Posts Tagged ‘#BlackLivesMatter’

Ruy Teixeira 2002: Hispanic Will Make Democrats The Permanent Majority Party. Ruy Teixeira 2021: Not So Fast

Sunday, October 17th, 2021

In 2002, Ruy Teixeira and John Judis’s The Emerging Democratic Majority argued that demographic changes, especially high levels of Hispanic immigration, were going to transform the American voting demographic enough the Democratic Party would enjoy a natural majority for the foreseeable future.

Now Teixeira has been reading the tea leaves again, and his new conclusion is: Not so much.

And once again, the culprit thwarting Democrats is Donald Trump. Like The Mule in Asimov’s Foundation series, Trump is disrupting the well-laid plans of secret hidden manipulators in ways they couldn’t foresee.

Joe Biden in 2020 characterized Donald Trump as, among other things, an unapologetic racist who particularly detested immigrants. This strand of Biden’s campaign was supposed to have special appeal to Hispanics and juice their Democratic support.

But that didn’t happen. Instead Hispanic voters went in the other direction, giving Trump after four years substantially more support than they did in 2016. According to Catalist, in 2020 Latinos had an amazingly large 16 point margin shift toward Trump. Among Latinos, Cubans did have the largest shifts toward Trump (26 points), but those of Mexican origin also had a 12 point shift and even Puerto Ricans moved toward Trump by 18 points. Moreover, Latino shifts toward Trump were widely dispersed geographically. Hispanic shifts toward Trump were not confined to Florida (28 points) and Texas (18 points) but also included states like Nevada (16 points), Pennsylvania (12 points), Arizona (10 points) and Georgia (8 points).

Some details:

1. Trump’s support was higher among Hispanic working class (noncollege) voters than among the college-educated. Biden carried Hispanic college voters by a whopping 39 points (69-30) compared to just 14 points (55-41) among the Hispanic working class.

2. Hispanic Trump voters were 81 percent working class and just 19 percent college-educated.

3. Within the working class, the less education Hispanic voters had, the more they supported Trump. Those with some college gave Trump 39 percent of their vote, high school graduates gave him 42 percent and high school dropouts gave him 53 percent.

4. Pew breaks income into three broad groups: lower income, middle income and upper income. Trump’s worst group by far here was upper income Hispanics where he received just 28 percent of the vote. But he got 41 percent support among middle income Hispanics and 40 percent support among lower income Hispanics.

5. Just under a third of Hispanic voters described themselves as conservative. These voters supported Trump by a lopsided 73-26.

6. Over half of Hispanic voters (53 percent) were very or somewhat confident in Trump’s ability to make good decisions about economic policy. Those who were very confident supported Trump 77-18; those who were somewhat confident supported him 56-40.

7. Trump support was highest among young Hispanic voters. Those under 30 gave him 41 percent support, those in the 30-49 year old age group gave him 38 percent; those 50-64 gave him 37 percent and those 65 and over the least at 35 percent.

And the reasons why?

What lies behind these unsatisfying results for the Democrats? One possibility, as I have previously argued, is that Democrats fundamentally misunderstood the nature of this voter group and what they really care about. Hispanics were lumped in with “people of color” and were assumed to embrace the activism around racial issues that dominated so much of the political scene in 2020, particularly in the summer. This was a flawed assumption. The reality of the Hispanic population is that they are, broadly speaking, an overwhelmingly working class, economically progressive, socially moderate constituency that cares above all, about jobs, the economy and health care.

For example, in the post-election wave of the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group (VSG) panel survey, well over 70 percent of Hispanic voters rated jobs, the economy, health care and the coronavirus as issues that were “very important” to them. No other issues even came close to this level. Crime as an issue rated higher with these voters than immigration or racial equality, two issues that Democrats assumed would clear the path to big gains among Hispanic voters.

In this context, it is interesting to note that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement did not rate very highly among Hispanics. In the national exit poll, Hispanic voters were split close to evenly about BLM, 47 percent unfavorable to 49 percent favorable. This significantly trails not just black voters, but also white college graduates, who rated BLM 61 percent favorable to 35 percent unfavorable.

Consistent with this, Latino voters evinced little sympathy with the more radical demands that came to be associated with BLM. In VSG data, despite showing support for some specific policing reforms, Hispanics opposed defunding the police, decreasing the size of police forces and the scope of their work and reparations for the descendants of slaves by 2:1 or more.

An important thing to remember about the Hispanic population is that they are heavily oriented toward upward mobility and see themselves as being able to benefit from available opportunities to attain that. Three-fifths of Latinos in the national exit poll said they believed life would be better for the next generation of Americans. In the VSG data, these voters agreed, by 9 points, that racial minorities have mostly fair opportunities to advance in America, by 11 points agreed that America is a fair society where everyone has a chance to get ahead and by 20 points agreed that “Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.”

They are also patriotic. By well over 3:1, Hispanics in the VSG survey said they would rather be a citizen of the United States than any other country in the world and by 35 points said they were proud of the way American democracy works. Clearly, this constituency does not harbor particularly radical views on the nature of American society and its supposed intrinsic racism and white supremacy.

It is probable that Democrats will continue to have problems with this voter group until they base their appeals to this group on what these voters care about the most rather than what Democrats believe they should care about.

The Democratic Party’s current ideological core is distinctly uninterested in any issues outside the narrow orbits of their own desires (money and power) and obsessions (Critical Race Theory/victimhood identity politics, and completely reordering society in the name of the Successor Ideology). Understanding the needs and opinions of working class Hispanics is not only beyond their current capabilities, but is something they probably feel active hostility toward even considering.

As previous pieces here have noted, the trend toward more Hispanics embracing the GOP has been especially pronounced in Texas. Open borders do not sell to the vast majority of American Hispanic citizens, who see widespread crime, disorder and general lawlessness from Biden’s decision to cease border enforcement, adding yet another current in the tidal wave of disaster Democrats are threatening to bring down on themselves in 2022.

LinkSwarm for October 15, 2021

Friday, October 15th, 2021

Biden is bumbling, borders are crumbling, bankers are plotting, and Art is out. Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Stephen Green finds out the real reason behind the supply chain SNAFUs: California Democrats changing the rules because they weren’t getting enough kickbacks and graft from an efficiently functioning transportation system.

