Erin Shaw: Bans on "Divisive Concepts" Threaten to Stifle Speech

Absolutely right.

Period.

No 'ifs,' 'ands,' or 'buts'...

Er...

...but...:

The point of those policies was actually to block indoctrination, as is clear if you read the seminal ones from e.g. Florida.

So how could someone aim at No leftist indoctrination and end up with No promotion of divisive concepts?

Two ways:

First, We might be tempted to say No promotion of concepts at all, only discussion...but the case is at least provisionally closed on many issues. E.g. the approximate shape of the Earth, that evolution occurs in at least some form, that the Battle of Lexington was in 1775, and so on.

Second--and speaking from personal...oh, sorry...of course I meant "lived"...experience: whenever you argue against leftist indoctrination, leftists respond that there is no clear line between teaching and indoctrination. This is really just a rhetorical ploy to allow them to keep indoctrinating students...but actually they're right...because there are relatively few clear lines between any two such things. Nature is filled with lines...but blurry ones. Generally not clear ones. 

   And it's on this latter ground that the battle ought to be fought.

   Don't avoid engagement here. If you do, you'll always be running from it. And you'll run to even shakier ground--like a prohibition on discussing "divisive concepts"...

...except, again (and of course) the original policies banned promotion of them, not discussion of them..

...and the promotion/discussion distinction is basically a way to discuss the teaching/indoctrination distinction...

   Look, here's what's really up, so far as I can tell:

   It's perfectly permissible to just teach/tell students that p if/when p is true...or at least it seems to be, and the case is at least provisionally closed. It is NOT ok to just teach/tell students that p when p is controversial...and especially when it is extremely so.

   But what the left has been doing is actually taking ideas that are not only NOT proven nor even well-established...and just teaching/telling students--and adults--that they are established facts. And, worse: they've been teaching/telling students (and adults!) that the case is closed and that obvious falsehoods are true. E.g. (again, their flagship dogma) Women have penises...

   It's generally a judgment calls whether to represent something as proven beyond any appreciable doubt...because, again, what we really have is a spectrum of degrees of proof. And we can't couch everything we say in preponderance of evidence language.

[subroutine: if we try to do that, we fall into a regress. Instead of Earth is round (actually it's an oblate spheroid), I say The evidence clearly indicates that Earth is round. Well, why is the nature of the evidence get exempted from these considerations? It, too, is something that must be established...so if I wanted to do the same thing for every question, I'd have to say: the evidence clearly indicates that the evidence clearly indicates that Earth is round... and so on. Or: so far as I can tell, the evidence clearly indicates that Earth is round. Anyway: at some point we just have to say something straight up and drop the evidence language...]

   To cut to the chase: in schools and "training" sessions run by the left, it's been promoting its wacko, poorly-evidenced theories as proven facts. The rest of us are demanding that that stop. We'll always face the generic problem, discussed above, about when to treat things as at least provisionally settled...but that's a completely different problem. What has to stop is what the left is doing. The other problem is never going to go away. But when challenged, they pretend that what they're doing is an instance of the generic problem...which it isn't.

   Almost every time I've spoken out against indoctrination at my university, someone has responded in a way that attempts to blur the distinction between the generic problem and the specific leftist indoctrination problem--and that's how we end up with the "divisive concepts" approach. It's a way of answering the left's sophistical defense of indoctrination. But, again, that's a confusion.

   The above is all written in one draft, as usual, but it's a bit more haphazard than usual. But I don't have time to revise it.

   Bottom line: there are some clear cases of indoctrination, and it's those that must stop. My own university got busted for a clear case of indoctrination of student orientation leaders (or maybe resident advisors) when it foolishly taped one of the session. It clearly showed two grad students basically telling the undergrads that leftist doctrines about "privilege" and whatnot are true. No qualifications, no indication that they were speculative, controversial, leftist views...they simply said things like "Here is a list of groups with 'privilege'" and so on. That was a clear instance of indoctrination. 

   Anyway, I think the bans were better than nothing, though obviously just band-aids. They helped blunt the edge of pervasive leftist indoctrination...but they're no substitute for going right at the problem. 

