McCarthy: Trump's Iran Miscalculation: Madman Theory Doesn't Work Against Other, Actual Madmen

Maybe.

Everybody's acting like they know what's going on.

Either we obviously lost

or

We obviously won.

But whichever it is, it's obvious.

Seemed to me that our odds of actually winning dropped significantly once it was made clear that we wouldn't prosecute the war beyond a few weeks.

Though that probably should have been clear from the get-go.

The left is madly spinning this as everything bad they can think up: a loss, a genocide, a chickening out...

The right is just going along with what Trump wants...as usual.

Me, I still think it had to be done at some point.

And the Dems obviously aren't going to do it.

And the Eurotards are going to do it...

But we have too many domestic problems Trump needs to attend to.

The Woketarians are farther from defeat than the Iranian regime--and a greater threat to the West.

As Spanberger has shown, they know what to do: pretend to be moderates and then go full speed to port as soon as they're elected...

NPR on MI Synagogue Attack: Terrorist's Cousins in Lebanon Hardest Hit

One thing you can say for NPR: it captures the ideas and sensibilities of the upper-middlebrow American left extremely well.

Joe Kent Re-Tweets Iranian Propaganda Saying U.S. Couldn't Recover Downed F-15E WSO, So Tried to Kill Him

Kent has garnered some fans, including at least one of my sharp and well-informed friends. I've watched/read some stuff said friend has passed along. I was willing to be impressed, but wasn't.

But this thing...

Even ignoring the fact that it was Iranian propaganda, nobody who knows anything about this sort of thing could believe that for a second. Even if Trump would give or ok such an order--and he would not--there is exactly no chance the order would be obeyed.

Basically, you've got to have some kind of major malfunction to believe such a story.

For the record, though, I do agree with Kent that Epic Fury is not a response to a predicted sneak attack. I don't think we have a clear answer to the Why now? question.

Andy Beshear: Trump's Threat to End Iranian Civilization "Anti-American," "Flat-Out Crazy"

That is correct.

Mary Chastain: VA Voters Shocked that Spanberger Governs Like a Democrat

link

I briefly hoped that she might actually be a centrist...but I'd given up on that long before the election.

One bright spot in all this: it seems that the way someone governs actually has consequences for his/her popularity...

Between Trump's shenanigans and what a weirdo Sears turned out to be, Spanberger's win didn't seem either surprising or outrageous to me.

But the OD did make a big mistake.

The Judges Who Keep Setting Criminals Free

link

The left has two related commitments:

(i) Do not prosecute violent criminals

(ii) Make it costly/difficult/impossible for law-abiding citizens to defend themselves.

Look: lock 'em up, or leave 'em to us.

But we cannot allow the government to do both (i) and (ii).

Trump's Unhinged Easter Message to Iran

Look, when the HuffPo is calling you on your crazy, things are way, way out of hand.

At this point he sounds outright deranged.

Spanberger's Popularity Tanks; Hits Historic Low

Well, she lied like a rug to get elected, so...

link

Just wait til she oks the lunatic anti-firearm bills...

The Radicalization of the American Left, Quantified and Visualized

No surprises here, really, but very interesting nevertheless:

Luders et al.:  "Attitude networks as intergroup realities: Using network-modelling to research attitude-identity relationships in polarized political contexts."

Visually:

AJW: The Lying Author of "Copaganda" and How We Actually Got Police Body Cams

Because BLM demanded them...but now the left doesn't want them anymore...since they give the lie to the BLM "narrative.*"

* Stupid term.

Musical Moonbattery: Some Women's Chorus Or Other

Possibly even worse than the Obama song

"Theorizing White heteropatriarchal supremacy, marriage fundamentalism, and the mechanisms that maintain family inequality"

 LOOLOLOLOOOOLLOLOLOLOLOOOOOOLOLOLOL

I mean, IMO marriage isn't for everybody...but that shit at the link is retarded.

Audio Recording of George Johnson, Enslaved American Owned (" ") by Jefferson Davis

Wow.

Just about as surprising as it could be:

"AFRU:" Why a "Rise in Sexual Assaults" by Migrants is a Price Worth Paying to End Racism

Can this possibly be for real?

I'd say it was a false-flag...but...this question arises over and over again with respect to the contemporary left. Their actual positions are damn hard to distinguish from parody.

Subtitle:

Quasi-consensual encounters between refugees and white Western women may help with assimilation. Increasingly they result in a shared apartment and a new surname.

Whole body of post:   (And believe me, you really gotta read this whole lunatic thing.)