    The immediate problem, the one in Los Angeles, has been caused by the state’s vindictively regulatory state government.

    We’ll get to the trucker shortage in just a moment, but California also faces a shortage of trucks for them to drive.

    Twitter user Jerry Oakley reminds us that “Carriers domiciled in California with trucks older than 2011 model, or using engines manufactured before 2010, will need to meet the Board’s new Truck and Bus Regulation beginning in 2020.” Otherwise, “Their vehicles will be blocked from registration with the state’s DMV,” according to California law.

    Snip.

    As a result, trucks aren’t being purchased to replace the ones being regulated out of business.

    But even if there were plenty of trucks in California, there wouldn’t be enough truckers to drive them — and it isn’t because the truckers are too old.

    “Traditionally the ports have been served by Owner Operators,” Oakley says, who are non-union. But under AB-5, “California has now banned Owner Operators.”

    Just like the union longshoremen, union truckers work under a whole host of work rules that simply can’t accommodate crisis conditions like the ones in Los Angeles.

    In fact, those work rules helped create the crisis conditions.

    The exact language of AB-5 was copied and pasted into Presidentish Joe Biden’s $5 trillion (Or: Five Million Million Dollar) “Build Back Better” bill currently stalled in the Senate.

    It’s one thing for Californians to screw themselves over, but AB-5 is hurting the entire country’s economy — and Washington Democrats want to take AB-5 nationwide.

  • Social Justice doesn’t want to win, it wants to destroy you:

    If you’re unaware, [David] Shor was canceled for accurately summarizing the contents of an academic paper. Shor made a point that he felt was important for the messaging of the Democrats. At the time the country was exploding in riots aligned with BlackLivesMatter and driven by anger over the deaths of George Floyd and Breanna Taylor. Shor linked to a paper that argued that riots have bad political consequences for Democrats. This would not seem to be particularly inflammatory; people indiscriminately burning and smashing shit has little obvious utility for the marginalized or anyone else. But Shor lost his job for tweeting that paper and agreeing with its thesis. Similarly, the Intercept’s Lee Fang was absolutely mobbed for the crime of recording an interview with a young Black man who was critical of the riots and the protest movement from which they sprang. He almost lost his job, as well.

    (Here’s a fun tip for you all: if you have the power to get someone fired or otherwise ruin their life you are not a powerless, marginalized Other.)

    Not that they had rebutted a particularly coherent pro-riot argument. There was little in the way of defense of riots in 2020 at all, really. Many attempted to invoke Martin Luther King in that regard, which is hilarious and bizarre concerning a man who among many other critiques of riots said that they “are not revolutionary but reactionary because they invite defeat; they offer an emotional catharsis, but they must be followed by a sense of futility,” and that close to the end of his life. (In their defense, almost no one who invokes MLK has actually read him.) But what Shor and Fang were guilty of was not of breaking with some intellectual mandate within liberalism but with speaking out of turn, with criticizing the wrong people. The difference between Shor and Fang’s criticism of the pro-riot side and the behavior of those who rose against them is that Shor and Fang never tried to destroy anyone, didn’t tweet at anyone’s boss in an attempt to get them fired, didn’t have the inclination or the power to punish those who dared to disagree with them. But those who targeted them were operating in a bizarre liberal discursive culture where, if you dress up what you’re doing in vague language about oppression, you can operate however you’d like without rebuke and attempt to ruin the life of whoever you please.

    Snip.

    The left-of-center is in a profoundly strange and deeply unhealthy place. In the span of a decade or less a bizarre form of linguistically-radical but substantively-conservative identity neoliberalism descended from decaying humanities departments in elite universities and infected social media like Tumblr and Twitter, through which it conquered the media and entertainment industries, the nonprofit industrial complex, and government entities as wide-ranging as the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights and the brass of the Pentagon. That movement now effectively controls the idea-and-story generating power of our society, outside of explicitly conservative media which exists in a large silo but a silo all the same. On any given day the most powerful institutions in the world go to great lengths to mollify the social justice movement, to demonstrate fealty, to avoid its wrath. It’s common now for liberals to deny the influence and power of social justice politics, for inscrutable reasons, but if the current level of control over how people talk publicly is insufficient, I can’t imagine what would placate them. Are most of these institutions false friends? Of course. But that, too, is not much of a defense.

    This tendency to be promiscuous in enthralling elites and powerful institutions should be a clue to the fact that, despite its radical self-branding, the contemporary social justice movement fundamentally serves to empower the status quo. Effective left politics are about convincing various people who are unalike that they have a shared self-interest, that society can do best for them when we do best for others, too. That’s how you build a mass movement, by appealing to people’s sense of self-interest and showing them how they can help their neighbors while they help themselves. But because the social justice movement’s first dictate is to establish a hierarchy of suffering, and to tell those that are purported to suffer less that their problems aren’t problems, no such mass movement is coming. The social justice movement is not just incidentally antagonistic to organizing everyone and recognizing all kinds of people as worthy of our compassion and support. That antagonism is existential. When you ask many people within the movement, “what could we do to convert the white working class to our values?,” they will simply tell you that they don’t want to convert them, that they are not worthy of being a part of their movement. They would rather have targets than converts, to lose as an exclusive moral caste than win as a grubby populist coalition.

    Core to understanding this moment is to realize that the vast majority of people who enforce these politics don’t actually believe in them. They don’t, that is, think that social justice politics as currently composed are healthy or just or likely to result in tangible positive change. There’s a core of true-believers who do, and there’s a group of those who profit directly from the hegemony of social justice politics in elite spaces. (The former two groups have some overlap, but it’s not a perfect circle.) There’s conservative critics, who are both the most natural targets of social justice ire and yet those the social justice movement seem least interested in targeting. There’s an island of misfit toys of left and leftish critics of social justice politics like me. And then there’s the great big mass of people who are just scared.

  • Do global elites have incentives for pushing “Green Energy”/”Climate Change” nonsense? $150 trillion of them.