   Final note: when our faculty senate was drafting its condemnation of such policies, I spoke against the resolution. I noted that, after years of leftist indoctrination, it had never even considered condemning that...and noted that the real goal was blocking indoctrination...and I moved that we add a clause condemning indoctrination. Another faculty-member said that it was too hard to distinguish between teaching and indoctrination. I responded that, difficult as that might be, indoctrination was still bad, and that we should condemn it, so that the criticism of divisive concept bans wasn't interpreted as a defense of indoctrination. My motion was soundly defeated. That's the situation in microcosm right there...

[Case in point:  the president of the AAA says that the case is closed on the number of sexes, and that for anthropologists to teach students that there are two of them is like turning astronomy classes into astrology classes...]

Rubio Knocks It Out of the Park Again: Left-Wing Terrorism

He's exactly right. The progressive establishment, including the MSM, throw the term 'far right' around at the drop of a hat, using it to describe anyone to the right of Obama. They rarely describe anyone as 'far left.' Leftist propaganda and idea-laundering organizations like SPLC and ADL produce reports propping up the myth that almost all terrorism is right-wing. 

Oh yeah, and:  Rubio '28...:

Megan McArdle: The Interview that Exposes Academia's Cluelessness (A Must-Read!)

No time to discuss this right now, but I say: read it and follow the links.

   I'm not sure that Anth is actually the worst offender...that I don't care much about. The real problem is that the problem of lightweight Lysenkoism is such a massive problem in academia. And the interview with the President of the American Anthropological Association is, indeed, both representative and embarrassing. Professor Rouse comes across as a clueless, sophistical Lysenkoist...which I guess is better than a clever sophistical Lysenkoist, really...

   Stupid ideas in the service of bad politics has taken over the academy. This is a crisis. There was more caterwauling in the media over the relatively minor threat of teaching creationism in biology courses back in the '90s. That would have been stupid, and I spoke out against it publicly...but it was nothing like what we've seen in the academy since the '80s... It was bad then, and it's catastrophic now.

   The comments on the McArdle story are instructive--they are so idiotic and clueless that I couldn't read more than a few...but it tells you where the mind of the average progressive's at...

Here's a link to the Boghossian et al. report

Inez Feltzscher Stepman: The Quietly Competent Side of the Trump Administration

Agreed.
Eliminating the doctrine of disparate impact seems to me to be one of the most important things the administration could do. I certainly hope it comes before the Supremes while there is still a sane majority there--who knows what the future holds?
Nuking DEI is also very important--though it's also important to realize that DEI is just a catspaw. The real problem is institutional capture by the radical left. (In academia, anyway--the only institution I can speak of with any authority.) DEI was just a broadening of the left's "diversity" ploy that's decades old. Before that, it was "multiculturalism." Now they're turning to "decolonialism." Their tactic is to come up with happy-sounding rubrics to advance their radical doctrines. I'm sure they're already at work producing new ones. Making up and redefining words is something they're good at--and it's been bizarrely effective for them. But that's a whole different topic, really... Also, of course, we have plenty of evidence that, in academia, at least, only the "Diversity," "equity" and "inclusion" language is being abandoned--the ideas and policies remain, under different words (e.g. "justice," "belonging," "access.") My own institution is still pushing "equity", apparently confident that it can get away with that one so long as the other two aren't conjoined with it.

Basic Logic: An Honest Review of Women's Suffrage

I'm certainly not convinced...but a lot of this is plausible and coheres with a lot of what we know:

HMD: The Scourge of Teen Takeovers

link

I continue to think that the central aspect of the left's insanity is its refusal to acknowledge plain facts. Everyone knows what's going on here...except for leftists...secure in their echo chamber...

They have an almost superhuman ability to simply ignore facts that are right in front of their noses.

It'd be funny--if it weren't so repulsively idiotic--that they continue to try to blame such stuff on the pandemic...

