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...