    Now, in case someone is still confused, none of these institutions, and not a single of the erudite officials running them, give a rat’s ass about the climate, about climate change risks, or about the fate of future generations of Americans (and certainly not about the rising water level sweeping away their massive waterfront mansions): if they did, total US debt and underfunded liabilities wouldn’t be just shy of $160 trillion.

    So what is going on, and why is it that virtually every topic these days has to do with climate change, “net zero”, green energy and ESG?

    The reason – as one would correctly suspect – is money. Some $150 trillion of it.

    Snip.

    How much would this green utopia cost, because if the “net zero”, “ESG”, “green” narrative is pushed so hard 24/7, you know it will cost a lot.

    Turns out it does. A lot, lot.

    Responding rhetorically to the key question, “how much will it cost?”, BofA cuts to the case and writes $150 trillion over 30 years – some $5 trillion in annual investments – amounting to twice current global GDP!

    At this point the report gets good because since it has to be taken seriously, it has to also be at least superficially objective. And here, the details behind the numbers, do we finally learn why the net zero lobby is so intent on pushing this green utopia – simple answer: because it provides an endless stream of taxpayer and debt-funded “investments” which in turn need a just as constant degree of debt monetization by central banks.

    Consider this: the covid pandemic has so far led to roughly $30 trillion in fiscal and monetary stimulus across the developed world. And yet, not even two years later, the effect of this $30 trillion is wearing off, yet despite the Biden’s admin to keep the Covid Crisis at bay, threatening to lock down society at a moment’s notice with the help of the complicit press, the population has made it clear that it will no longer comply with what is clear tyranny of the minority.

    And so, the establishment needs a new perpetual source (and use) of funding, a crisis of sorts, but one wrapped in a virtuous, noble facade. This is where the crusade against climate change comes in.

    Imagine a central banker, destroying your bank account through hyperinflation…forever.
    

  • The Biden Administration has discarded $100 million worth of border wall segments and is paying workers $5 million a day not to build the wall.
  • They’ve also halted worksite immigration enforcement.
  • Controlling (barely) all three branches of government, you wouldn’t expect Democrats to show this much panic.

    he results in 2020 came as a shock to Democrats for several reasons. First, Joe Biden’s official margin of victory, while slightly larger than Obama’s in 2012 at 51.26% to 46.8%, was half the size that polls, such as Nate Silver’s 538, had showed, at 51.8% to 43.4%. But even more concerning for Democrats, the locations of the polling error tended to be not in places where Democrats were strong, but rather either in swing areas where they hoped for gains, or areas where Obama had done well in 2008 and 2012, but Trump had won in 2016. In effect, Democrats won areas they felt were moving in their direction such as Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Wisconsin by far less than they expected, and lost states they thought were close such as Iowa, Ohio, and Florida by much larger margins.

    The implications of this in the Presidential race were obscured by the fact that the numbers showed Biden won. But they were keenly felt in the Senate races, where Democrats lost races in Iowa and North Carolina where they believed they were favored, and their candidates did worse than Biden even where he won, such as in Michigan and Maine. The result at the time was to leave the Senate at 50 Republicans and 48 Democrats, a situation transformed by the victory of Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock against a dysfunctional Georgia GOP in January 2021. Nonetheless, it was ominous and it set the tone for Democratic behavior in 2021.

    In light of these results, we can understand that the reason Democrats are now obsessing the filibuster is not because they have a mere 50 seats in the Senate. When Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut calls out Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema for blocking legislation that 48 Democrats support, he is doing so not because he believes they are likely to be 50 or 52 Senators for it in the future but because he is pretty sure 50 is as good as it is going to get. In 2008, Democrats won 60 Senate seats, and while with hindsight we can see this was a high-water mark, at the time Democrats dreamed bigger. After all, Mitch McConnell had only won 53%-47% in 2008. There were also open seats in states Obama had won in 2008 such as New Hampshire, North Carolina and Florida coming up in 2010, and there was a path to a Democratic supermajority.

    That is not the case after 2020. In 2020, only Susan Collins won reelection in a state won by the Presidential candidate of the opposing party. Democratic challengers, including strong ones such as Montana’s two-term governor, Steve Bullock lost, and lost badly (by 10% in Bullock’s case). This was also not just a 2020 phenomenon. Despite a good year for Democrats overall in 2018, Democratic incumbent Senators lost in Florida, Indiana, and Missouri that year.

    Biden’s underperformance scared Democrats because it indicated a ceiling, rather than a floor for their strength.

    In 2022, Democrats will be defending Senate seats in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and New Hampshire, all states that went to Biden, but within margins whereby strong GOP challengers, which exist in all those states, could win. More problematically, the list of Democratic targets includes only Pennsylvania and Wisconsin among states Biden won, and North Carolina and Florida among states Trump won by less than landslide margins. Matching Biden exactly would get the Democrats a gain of two seats; but even in 2020 most Democratic candidates ran behind Biden, and Biden is himself deeply unpopular today.

    The situation in the House is, if anything, worse for the Democrats. Democrats lost 12 House seats in 2020. The impact of redistricting is overblown – Republicans will gain a marginal advantage from the lines, but census results show the areas growing most quickly lean Democrat – yet nonetheless, the Democrat position is so weak that any deterioration in Biden’s position will be fatal to their 2022 hopes.

    In effect, the 2021 Democratic majorities are on a “death watch,” and Democrats’ confused attempts to deal with that realization is determining their current erratic behavior.

    The split in the party is not so much between the moderates and the progressives. It is between progressives and moderates who desire political futures and those who know they have none. Pelosi is able to generally pass left-wing legislation in the House despite her narrow majority because many of her moderates know they are doomed no matter what, and are willing to cast their votes for the progressive agenda. In turn, AOC and the Squad feel free to sabotage any compromises because their own seats are safe and they believe they have time to fight another day, even if it is ten years from now. By contrast, both Sinema and Manchin seem to resent the efforts of other Democrat officials to pressure them to commit political suicide or behave as if they personally are doomed, just because it is true of some of their colleagues. In particular, rhetoric out of the Democrat caucus that Manchin is “probably in his last term anyway” or that Sinema “won’t win reelection” seems predicated on the idea that both should act as if they are finished and behave accordingly.