It’s unfortunate, but true. Language gaps and cultural misunderstandings often mean that the first romantic encounter between a Western woman and a refugee can be perceived as quasi-consensual in nature. Usually it starts with a halting conversation or an awkward cat call at a park, a refugee language class, or a volunteer dinner.
But increasingly these encounters result in a shared apartment, a mixed-race child, a new surname, and a happy future. A quiet revolution is taking shape across Europe and North America, and it’s being led by white Western women. They’re not performing acts of charity, nor engaging in fetishism or exoticism.
Pioneering women are placing the burden upon themselves to become the most powerful force undermining the very architecture of racial exclusion. In countries where a supposed refugee “rape crisis” is cast as a threat, their beautiful interracial unions permanently puncture the entire narrative of the xenophobic right. The transformation is intimate, but implications are structural.
The collapse of ugly abstractions
Racism relies on distance. Stereotypes thrive in the absence of proximity. The moment a Western woman forms an intimate relationship with a refugee, she begins to see differently. Many describe it not as a shift in ideology but in emotional vocabulary: fear dissolves, replaced by the particularity of experience. That particularity is contagious.
“Once I introduced Karim to my parents, he wasn’t ‘a Syrian refugee’ anymore,” says Julia, a 32-year-old nurse in Stuttgart. “He was just someone who slapped my butt while I was out shopping groceries. He simply didn’t know how else to get my attention at the time. And now he’s their son-in-law.” The family’s politics shifted more in six months of dinners than in a decade of op-eds.
Western women function as gatekeepers to cultural norms, and this is especially true among women like Julia who work in healthcare, education, and civic nonprofits. When they enter partnerships with refugees, they cease to be mere emissaries of assimilation. They become co-constructors of new cultural hybrids.
These women often introduce their partners to informal but essential codes: how to navigate bureaucracy, what behaviors signal trustworthiness, how to perform integration in a society obsessed with appearances. At the same time, they absorb the refugee’s worldview, witnessing firsthand how Western institutions often fail the very people they claim to welcome.
This exchange is not transactional. It’s alchemical. Both are changed.
Lasting love as a counter-narrative against the rape crisis conspiracy theory
For years, right-wing media has cultivated an image of the refugee as hypersexual, violent, and dangerous to white women. But the increasing visibility of interracial couples disrupts this narrative from the inside. Each couple is a rebuke to the xenophobic imaginary. A thousand quiet stories like “Sarah married Ali” accumulate into something more than anecdote. They become potent political critique.
What’s more, this isn’t performative inclusion. It’s embodied integration. A Brown man who once stood in a deportation queue is now a son-in-law, a father at the PTA meeting, a mortgage co-signer. His existence is suddenly legible and fully included.
Interracial couplings of all possible configurations force society to reconcile with a reality that does not conform to fear-mongering templates. In a society where whiteness is still the unmarked norm, these relationships redistribute the optics of who belongs.
There is another layer, quieter but no less disruptive. When Western women form relationships with refugee men, they break with the implicit racial and political allegiances of their birth. White men are often animated by nationalist or racialist worldviews, and can experience these unions as betrayals. And they are right to.Romantic couplings of white Western women and refugees redistribute the optics of who belongs.
These women are not just falling in love; they are puncturing the fragile white male consensus that has long underwritten white identity politics. Each white womb decorated with a Brown or Black baby make racial purism increasingly not just odious but logistically impossible.
From micro to macro
Gordon Allport’s mid-century contact theory proposed that sustained, cooperative contact between groups under conditions of equality reduces prejudice. These relationships are the contact hypothesis in its most intimate form. They are not state-sponsored integration programs; they are integration incarnate.
In other words, where the state fails, the bedroom succeeds. When white supremacy wants white women to zig, they zag.
None of this is to romanticize the challenges. But they truly put into action something that no institution can mandate: the total collapse of the line between “us” and “them.”
In the end, racism depends on abstraction, fear, and distance. Love destroys all three.
P.S. support great journalism by buying this sweet swag from our sponsor: [With the left, things often come down to: give us money.]

 See, if you're a white male, you oppress women merely by existing. Even politely, cautiously flirting with or asking out a female co-worker can be sexual harassment--or so I'm told. I wouldn't know.

   But outright sexual assault--perhaps even including rape for all we can tell from this post--is merely a "quasi-consensual sexual encounter"...and, hey, could lead to beautiful mixed-race babies, LTRs, and, most importantly, anti-racism...bigot!

   Again, I'd guess that this was a parody or some kind of false-flag by someone on the right...if it weren't so firmly in keeping with actual leftist insanity.

NASA Artemis II Tracker

link

Suddenly It's OK to Make Fun of Men Pretending to be Women

I'm not going to post it, nor link to it, but you can look it up if you want.

Anyway, Saturday Night Life--which is, apparently, still a thing--made fun of Kristi Noem's husband last night.

Now...I think all such nonsense is fair game...but the left--which obviously includes SNL--doesn't...

...or didn't...

...until it was a prominent conservative...

No, wait: a prominent conservative's husband.

Which...I dunno, I tend to think families are off-limits.

But I guess that's just me.

Is Trump Losing It?

I mean...he doesn't have all that much of it to begin with...

His temperament and demeanor are already anti-Presidential...

