Two of these were picked up at Half Price Books locations in DFW and the greater Houston area, the other was a gift.





Two of these were picked up at Half Price Books locations in DFW and the greater Houston area, the other was a gift.





How long has it been since we did a post bashing communism? Well that’s too long!
Here Michael Malice talks with Yaron Brook and Lex Fridman about writing his book The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil (which I guess I should track down now) about the evils of communism and how western intellectuals covered up for them so long.
Longtime readers know that I always recommend Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow as the first book to read on the Stalin’s terror famine in Ukraine. And of course the Holodomor was just just one of communism’s many, many genocides…
In one of the more important but confusing stories this week, UK’s Parliament rejected PM Theresa May’s Brexit deal, rejected a no-deal Brexit, and rejected a second referendum, but voted to delay Brexit until June. Whether the EU will consent to this delay or not remains to be seen. Borepatch thinks not, mainly due to EU elections coming up.
Enjoy a complimentary LinkSwarm:
In the Trump era, Democrats are so intent on appealing to immigrants and minority voters they will tolerate insults to Jews, a constituency that voted for Clinton by better than a 3-to-1 margin in 2016. This is not inconsequential, as Jewish conservative Jeff Dunetz pointed out last week: “According to the FBI, almost 60% of the hate crimes in 2017 based on religion were against Jews.” Liberals would like us to believe that Trump supporters are responsible for this, but who is to blame when, for example, Somali immigrant Mohamed Mohamed Abdi is charged with attempted murder for allegedly trying to run over two men outside a Los Angeles synagogue? How can liberals claim Trump is responsible for three black men attacking Jews in Brooklyn? Police are alarmed by increasing anti-Semitic violence in New York City, which probably has a lot more to do with the “progressive” politics of that Democrat-run fiefdom than it does with who’s occupying the White House. Meanwhile, 11 white people were attacked in New York over the weekend, and a black transgender suspect has been arrested in what police say was an apparent hate-crime spree. Such is the toxic racial climate in the city that sends to Congress such Democrats as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who spent her weekend trashing Ronald Reagan for a capacity crowd of liberals in Austin, Texas.
Democrats and their media allies have spent years building this bonfire of racial resentment. CNN devoted hour upon hour of coverage to the “Black Lives Matter” movement that provoked riots in Ferguson, Missouri, and by the time of the 2016 Republican convention in Cleveland, anti-Trump protesters were marching with Communist posters advocating revolution. Barely six weeks before Election Day 2016, a “Black Lives Matter” riot erupted in downtown Charlotte, N.C., and does anyone still wonder why Hillary lost North Carolina, a state that Obama had carried twice? Trump got 63 percent of the white vote in North Carolina, carrying the state by a margin of more than 170,000 votes. Is it likely that Democrats can reverse that verdict by doubling-down on identity politics? Yet liberals continue intensifying their incendiary rhetoric that has sparked incidents like the smearing of the Covington Catholic boys, the Jussie Smollett hoax, and a spree of attacks on Trump supporters across the country. Democrats and their media allies have done everything in their power to demonize the nearly 63 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2016, and what does that foreshadow for November 2020?
Certainly by now, working-class white voters must be tired of deranged Trump-haters getting in their faces and shouting, “RAAAAACIST!” Perhaps that’s why the latest Iowa poll shows Democrat primary voters favoring two old white guys, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. However, the crowded field of Democrats contending for the 2020 presidential nomination, cheered on by their Greek chorus of left-wing journalists, will probably make it easier for Trump to get re-elected. The more white voters become alienated from the Democrats, the more extreme the Democrats become, and the media are so out of touch with voters in places like Iowa that Democrats are caught in a sort of feedback loop of extremism.
The constituent elements of the American left have radicalized and they are tearing the Democratic Party apart. Meanwhile Donald Trump has delivered on a growing economy, deregulation, strong borders, the rule of law, and he is apparently going to leave the cows and their diapers for later.
The radicalized Democrats are now running as socialists. In the middle of a growing economy they are casting their lot with Venezuela. They expect to win in 2020. Call it the left-wing crack-up.
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Less than four years ago, Jeremy Corbyn was an obscure backbencher in the British Parliament. In his 30 years as a member of the Labour Party, his greatest legislative accomplishment was paradoxically the lack of any: From 1997 to 2010, when Labour was last in government, Corbyn was the MP who voted against his own party more than any other. Despite his perpetual insubordinations, successive Labour Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown declined to expel Corbyn from their party. “There was no threat,” a deputy Labour chief whip told the Financial Times about Corbyn and his small band of hard-left rebels in 2016. “These people were tolerated because no one had ever heard of them.”