    But think about the deeper implications of that statement: All moderate Democrats (with the possible exceptions of Manchin and Sinema) are aching to do The Will of the Party and push the most radical, leftmost agenda possible if only it weren’t for the pesky problems of winning elections. Even moderate Democrats are leftwing radicals.

  • Democrats really want to get their hands on all your banking information. Remember how Obama weaponized the IRS? That was just a foretaste. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Biden: The war against terror is over! Supreme Court: Then why are you still doing all these things that are only legal if a war’s still on? Biden Administration: Yeah, when we said the war against terror was over, we didn’t mean it was over over…
  • You know Merrick Garland’s social justice warrior problem? It gets worse:

    We learned, too, that Merrick Garland’s son-in-law, through his company, Panorama Education, sells CRT materials to public schools. And yesterday, it turned out that Panorama is also spreading material calling Trump and his supporters “white supremacists”

    Alexander “Xan” Tanner, a very White man, is married to Merrick Garland’s daughter. Tanner co-founded Panorama Education, which purports to provide a data platform that delves into students’ psychosocial issues in order to help schools intervene in problems and improve the school climate. In a word, it’s creepy…

    The educational workshop released by Panorama Education, co-founded by Alexander “Xan” Tanner, the group’s president, revolves around “systemic racism” and includes an article as a resource that states the Ku Klux Klan and attendees of Trump’s rallies are both “examples of white supremacy.”

    Garland should be forced to resign.

  • “More Hunter Biden Questions: Art Gallery Repping Him Gets Big Federal COVID Loan.” Try to contain your shock.
  • A husband and wife were arrested for trying to sell U.S. submarine secrets. “Navy nuclear engineer Jonathan Toebe, 42, and wife, Diana, 49, were charged Saturday with selling secret information to an unidentified foreign country.” Bonus! “The woman arrested with her Navy nuclear engineer husband for allegedly selling secret information about nuclear submarines to an undercover FBI agent appears to be vocally in support of Black Lives Matter and ‘resistance’ movements on her social media.” There’s a lot of shocked face in this LinkSwarm…
  • Michigan charges three women with more of that 2020 election fraud that doesn’t exist.

    Investigators determined Trenae Myesha Rainey, 28, a facility employee, did not contact residents as set by procedure and instead filled out the applications and forged the resident’s signature to each application….

    Investigators determined Nancy Juanita Williams, 55, planned to control absentee ballots for legally incapacitated persons under her care by fraudulently submitting 26 absentee ballot applications to nine identified city and township clerks.

  • Sydney Lockdown Finally Ends After 106 Days.” Now Sydney residents just need to track down the people who ordered it and throttle them
  • “School district equity chief canned after racist, anti-white videos surface.” That’s a good start, but every “chief equity officer” should be canned. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • It’s FBI informants all the way down.
  • Empty Shelves Joe.
  • Morgan Freeman still isn’t having any of your defund the police lunacy. “I am not in the least bit for defunding the police.”
  • Democratic Virginia gubernatorial candidate and Clinton toady Terry McAuliffe lies again.

    Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe incorrectly stated on Thursday night that there were 1,142 children in Virginia’s intensive care unit beds, a gross overestimation of the virus’s current impact in the state.

    “We in Virginia today, 1,142 children are in ICU beds,” McAuliffe stated during a roundtable discussion with local reporters. The statistic is a massive overestimation. Virginia Department of Health statistics show that there are a total of 443 people of all ages currently in ICU beds, a fraction of the figure McAuliffe put forth for children.

    The state database shows the number of Virginians in ICU beds infected with COVID-19 has never come close to 1,142 since the first hospitalizations in March 2020—the peak of individuals hospitalized in the ICU with COVID-19 was on Jan. 13, when there were 587 cases. State records show that just 1,094 individuals younger than 19 years old have been hospitalized with COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic. Children, who rarely get seriously ill from the virus, have never made up a significant chunk of hospitalized individuals.

    McAuliffe also said during the roundtable Virginia had “8,000 cases on Monday,” another exaggerated statistic. On Monday, Oct. 4, Virginia saw 1,220 “confirmed” cases and 864 “probable” cases, according to the Virginia Department of Health.

    The state has never seen 8,000 confirmed cases in a day. According to the department, Virginia’s 7-day moving case average peaked at 5,904 on Jan. 8, 2021—a number thousands short of McAuliffe’s case assessment.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Oregon county declares “illegal pot emergency.” On the other hand, the “emergency” is that they can’t seem to regulate illegal pot farms.
  • Eight Texas Constitutional questions are on the November 2nd ballot.
  • “Longtime politician Mark Ridley-Thomas and the former dean of the School of Social Work at a university in Southern California were indicted today on federal corruption charges that allege a bribery scheme in which a Ridley-Thomas relative received substantial benefits from the university in exchange for Ridley-Thomas supporting county contracts and lucrative contract amendments with the university while he served on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.” This is the fed indictment notice, so it doesn’t mention that he’s a lifetime Democrat, in addition to being an LA City Councileman and former state rep.
  • Dwight has more details.
  • Art Acevedo out in Miami. Sounds like a mixture of BS and real Acevedo stupidity. And it’s generally not a good idea to compare Miami Cubans to commies…
  • This is why the left feels compelled to crush police unions: “Chicago Police Union to Defy Vaccine Mandate and Dare the City to Enforce It.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Buy an electric vehicle,” they said. “They’re just as good and you’ll be saving the earth,” they said. Well surprise! “UK Readying New Law Mandating Home EV Chargers Be Shut Down During Peak Hours.” Also: “Beginning May 30, 2022, all chargers that are installed must be ‘smart’ chargers connected to the internet, allowing their functions to be limited between 8am to 11am and 4pm to 10pm.” Big brother in his squad car’s coming near…
  • Communist China demands that Christian pastor denounce himself for daring to preach the gospel in violation of state doctrine. Oh wait, did I say Communist China? I meant “Canada.”
  • Texas House passes Save Girls Sports act to keep them from having to compete against men.
  • UK: “Sir David Amess: Conservative MP stabbed to death. Police said a 25-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of murder after the attack at a church in Leigh-on-Sea.” Police seem awful tight-lipped on details about the murderer…
  • “Wyoming teenager hauled out of high school in handcuffs for refusing to wear a mask.” Every. Knee. Must. Bend.
  • British baker busted for selling cookies with illegal sprinkles.
  • Amy Alkon posts negative review for company trying to game Amazon reviews. result: Amazon deletes the review.
  • Heh:

  • John Deere workers go on strike.
  • Freedom Flu protest outside Southwest Airlines Monday, October 18:

  • “Southwest Airlines Offering Free Flights To All Passengers Who Are Vaccinated And Can Fly A Plane.
  • When the federal government banned sliced bread, supposedly due to helping the war effort in World War II. But nobody would admit who ordered it, or what scarce wartime commodities it was supposed to save, and the ban was lifted after two months. Sound familiar? Well, except for that whole “admitting the mistake and quickly reversing course” part…
  • You may be metal, but are you reach your hand into a shark’s mouth to remove a hook metal?
  • Armadillocon is this weekend.
  • Get hyped!

  • Is Austin Homeless Funding A Conduit For Democratic Party Graft?

    Wednesday, September 22nd, 2021

    My working theory for why Mayor Steve Adler and the other leftwing radicals on the Austin City Council inflicted the homeless crisis on Austin is that the Homeless Industrial Complex is a particularly good vehicles for passing graft onto leftwing cronies.

    So yesterday, when current councilwomen Mackenzie Kelly (an outsider whose tenure postdates the disastrous camping law repeal) was kind enough to post a report on Austin’s homeless spending, I dove right in.

    Literally the first name I plucked out of Appendix B was Barbara Poppe and Associates of Columbia, Ohio.

    And the first thing I checked about Poppe was what political candidates and organizations she donated money to. Well, what do you know?

    Category Contributor Occupation Date Amount Recipient Recipient Jurisdiction
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 11-26-2020 $250.00 Fair Fight PAC (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 Barbara Poppe & Associates 10-30-2020 $500.00 Ryan, Tim (D) Federal
    Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 Barbara Poppe and Associates 10-22-2020 $250.00 Ohioans for Justice & Integrity Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 Barbara Poppe & Associates 10-01-2020 $250.00 Espy, Mike (D) Federal
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 Barbara Poppe & Associates 10-01-2020 $250.00 Colorofchange.org Federal
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 09-30-2020 $250.00 Colorofchange.org Federal
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 09-30-2020 $250.00 Fair Fight PAC (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 Barbara Poppe & Associates 09-28-2020 $500.00 Biden, Joe (D) Federal
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 09-04-2020 $250.00 The Collective PAC Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 Barbara Poppe & Associates 08-30-2020 $250.00 Biden, Joe (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 07-28-2020 $500.00 Biden, Joe (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 05-31-2020 $250.00 Swearengin, Paula Jean (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 05-29-2020 $250.00 Swearengin, Paula Jean (D) Federal
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 04-24-2020 $250.00 Fair Fight PAC (D) Federal
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 12-27-2019 $250.00 Colorofchange.org Federal
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 12-22-2019 $250.00 Colorofchange.org Federal
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 12-19-2019 $250.00 Fair Fight PAC (D) Federal
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 06-29-2019 $250.00 The Collective PAC Federal
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 05-03-2019 $250.00 The Collective PAC Federal
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 04-21-2019 $250.00 Fair Fight PAC (D) Federal
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 01-13-2019 $250.00 The Collective PAC Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 10-30-2018 $500.00 O’Connor, Danny (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 10-29-2018 $1,500.00 ZACK SPACE FOR OHIO Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA J
    Columbus, OH 43202 10-29-2018 $1,000.00 CORDRAY, RICHARD A & SUTTON, BETTY Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA J
    Columbus, OH 43202 10-20-2018 $500.00 CORDRAY, RICHARD A & SUTTON, BETTY Ohio
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 09-21-2018 $650.00 The Collective PAC Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 09-21-2018 $500.00 Pureval, Aftab (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 09-21-2018 $750.00 GILLUM, ANDREW D. (DEM)(GOV) Florida
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 09-21-2018 $250.00 BEJAMIN TODD (BEN) JEALOUS CAMPAIGN CMTE Maryland
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 09-21-2018 $400.00 STACEY Y ABRAMS CAMPAIGN CMTE Georgia
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 09-21-2018 $1,500.00 CLYDE, KATHLEEN Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 09-14-2018 $500.00 DETTELBACH FOR OHIO Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 09-13-2018 $500.00 O’Connor, Danny (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 09-13-2018 $250.00 STACEY Y ABRAMS CAMPAIGN CMTE Georgia
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 09-05-2018 $1,000.00 CLYDE, KATHLEEN Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 09-05-2018 $1,000.00 ZACK SPACE FOR OHIO Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 08-29-2018 $250.00 GILLUM, ANDREW D. (DEM)(GOV) Florida
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 08-26-2018 $250.00 Garrett, Janet (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA J
    Columbus, OH 43202 08-24-2018 $2,500.00 CORDRAY, RICHARD A & SUTTON, BETTY Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 08-10-2018 $250.00 O’Connor, Danny (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 07-16-2018 $250.00 O’Connor, Danny (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 07-16-2018 $100.00 STACEY Y ABRAMS CAMPAIGN CMTE Georgia
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 07-08-2018 $500.00 O’Connor, Danny (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 05-23-2018 $250.00 ZACK SPACE FOR OHIO Ohio
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 05-15-2018 $250.00 The Collective PAC Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 05-15-2018 $250.00 CLYDE, KATHLEEN Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 PRINCIPAL 04-21-2018 $100.00 HELEN PROBST MILLS CAMPAIGN CMTE North Carolina
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA J
    Columbus, OH 43202 04-07-2018 $1,500.00 CORDRAY, RICHARD A & SUTTON, BETTY Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 03-14-2018 $250.00 O’Connor, Danny (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 01-28-2018 $2,500.00 CORDRAY, RICHARD A & SUTTON, BETTY Ohio
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 11-23-2017 $250.00 The Collective PAC Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 11-15-2017 $250.00 Jones, Doug (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 11-15-2017 $250.00 Jones, Doug (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 08-18-2017 $2,500.00 Brown, Sherrod (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 08-14-2017 $250.00 JUSTIN FAIRFAX CAMPAIGN CMTE Virginia
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 08-14-2017 $125.00 DONTE TANNER CAMPAIGN CMTE Virginia
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 07-09-2017 $250.00 STACEY Y ABRAMS CAMPAIGN CMTE Georgia
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 06-29-2017 $100.00 CLYDE, KATHLEEN Ohio
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES LLC 06-20-2017 $250.00 The Collective PAC Federal
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES LLC 04-15-2017 $500.00 The Collective PAC Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 10-29-2016 $250.00 Clinton, Hillary (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 10-14-2016 $250.00 Clinton, Hillary (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 09-25-2016 $250.00 Clinton, Hillary (D) Federal
    Unknown POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 09-11-2016 $250.00 The Collective PAC Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 09-11-2016 $250.00 Harris, Kamala D (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 09-11-2016 $250.00 Rochester, Lisa Blunt (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 BARBARA POPPE & ASSOCIATES 09-11-2016 $250.00 Demings, Val (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 09-02-2016 $250.00 Clinton, Hillary (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 08-23-2016 $250.00 Clinton, Hillary (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 CONSULTANT 07-28-2016 $250.00 Clinton, Hillary (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 12-03-2015 $250.00 DORRIAN, JULIA L Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA J
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 COMMUNITY SHELTER BOARD 02-24-2012 $500.00 Kilroy, Mary Jo (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 10-21-2008 $100.00 STEWART, DANIEL K Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 COMMUNITY SHELTER BOARD 05-12-2008 $500.00 Kilroy, Mary Jo (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Holland, MI 49423 04-08-2008 $25.00 CMTE TO ELECT MICHELLE MAKSIMOWICZ Colorado
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    COLUMBUS, OH 43202 COMMUNITY SHELTER BOARD 06-29-2007 $250.00 Kilroy, Mary Jo (D) Federal
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 10-04-2006 $100.00 CELESTE, TED Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 09-23-2006 $100.00 CELESTE, TED Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, HERBERT & BARBARA
    Nederland, CO 80466 RETIRED 05-01-2006 $25.00 FITZ-GERALD, JOAN Colorado
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Nederland, CO 80466 11-03-2005 $50.00 GRANHOLM, JENNIFER M & CHERRY JR, JOHN D Michigan
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 03-30-2004 $100.00 STEWART, DANIEL K Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 10-15-2002 $100.00 MILLER, RAY Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Nederland, CO 80466 10-02-2002 $30.00 PLANT, TOM Colorado
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 10-01-2002 $50.00 MILLER, RAY Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 09-27-2002 $150.00 HAGAN,, TIMOTHY & TAVARES, CHARLETA Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Nederland, CO 80466 07-23-2002 $30.00 FITZ-GERALD, JOAN Colorado
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Nederland, CO 80466 07-17-2002 $30.00 STEELE, TERESA L Colorado
    Money to Parties POPPE, BARBARA
    Nederland, CO 80466 09-06-2000 $100.00 DEMOCRATIC SENATE CAMPAIGN FUND OF COLORADO Colorado
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Nederland, CO 80466 06-16-2000 $25.00 FITZ-GERALD, JOAN Colorado
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 09-14-1998 $250.00 FISHER, LEE Ohio
    Money to Candidates POPPE, BARBARA
    Columbus, OH 43202 07-31-1998 $50.00 TAVARES, CHARLETA B Ohio