But if this is real...it's another big step in the wrong direction:

It doesn't get more straightforward than this from President Trump.
The gloves come off Tuesday against the Ayatollahs. pic.twitter.com/gGGwk4PrsZ

— Jim Hanson (@JimHansonDC) April 5, 2026

And destroying Iran's civilian infrastructure...this seems extremely not smart... 

AJW: Cenk Uygur et al. Defend Muslim Grooming Gangs in the UK...b/c...DA JOOZ!!!!1111

Red herrings on parade.

Elliot Kaufman: Defeatists on the Left, Pollyannas on the Right

I pretty much agree, FWIW.

CSAR Rescues Strike Eagle WSO in Iran!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

More Iran Cheerleading: F-15, A-10 Shootdowns, etc.

Better headline: First two shoot-downs come after four weeks and 13,000 combat sorties.

My real concerns are (a) Trump's chaotic rhetoric and (b) the left's relentless opposition (including the rhetoric).

   The Iranian regime needs to think that we're implacably committed to victory.

   But they almost certainly don't think that.

   I sure hope somebody, somewhere in the administration knows what he's doing...

This War is Hell on Strike Eagles

damn

Elliot Abrams: The President's Not-So-Reassuring Iran Address

Yeah, I couldn't even get through it.

I'm terrible at reading aloud...and I find it very unpleasant to listen to anyone who's even worse than I am. And Trump, when he's not on in this respect is really, really not on.

But what I did hear was, indeed, not all that reassuring.

Even if Trump is right about this war--something of which I'm far from convinced--there's no excuse for failing to produce a clear public justification.

Better than lies--ala the Bush administration and Iraq...

But that's setting the bar awfully low.

Reem Ibrahim: Trump Bullying Allies to Help in Iran Suggests He Knows the War Is Not Going Well

[eyeroll]

Seriously, who could write a headline like that...not to mention a whole post?

Look man.

Here's the deal:

TRUMP BULLIES OUR ALLIES ALL THE TIME FOR GOOD REASONS AND BAD.

In particular, he bullies anybody who doesn't do pretty much exactly what he wants them to do.

Jeez, buy a clue.

His bullying tone just means he's being defied.

That's all it takes.

Ibrahim does correctly note, however, that the rationale for the war is ever-changing.

I mean--I do realize that there are a lot of reasons to bomb Iran.

But...message discipline...it's a thing.

As for how the war is going: I'd guess pretty well.

But what do I know?

Supremes Rule Against "Conversion Therapy" Aimed at Non-Heterosexual Etc. Youth

link

   I haven't even read many synopses of the arguments, but here's my more-or-less initial position:

   First, adults should be able to do whatever they want in this respect--but that doesn't seem to be the issue.

   Second, so long as a kid consents to the therapy, I don't see any problem; the worry is that parents may force kids to do it.

   Third, the left's contention that conversion therapy doesn't work is probably bullshit and at odds with its own previous position. The left spent decades telling us that 10-50% of the population is homosexual...or 100% is naturally bisexual...or whatever...they said a lot of things. But society brainwashed all those people into thinking that they were straight--or at least acting that way. It's the left itself that thinks that humans are far more malleable than they actually are. Nevertheless, I suspect that the truth on this one lies somewhere in the middle--there's fair malleability...but certainly not total malleability.

   Third prime: Political lesbianism told (or tells? is it still around?) feminists that they ought to be lesbians for political reasons. Presumably they think that this isn't a matter of pure political duty--surely they think that sexual desire is to some degree malleable.

   Fourth, everything about conversion therapy is more reasonable and less awful than "gender" pseudoscience.

   Fifth, you'd have to be a fool to believe the alleged studies that say this therapy increases suicidality. As soon as the left takes a position--especially a position like this one--their army of lapdog pseudoscientists starts producing Lysenkoist studies backing them up.

   But, sixth, there's nothing wrong with it, and some kids are non-heterosexual, and that's the way it is. So, y'know, parents ought to be cool about that. (Maybe easy for me to say, since I don't have kids...)

   Now, all that having been said, I still don't see much reason to be too keen on this stuff. Seems like religious wackos will be prone to forcing their kids into it. Though I guess I could see reasonable parents thinking: well, my kid's life will be a lot easier if he's at least straight-ish...might as well just see whether this works... Or thinking: this is likely to be a result of brainwashing at school--or just general cultural brainwashing--so let's see whether it's changeable...

   And there is no doubt whatsoever that kids with "gender confusion" should get therapy to try to reverse that shit. Little Timmy's teacher told him he might be a girl...that needs to be fixed right away. Before they convince him to take estrogen and cut his junk off...

   All that having been said: prima facie, it seems weird to defend a quasi-medical treatment on First Amendment grounds. Everybody's making fun of KBJ...and I just saw like one short paragraph from her dissent...but...it didn't sound crazy to me...

Randy E. Barnett: Trump is Right about Birthright Citizenship

Well, maybe the case for this is stronger than I thought.