HMD:

Democratic elites have been telegraphing a message to black teens: as victims of white oppression, you are not responsible for your misbehavior. Theft is a reasonable response to a rapacious economic system; violence in the name of racial justice is understandable. The average teen may not follow politics closely, but the sentiment behind Brandon Johnson’s 2025 pronouncement about law enforcement (“It is racist; it is immoral; it is unholy—and it is not the way to drive violence down”) is widespread enough to penetrate even the hermetic world of teen culture.

and:

Teen takeovers are not a mystery. They are the predictable result of a culture that increasingly refuses to hold lawbreakers responsible for antisocial behavior, especially if those lawbreakers are black. Every institution that once imposed discipline—the family, the schools, the juvenile-justice system, the police, even public opinion—has been weakened. Despite elite hopes, government programs cannot substitute for the habits of self-control and respect for law that make civil society possible, however. Until those habits are restored, Americans should expect more takeovers and a widening divide between jurisdictions willing to enforce basic norms and those that are not.

When I was young, I though that it was conservatives who refused to face facts, and liberals (which we had then) who were intellectually honest and willing to recognize unpleasant truths. I honestly don't know whether that was ever true...but that's the way it seemed to me.

Now, of course, it is just the opposite.

Conservatives today aren't intellectually pure as the driven snow by any stretch of the imagination...but the left has simply come unhinged...

Peter van Buren: Why the Dems Can't Kick the "Trans" Obsession

Look, this is a litmus test. Transgender ideology is a set of obvious, undeniably-false falsehoods, contrary to science and ordinary human experience, similar to Night is when the sun is up, Puppies are adult dogs, or Most people are left-handed... No one believes that women have penises on the basis of good reasons. Most who do believe it believe it because the party has told them to--and they have, over years of being on the left, developed the ability to more-or-less believe on command. Most female transgenders who believe it believe it for roughly such reasons--transgenderism among women and girls is typically a social contagion. Most male transgenders are fetishists with autogynophilia...and they believe it (if they really do) as part of a fetish. Many lefties don't believe it at all--they just pretend to in order to remain a member of the cult in good standing...to avoid excommunication and "cancellation"...

   So long as Dems maintain their commitment to transgenderism, they're unfit to be elected on account of woketarian madness. If they refuse to back off of even the most obviously false, obviously insane dogma of Woketerianism, you shouldn't even consider giving them your vote...and we haven't yet even mentioned the boatload of other idiocies they've accepted as tenets of their tribe...

   One of the delusional beliefs on the contemporary left is that it is the right that has radicalized. In fact, of course, the right has moderated, perhaps most notably on non-heterosexuals and same-sex marriage. The right moved left--i.e. toward the center--as the left rocketed leftward--i.e. toward the lunatic fringe. The left is so radical it doesn't even know where it's been moving...it can't even admit its own radicalization... Maybe this is what it has against the DSA insurgents...they admit they're radical...though they don't disagree much with the contemporary Democrat mainstream... Or maybe it's because they mean it when they say, e.g., Defund the police...whereas the Democrat party picked it up as a fashionable slogan...which they did, to some extent, support with practical measures...but they doubt it enough to at least have the good sense to motte-and-bailey it when pressed...and now deny that they ever even mouthed the words...

   Oh, and: let's not forget that the Democrats' embrace of transanity has led to the brainwashing and sexual mutilation of thousands or tens of thousands of children in this country alone... I'm more interested in the madness at the theoretical level...but that madness has had horrific practical consequences... If we believe absurdities, we will commit atrocities...

RIP Mitch McConnell [NO!!!!], Lindsey Graham

[LOL how the hell did I get the idea that McConnell was dead??? He is not. Congrats on being alive, Senator!]

Without McConnell, Merrick Garland would be a Supreme rather than Gorsuch. (Obama and Biden are already responsible for the three worst justices on the court--one of whom seems barely qualified, another of whom seems outright unqualified...all of whom were chosen for DEI reasons...)

Perhaps Graham's finest moment, IMO, came during the Kavanaugh hearings. Dude was absolutely right on. It was a disgusting spectacle.

RIP to both.

Lott: Trump's Immigration Enforcement (and Other Policies) Really is (are) Slashing Violent Crime

B...b...but...the Undocumented commit 10,000% less crime than AmeriKKKans!!!!!!