    A total of 91 donations, all to Democrats and left leaning organizations, including:

  • Hillary Clinton
  • Joe Biden
  • Kamala Harris
  • Stacey Abrams
  • Andrew Gillum
  • “Ohioans for Justice & Integrity”
  • “Colorofchange.org” (BLM-esque group)
  • Etc.
  • Hardly invalidates my thesis, does it?

    There are lots of other names on that list, and lots of other ways for money to to flow into the hands of Democrats and far-left organizations.

    More research is needed.

    In Which I Take On Two Unwarranted, Unspoken Assumptions Conor Friedersdorf Has About Defunding the Police

    Thursday, August 12th, 2021

    Conor Friedersdorf has a pretty decent piece in The Atlantic about how disasterous and unpopular the entire “Defund the Police” movement has been:

    After George Floyd’s murder, when sweeping criminal-justice reforms seemed more possible than ever, many Black Lives Matter activists and their allies settled on a rallying cry: “Defund the Police.”

    That choice was a disaster. The slogan—shorthand for cutting spending on law enforcement and redirecting it toward social services, or, for more radical proponents, moving toward eventual police abolition—is a political liability, largely due to justified fears that, if implemented, it would lead to many more murders, assaults, and other violent crimes, disproportionately harming victims in America’s most marginalized communities. Yet even as the Democratic Party abandons the slogan, the activist left still clings to it, as if oblivious to its opportunity cost: Namely, the public is open to any number of potential improvements to American policing, but no politically viable reform is getting anywhere near the attention of “defunding.”

    Before the public sours on criminal-justice reform more broadly—as it may amid rising fears about crime and disorder in cities—a new focus and rallying cry are needed. And given the spike in homicides that has afflicted the United States during the pandemic, disproportionately killing Black people, there’s an especially strong case for this overdue slogan: Solve All Murders. Precisely because Black lives matter, people who take Black lives shouldn’t get away with it.

    The Murder Accountability Project, a nonprofit watchdog group that tracks unsolved murders, found in 2019 that “declining homicide clearance rates for African-American victims accounted for all of the nation’s alarming decline in law enforcement’s ability to clear murders through the arrest of criminal offenders.” In Chicago, the public-radio station WBEZ’s analysis of 19 months of murder-investigation records showed that “when the victim was white, 47% of the cases were solved … For Hispanics, the rate was about 33%. When the victim was African American, it was less than 22%.” Another study in Indianapolis found the same kind of disparities.

