than the blue team. If this dynamic stays in place, we could be forced to support, by increments, a more and more extreme right just because it's not as batshit crazy as the left.

   Well, anyway. We don't find ourselves in that situation yet. But the dynamic has already forced many of us to vote for someone we said we'd never vote for again. We can't run a democratic republic on one sane party and one crazy one. That's a blueprint for disaster.