Ed Kilgore: The Dems' "Long-Awaited Pivot to the Left?" [sic]; or Rejection of the Dem Establishment?

What I want to do here is nitpick at a fantastically loony suggestion embedded in the following:

The big debate raging among Democrats this year is whether the renewed energy being exhibited by the progressive wing of the party reflects an ideological development or something else. Unsurprisingly, there are many voices suggesting a long-awaited “pivot to the left” by Democrats is finally underway, as Ben Davis, a Democratic Socialist who worked on the data team for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign, wrote in The Guardian:

After the last month, Democratic leadership should be seriously taking stock of their position. The energy is on their left. The people are on their left. Democrats want fighters, and they want a politics rooted in the collective struggles of the masses, not decided in smoke-filled rooms. We still need moderate Democrats to win those pesky median voters, for now. But the party’s leadership is deeply out of touch with its base. A leftist wave is cresting across the country. [my emphasis]

 LOLOLOLOLOLOL

A long-awaited pivot to the left????

How far fucking left are you thinking there is left to go?

They're barely balancing on the left edge of sanity as it is...

It is beyond any serious question that the Dems lurched far to the left over the course of the last decade+. It makes little sense to suggest that anyone has been waiting for any such a thing...

Unless, of course, you don't think they lurched far enough...

...or:

Want them to move leftward economically, too.

I think it's probably both...but mostly the latter.

Many Dems are incapable of recognizing/admitting how far left they went...but there's just not a lot of left left, socially speaking, after Women have penises, DEI, mass censorship campaigns and quasi-open borders...

What they seem to want now is for the party go socialist, too.

Or at least what they often mistakenly think is socialism--a Nordic-style expansive social safety net / welfare state...

See, I think economic leftism, confused and disastrous as it usually is, is at least sane--unlike the "Great Awokening." We want socialism is the sophomoric battle cry of losers and the economically uneducated...but, unlike Women have penises and Abolish the police, it's not outright nuts.

Miranda Devine: Democrats Haven't Learned a Thing from the Biden Fiasco

link

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this all to me is that anyone would put a pudgy, doughy pic of himself like that on a hook-up app... 

WSJ: How the Smithsonian Lost America's Plot

Nothing about this surprises me.

I haven't read the report yet, so in some sense I reserve judgment. But I'd actually be surprised if it weren't generally right. A by-now-familiar mishmash of leftist political ideas, derived largely from now-rather outdated Continental philosophy, French literary theory, feminism, postmodernism, and critical theory has become the quasi-official ideology of the intellectual left. These ideas are pretty thin gruel, but they cohere with leftist politics, and they're easy to master. Once you learn a few names and a few simple rhetorical moves, you're set. You can pretend to understand the philosophical underpinnings of any subject, even if you've never read a word of Aristotle or Descartes. It takes little training and even less brains to simply issue an accusation of racism (or sexism...or "transmisogynoir" or WTF ever...) against anything you dislike or disagree with. Name-drop Fanon or Judith Butler. Memorize a few quip-templates like "As Foucault has shown, everything is power," or "It is long past time that we decolonize x." It's much more demanding and time-consuming to refute such bullshit than it is to introduce it into a discussion. And it generally functions like one of those smoke bombs villains deploy in comics and movies--when dialectically cornered, just throw some of that into the discussion and escape in the confusion...

Such ideas are fine to discuss in philosophy seminars--though the time would be better spent on almost anything else. Part of the problem is that the ideas are so poorly-justified and of such low quality. It's more like a collection of curiosities. But to dogmatically accept such curiosities as orthodoxy across so many areas is madness. Bad ideas are one thing. Unquestioned orthodoxies are another. The two together are very bad indeed.

WGL: Statewide Injunction Issued Against VA "Assault Weapon" Ban

Suck it, gun-grabbing VA Dems:

War's Back On

link

Platner: Effete Lefty, Working Class Cosplayer

Honestly, it hadn't really/fully occurred to me that the Woketarian cult still had any illusions about representing actual working stiffs. I recognize it once it's said...but, in fact, as others have noted (I didn't recognize this, either): it's, at its core, a coalition of effete upper-class pseudo-intellectuals and the poor.