    Eliminating such disparities ought to be a priority for all Americans, including anti-racist activists. But that’s unlikely so long as Black Lives Matter leaders and their allies focus on defunding the police.

    Snip.

    Last summer, many progressives persuaded themselves that “defund the police” was not just a talking point that some radicals favored, but an attainable goal. “The movement to defund the police is gaining significant support across America, including from elected leaders,” The Guardian reported on June 4, 2020. “Government officials have long dismissed the idea as a leftist fantasy, but the recent unrest and massive budget shortfalls from the Covid-19 crisis appear to have inspired more mainstream recognition of the central arguments behind defunding.”

    Within left-activist bubbles, criminal-justice-reform proposals that stopped short of defunding the police lost any credibility. By mid-June 2021, for example, the leaders of 8 Can’t Wait, a campaign to get police departments to reform their policies on when and how to use force, felt obliged to apologize for focusing on lifesaving reforms rather than defunding. “We’ve seen dozens of cities adopt the goals of #8CANTWAIT, policies that can reduce the harm caused by police in the short-term,” a statement on their website declared. “And while we are proud of the impact we were able to make, we at Campaign Zero acknowledge that, even with the best of intentions, the #8CANTWAIT campaign unintentionally detracted from efforts of fellow organizers invested in paradigmatic shifts that are newly possible in this moment. For this we apologize wholeheartedly, and without reservation.”

    In fact, “defund” was the problem, because the mainstream still regarded defunding the police as a leftist fantasy. And that fantasy appeared to hurt Democrats in the 2020 election. “In the summer, following the emergence of ‘defund the police’ as a nationally salient issue, support for Biden among Hispanic voters declined,” the data scientist David Shor argued in an interview with New York earlier this year. “So I think you can tell this microstory: We raised the salience of an ideologically charged issue that millions of nonwhite voters disagreed with us on. And then, as a result, these conservative Hispanic voters who’d been voting for us despite their ideological inclinations started voting more like conservative whites.”

    The utter unpopularity of defunding the police has since become even clearer. By 2021, some of the cities that made the most significant gestures toward cuts to police budgets were reversing themselves. In March, a USA Today poll found that nationwide, “Only 18 percent of respondents supported the movement known as ‘defund the police,’ and 58 percent said they opposed it,” adding that “only 28% of Black Americans and 34% of Democrats were in favor of it.” The victor in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary in June was Eric Adams, a former police officer who ran against “defund the police.” In July, another USA Today poll surveyed residents of Detroit as that city suffered a rapid increase in murders. “By an overwhelming 9–1, they would feel safer with more cops on the street, not fewer,” the newspaper reported. “Though one-third complain that Detroit police use force when it isn’t necessary—and Black men report high rates of racial profiling—those surveyed reject by 3–1 the slogan of some progressives to ‘defund the police.’”

    Given bipartisan, pan-racial majorities that oppose “defund the police,” the Democratic Party’s explicit rejection of that framing, and the fact that most Black Americans favor more, better-trained cops on the streets of their neighborhood, not fewer cops in departments with fewer resources to train them, you’d think anti-racists would shift their focus.

    Instead, many activists are still doubling down on “defund,” whether in municipal budget disputes or interviews with national publications. Legislators on the Democratic Party’s left flank continue to press the idea at the local, state, and federal levels. The merits of defunding are still taken as self-evident in academic writing, tweets by prominent organizers, and professional PR campaigns.

    On July 20, I received an email from Ronja Kleinholz, an account executive at Berlin Rosen, a large PR agency that, according to its website, has offices in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, and represents clients including MGM Resorts, the Ford Foundation, Unicef, Singapore Airlines, and Virgin Hyperloop 1. “With continued talks around addressing rising crime rates and increases in gun violence, activists with the Movement for Black Lives are available to talk about why we must refocus the conversation around defunding the police,” she wrote. “While Republicans focus on fearmongering and blaming disinvestment in policing for rising crime rates, statistics show that police don’t prevent nor stop crime—in fact, they often show up after the crime has already occurred.”

    Some good points in here, but he fundamentally misunderstands the real motives of the people behind the defund the police campaign.

    The first unspoken assumption that Friedersdorf makes about the #BlackLivesMatter/hard social justice left is that they really want to save black lives and prevent crime, and that showing them that eliminating the police costs more black people their life than continuing to fund the police will change their mind. This is not the case. The hard left is ideologically committed to completely eliminating municipal police for at least two big reasons.

    The hard left’s immediate goal in eliminating the police is to ensure that all the money going to the police instead goes to them. Reading through the “reimagine police” document the City of Austin put out (and remember that Austin is one of the few cities actually foolish enough to reduce funding to the police in 2020) makes this crystal clear. Again and again they say money needs to be shifted from the police to “the community,” and again and again it’s clear that by “the community” they mean hard-left social justice organizations. The entities pushing this agenda will never agree to give up their push for defunding because that means giving up the dream of getting their sticky fingers into all that sweet cash. You can’t convince a man to see your point of view when their entire business model revolves around not seeing it.

    The hard left’s secondary goal in defunding the police is eliminating any organizations outside their control that might thwart their will to power, especially those that are armed. They believe (correctly I think) that police departments are institutionally opposed to their radical program to replace the American capitalist constitutional order with Marxism. (This is also why the left has never wavered in it’s support for complete civilian disarmament.)

    The second unspoken assumption that Friedersdorf makes about the hard left is that they can be remotely swayed by polls that show Democrats being defeated across the country due to all the “defund the police” rhetoric. Before they can seize control of the means of production, the hard left must first seize complete control of the Democratic Party. Time and time again, the corrupt wing of the Party (be it Hillary Clinton, Tom Perez, or Joe Manchin) has thwarted the will of the insane wing of the party. Just look at how many times they screwed over Bernie Sanders!

    If defunding the police causes a massive number of Democrats to lose their jobs in November of 2022, the insane wing knows that corrupt wing of the party will be the one to face the brunt of voter displeasure. As such, an electoral wipe-out only increases their chances of a complete top-to-bottom takeover of the party.

    In light of all that, the hard left has no reason (and no intention) of abandoning their drive to completely defund the police.