Today, everyone in British politics has heard of Jeremy Corbyn, who, as leader of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, has utterly transformed the Labour Party. Once a broad-based movement that could command large parliamentary majorities, today it is a sectarian personality cult, offering meager resistance to a shambolic Conservative government. Once the party whose leaders created NATO and stood stalwart against the threat of international communism, today Labour is led by people who sing the praises of anti-Western despots and terrorists. And once the natural political home of British Jewry, Labour today is mired in an anti-Semitic morass, to the point where 40 percent of Jews say they would “seriously consider” leaving the country were Corbyn to become prime minister. Indeed, Labour has become so toxic that, last month, nine MPs quit the party, calling it “sickeningly, institutionally racist,” “a threat to national security” and “a danger to the cohesion of our society, the safety of our citizens, and the health of our democracy.”
How Labour reached this deplorable condition is one that should seriously concern liberals in the United States, where a similar dynamic is playing out in the Democratic Party. An insurgent progressivism favorably disposed to socialism, hostile to Jews and openly admiring of Jeremy Corbyn and all that he represents is steadily making inroads against an aging, centrist Democratic establishment. Here, a constellation of elected officials, media personalities, and activists are mimicking the tactics of their ideological comrades in Britain to take over and transform the Democratic Party into a vehicle for their extreme agenda.
According to a report by Breitbart, in recently released research by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), analysts discovered that about 63 percent of non-citizen households, those who live legally and illegally in the U.S., use some form of public welfare while only about 35 percent of native-born American households are on welfare.
[Gabriel] Schoenfeld only fuels the popular perception of The Bulwark Never Trumpers as an angry, coastal elite who are anguished that their warnings about Trump were ignored by both hoi polloi and their conservative “grifters and trolls.” In careerist fury, he now damns others for his own self-immolation — as if the country must suffer for the sins of not listening to his own genius, which would probably have given the country a 16-year Obama-Clinton regnum.
That Never Trumpers at The Bulwark were wrong about the Trump nomination, the general election, and the first two years of the Trump administration seems only to have fueled their spitefulness. If Schoenfeld is representative of this rump movement, then they are engaging in projection.
Read the whole thing for a detailed, comprehensive takedown.
The collapse of Venezuela’s electrical grid and public services is due to years of Maduro’s corruption, a refusal to invest in the public sector, and neglect of maintenance. It’s simple: machinery breaks down when you steal all the money intended to buy parts to keep it running.
— John Bolton (@AmbJohnBolton) March 13, 2019
"Excuse me! Did you see a sign on my cave that said 'Dead Messiah Storage?!?'"
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) March 12, 2019
This is almost a non-story, but since I stumbled across it, and it takes place at my alma mater, and I possessed intimate knowledge of Objectivism during my college days, I thought I’d mention it.
Basically, UT has money available for chartered student groups, the UT Objectivist group applied for money to host a debate, and the UT Events board turned them down without telling them why.
UT Objectivism Society applied for funding support from the student-led Events CoSponsorship Board (ECB) for a planned on-campus debate. Titled “Inequality: Should We Care?,” the discussion was set to feature Yaron Brook, Executive Director of the Ayn Rand Institute, and James K. Galbraith, a UT professor and director of the University of Texas Inequality Project. ECB itself is funded wholly by student activity fees, to the tune of $70,000 per year—all of which is spent supporting the programming of various student organizations. The UT Objectivism Society applied for $1,920.64 in funding to support the event…In March 22, however, ECB emailed UT Objectivism Society president Jonathan Divin, informing him that ECB “is unable to fund UT objectivism Society at this time.” Divin responded, asking if ECB could provide any explanation as to why the group’s request for funding was denied. Troublingly, ECB replied only: “Unfortunately, ECB is unable to disclose any information regarding the deliberation process whether or not an event was funded.”
Enter the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which has frequently taken up first amendment and equal rights causes on campus. So they sent a letter, UT went “Yeah, we should be more transparent,” then said the reason the Objectivists were denied money was because the fund was already out of money. And they promised to do better.
Assuming UT follows through, we’ll count that as a tiny win for fairness and transparency…
Some people have asked me if I’ll be reviewing the Atlas Shrugged movie, since one of my gigs is reviewing science fiction movies, and Ayn Rand’s original novel certainly qualifies as science fiction. (I’m also familiar enough with the novel to craft this parody of it.) But I thought it would be nearly impossible to do justice to the source material in movie form; a TV miniseries would probably be more appropriate to fit that sprawling, didactic story.
So I’m glad the inimitable P.J. O’Rourke has saved me the trouble. He’s seems to have done a good job of dissecting the movie’s flaws (and advanced word has been very negative just on the story-telling and movie pacing fronts) without rejecting the underlying message.