The great secret of the last hundred years is that Progressivism is an elitist, technocratic ideology crafted by academia. It has NO working-class foundations at all. This desperate search for a believable marionette is hopeless. https://t.co/67jlMdrSEr pic.twitter.com/jtKhtMxUDV

— Jeffrey A Tucker (@jeffreytucker) July 7, 2026

Emily Sturge: Rice University offers Taylor Swift course analyzing ‘nationalism,’ ‘whiteness,’ and gender

Here's the thing about this:

We see two academic trends interacting:

[1] The tendency to view/teach every topic through the same leftist political (to use their favored metaphor) "lens."
[2] The tendency to make pop culture and other such trivia the object of scholarship and teaching.

The latter fad was, IMO, kind of cool at first--when it constituted a minor deviation/break from weightier/stodgier topics, many of which, one might argue, had been done to death. I fulfilled my lit requirement by taking a course on sci-fi/fantasy. Now, that obviously isn't quite on the order of doing a class on Taylor Swift...but let's say it's in the same general vein. (Note: I made a mistake blowing my only lit course on a genre that's not terribly serious, and that I already knew pretty well. I should have been reading Dickens and Tolstoy.)

   One problem in play is that now these frivolous courses and areas of "research" have proliferated. People are doing Ph.Ds on such shit, and making them their areas of specialization. What was once kind of cool--like a professor making humorous or off-topic asides in class--becomes tedious and destructive when overdone. And that shit is way overdone in the academy now. The proliferation of "Me Studies" is similarly stupid/bad/frivolous.

   Anyway, dumb and wasteful as that latter fad is, it's less bad than the former.

   Look, theoretically, you might have some interesting things to say about pop music. But this sort of thing is--as in the case at hand--usually just another opportunity to beat the same drum the professor is already beating. In this case, at least: "nationalism," "whiteness," and "gender." Race! Gender! Colonialism! Capitalism! Oppression! It's just going to be the same kind of propaganda and indoctrination that they're engaged in anyway...but without reading or studying anything inherently worthwhile. At least in a normal course, the students might be listening to Bach or reading As I Lay Dying... Not that I'm excusing propaganda and indoctrination in those courses. I'm just saying that at least the students might get something from them on the sly...

   To be clear, it's not that every course and every class is such shit...but way, way too many are. It's analogous to Scientology taking over the academy. It would be a disaster if even 5% of courses were given over to it--and if it showed up in so many courses that it was clearly being represented as the academic orthodoxy, the consensus of experts, the taken for granted background...

   I'm tired of hearing myself complain about this BS...but BS it is, and complaining is, IMO, warranted.

Doomer Circlejerk: STOP. USING. AI. REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

IT'S MAKING YOU LOSE YOUR COGNITIVE THINKING ABILITIES

Sav Guthrie: Austin's New $125m Public Library Overrun by Bums

Your blue future:

WGL: The Glock Ban: When the DOJ Starts Throwing Haymakers on CA

Trump's Independence Day Speech

I still haven't had the heart to listen to it.

Please let it not be crazy...

Lefties: "Brave Black Woman Surrounded by White Supremacists is Like Rosa Parks!;" Facts: Actually, She Just Committed Some Really Gross Indecent Exposure

It’s been revealed that the black woman Democrats put on a pedestal for “bravely” riding a train with Patriot Front members was engaging in indecent exposure on the train moments before the photo was taken and has a lengthy arrest record. pic.twitter.com/xk0gm1bbmA

— Right Angle News Network (@Rightanglenews) July 6, 2026

COVID Hysteria, a Very Special Retrospective: IF UR UNVAXXED UR AS GOOD AS DEAD BETTER MAKE A LIVING WILL, CORPSE-BOY

REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVAXX URSELF, SHEEPS!!!!!

For the record, I'm still neither pro- nor anti-vax. I asked about getting it two years ago, when I was at the doc anyway...but they had run out.

This crap is pretty typical of our times:

There are hysteriacs on both ends of the spectrum. But the left-hysteriacs control the prestige institutions with the loudest megaphones...so their hysteria is more repulsive.

Though TBF the right-hysteriacs are REEEEEEEEally hysterical... Don't forget about all the microchips-in-vaxxes, 4G and blood clot lunacy. I even read someone in the depths of Free Republic claiming that, if you left the vax out-of-refrigeration, it would resolve into tiny aliens (described as being like teensy versions of the bugs in Starship Troopers...).

   Though it's one thing to find lunacy in the depths of fringey, super-conservative websites...and quite another to find it at Newsweek and Emory and CDC...

Patriot Front Fever...Catch It!

LOL I gotta say, I can see this going either way...but John Ocasio-Rodham Nolte's argument is pretty elegant:

In the same we know the moon landing was real because of it weren’t, the Russians would’ve said so, if these were actual right wingers, the corporate media would have doxxed them by now.

That is a very excellent point.

   We know the right's done similar stuff...e.g. the tiki-torch riot. But we know the left has run false flag ops just like this one--when Dems sent staffers to stand by Youngkin's campaign bus pretending to be tiki-torch-rioters...

   As many are pointing out, one difference between us and the left is that the left supports outright terrorists--so long as they're on the left (e.g. Antifa, BLM rioters, Bill Ayers et al.)...whereas the right thinks these "Patriot Front" clowns are...well...clowns. Or Feds. Or false-flaggots...

   However, some are saying we'd support arresting them...which is false.

   They haven't done anything illegal, no matter which side they're on.

   Let 'em do their thing...whatever it is.

BCP on the Latest Patriot Front Cosplay / Freakout

Honestly, I don't know whether "Patriot Front" is a blue team psyop or not.

We know that the lunatic right has done pretty much this before--in the tiki-torch riot march across UVA grounds the night before the Unite the Right rally. (Reminder: I consider those two things to be very different. UtR proper had every right to rally at Lee Park. They had a permit and everything. I don't know about the legality of the tiki-torch riot...but, to be perfectly honest, I would have had a strong urge to kick their asses...so...maybe I'm inconsistent on this one. So sue me.)

   Anyway, the shrieking lefty just before 1:25 is funny. But the really crazy shit comes after 1:25. Pretty much everything those two jackasses say is gold, baby...GOLD. They compare the picture of the black woman in a subway car filled by the Feds "Patriot Front" guys to a famous pic from integrating Little Rock schools. Now, in the latter pic, a black woman is surrounded by shrieking white racists...whereas in the former pic, a black woman is in a subway car filled with peaceful, polite cosplayers. Hell, even if they're for realz racists, they're not bothering her in any way. Perhaps the best part is when one of the lefties says "it's too early to start talking about Pulitzer Prizes..."

LOOLOLOLLLOL

Which isn't true at all!

Hell, go ahead and give the photographer a Pulitzer!

You get to keep those even if your story (or picture, presumably) turns out to be complete bullshit.

Neither the Post nor the NYT gave back Pulitzers they got for participating in the Russiagate hoax...so even if these guys are all on the SPLC payroll...hey...Pulitzer prize!

Some Grauniad Moonbat: "I Used to Revere the Great Experiment that is the United States; After Trump, I'm Not So Sure"

I went into this with a good attitude, since I think rational people can accept the idea expressed by the headline.

But meh.

Really not so good.

I'm sick and tired of Trump's bullshit.

But compared to the threat posed by the left, Trump's not such a terribly big deal.

Even though I agree that, when NOT compared to the contemporary left, Trump's shenanigans do seem--in some cases at least--to be a pretty damn big deal.

But any such article ought to start out by noting that the left spent the last decade trying to destroy free speech in America--and pretty much succeeded in destroying it everywhere else...

Trump, OTOH--with help from the likes of Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi--smashed those efforts.

He also gave us the best and most consequential SCOTUS of my lifetime.

Also: I pretty much lost interest when the author asserted that the Iran war had left Iran stronger and the U.S. weaker. The latter claim might be worth discussing. The former is pure TDS...

And don't forget: I don't think Donald Trump is fit to be President.

This is kinda the Trump paradox: who can someone so obviously unfit for the office in so many ways be doing such a good job in so many ways?

Well, the obvious answer is: because the other party has lost its fucking mind, and many of his best acts are just rolling back their obviously insane policies. It doesn't take a Washington or a Lincoln to recognize that men aren't women, and that any government programs saying otherwise absolutely have to be slapped down hard.. To take just one notable example...

Well, anyway.

NBC News: "Trigger Warning" for Using the Terms 'Biological Male', 'Biological Female'

What they ought to give is a redundancy warning.

INSANE: NBC’s Craig Melvin offers a trigger warning for trans people watching...

“Just a quick note here. The terms that we’re using here during our reporting, biological male, biological female, the high court put those terms in quotations in their decision and their dissent.… pic.twitter.com/Hx15swCfJ6

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) June 30, 2026

A P-40 Fires Its Guns Again

One of my absolute favorite fighters.

One of my main daydreams as a kid was flying with the Flying Tigers.

Republican and Democrat Coaches on: 'Merica!

Truck Nutz on Air Force One...actually a pretty good idea...

Happy 250th!

I remember the bicentennial well--it's part of what prompted my interest in early American history and American political thought.

Celebrate, ya 'Mericans!

Conservatives and the Left: What If Each Ran the Country?

Look, when it comes down to it, a nation run by conservatives wouldn't be as much fun. Probably: no legal weed. Significant penalties for getting caught with it. No sexual revolution. Let's say: no hookup apps, social stigma discouraging casual hookups and high body counts (gross term). Teh gayz: back in the closet with you! Prayer in school, abstinence propaganda. Probably not free pr0n on the interwebs all over the place... Flag-burning: illegal. Illegal aliens: all deported. Maybe some creationism in bio classes. Lower taxes and lots fewer public services. No abortion. I dunno. I'm not really thinking of all the things... It'd be a much churchier place. Much more straight-laced.

   Anyway, the point is: not a super-fun place.

   I'm against it.

   OTOH, imagine a world in which the left got what it wanted: socialism. Gender ideology brainwashing in schools and the brainwashed kids getting sexually mutilated left and right. DEI for everything everywhere, including NSF and NIH grants. CRT and indoctrination into it everywhere. Open borders and no deportations. All science ideologically infected--possibly by law. Universities fully converted into re-education camps. Extremely high taxes, especially on the rich and corporations--including punitive "wealth taxes." Censorship a la Biden's "mis-/dis-/mal-information" bullshit pervading government and media. Money lavished on leftists NGOs that then distribute it to leftists to feed it back into the Democrat party--and shower it on other countries for drag queen story hours in Ulan Bator and everywhere else... No controls on elections...draconian control of firearms, criminals released willy-nilly...

   In short: a catastrophe.

   Conservatives are wacky in their own way. And I don't want them to have unbridled control of the country.  But we know they won't destroy the country, because they used to control it and we did just fine.

   Leftism is made up primarily of these components: (a) insane policies that have never been tried, but which will obviously lead to disaster (e.g. decarceration); (b) policies that have been tried over and over and failed every time (e.g. socialism), and (c) people with mental problems (see: the psychological differences between progressives and conservatives).

   If you wanted to draw up a blueprint for the destruction of the USA, ergo the West, ergo the world, you really couldn't do any better than the blueprint the contemporary left is already trying to implement.

   We know conservatism won't destroy us because we've been there, and it didn't. Nothing similar can be said about contemporary woke leftism. In fact, it's more likely than not to lead to our destruction.

Mandami's Rent Freeze Leads to Bankrupt Landlords and Fewer Apartments for Rent

Leftists don't believe in the rest of science...so why should they believe in the law of supply and demand?

"Transgender" Mayoral Candidate (Hamilton, Ontario) "Scarlett" Gillespie Uses "Emotional Support Sock Puppet"

 Mr. Gillespie pretends to be a woman. He is also a "sex worker," and also goes by the name 'Jelena Vermillion.'

Leftism is a type of insanity.