    The Return of Urban Blight

    Wednesday, July 21st, 2021

    If you didn’t grow up in the 1970s, you probably don’t remember what the first bout of urban blight in America’s largest cities looked like. High crime, endemic corruption, failing city services and decaying infrastructure were some of the hallmarks. Though cities like Detroit and Baltimore never recovered, others bounced back thanks to the Reagan economic boom, tough-on-crime mayors, and Broken Window policing.

    But thanks to the radical left, high taxes, lockdowns, antifa/#BlackLivesMatter riots, George Soros-backed DAs, and the Homeless Industrial Complex, urban blight is back with a vengeance:

    Six Target stores in San Francisco are adjusting their times, opening hours later and closing hours earlier to try to curtail soaring theft.

    They join Walgreens, which has closed 17 stores over five years in direct response to criminal activity. Last month, a video went viral of a hooded and masked man riding his bike into a San Francisco branch of the chain, loading a trash bag with merchandise, and riding back out — past a powerless security guard and two others filming on their phones.

    Early Monday evening, at least nine men and women smashed cases and stripped shelves in San Francisco’s high-end Neiman Marcus store, fleeing with a fortune in designer handbags. The brazenness is out of control, is goaded on by the normalization of masks, and is directly enabled by district attorneys and other politicians.

    The Golden City is joined by nearby Sacramento and Los Angeles, where retail crime has spiked, but across the country as district attorneys from Massachusetts to Missouri to Texas have declared they won’t defend citizens from theft, the story has gone much the same.

    While it’s insane that crime is so severe and law enforcement so nonexistent in a prosperous city that businesses must close their doors early or shut them entirely, there’s more in store. Far more ominous than a sign of how bad things have gotten, darkened windows and shuttered doors reveal just how much worse things are going to get.

    Snip.

    More than 50 years later, over-credentialed activists and politicians once again say they know better, and tell us our neighborhoods will be more just and “equitable” if we don’t enforce laws. Now business owners are telling those politicians they’ll need to close their doors. Residents are left to feel the pain of both the crime and the closures. The boon of life and appreciation is suffocating.

    Crime begets crime begets crime, and changes to enforcement and prosecution policies are entirely to blame. In nearby Oakland, where murder is up 90 percent in the past year and car-jackings up 88 percent while the city council continues to cut police, city leaders dismiss the surge in crime as “a bump in the road,” but for the people who live there, strive to work there, and try to not be murdered there, it’s more than that…

    Rising crime is a direct threat to our towns, our neighborhoods, and our families. Already in great American cities, urban blight is setting in. We’ve down this path before for virtually the exact same bleeding-heart reasons, and we lived through the tremendous pain it brought. We cannot let it happen again — unless we do.

    Things are particularly bad in San Francisco, where George Soros-backed DA George Gascon Chesa Boudin refuses to prosecute shoplifters:

    New York City YouTuber Louis Rossmann takes a walk down 7th avenue from 27th Street to Canal to record all the empty storefronts

    Here’s another, longer walk, showing more of the same, that businesses aren’t returning to NYC, despite which rents remain insanely high. They also pass a guy shooting up.

    Not even Broadway is immune:

    (By the way, here’s a video from the same guy talking about how impossible it is to get an NYC licensing authority to renew a license he had already paid for a year before, which finally got their attention.)

    But it’s not just New York. Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, and any other Democrat-run city that’s allowed antifa/#BlackLivesMatter rioting and graft to run rampant.

    Democrats were allowed to run America’s big cities for decades because machine politics mostly worked well enough most of the time to meet the needs of most citizens. There was enough graft, cronyism and featherbedding to keep close party coalition partners happy while still providing a minimum baseline of services. But Social Justice appears to be the straw that’s breaking the camel’s back. No longer content with traditional levels of welfare state clientism, Social Justice demands that all city funding must flow through its sticky fingers, especially police funding that previously keep big American cities mostly safe and livable.

    The security necessary to maintain life, liberty and property is the the most basic function of government. The Democratic Party’s need to replace police with social justice cadres is destroying the quality of life in big cities at the same time telework advances have made living in expensive cities unnecessary for vast swathes of American technology and service workers. With the antifa/#BlackLivesMatter riots that destroyed businesses built up over entire lifetimes and you have a recipe for increasing numbers of middle class Americans to flee cities Democratic polices have made unlivable.

    To quote Ernest Hemingway:

    “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

    “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

    “What brought it on?”

    “Friends,” said Mike. “”I had a lot of friends.”

    For “friends” read “cronies” (or “looters” if you prefer). Previously Democratic politicians were mostly content to take their piece of the action to keep the graft coming. That’s the “gradually” part. Social Justice Democrats want the entire pie, and they want it now, all of it, even if it means destroying American cities to do it.

    They’re eagerly devouring America’s seed corn, hoping to bring down the entire system and replace it with their neo-Marxist rule.

    That’s the “suddenly” portion.

    The physical and human capital built up in American cities took innumerable lifetimes to build up, but Social Justice is destroying it all in the space of a few years.

    LinkSwarm for July 9, 2021

    Friday, July 9th, 2021

    Greetings, and welcome to the return of the Friday LinkSwarm on Thursday! My Mac is working, my house is clean, and I have a newly painted master bathroom with a new floor and a new toilet.
    
    Some links are new, some from a week or two ago.

  • “Defector Provides Evidence That the Chinese Military Orchestrated the Creation of COVID-19 and Lab Leak.”
  • Minneapolis: “Black Lives Matter activists block city council member’s car until she signs statement that charges against rioters will be dropped.”
    

  • “Peter Daszak – whose ‘EcoHealth Alliance’ funneled U.S. taxpayer cash to the Wuhan Institute of Virology – defended SARS gain-of-function experiments that potentially rendered the virus ‘capable of directly infecting humans’ in a Nature article unearthed from November 2015.”
  • Know who else was funding Peter Daszak’s research? Google.

    The unearthed financial ties between EcoHealth Alliance and Google follow months of big tech censorship of stories and individuals in support of the COVID-19 “lab leak” theory.

    The Google-backed EcoHealth Alliance played a critical role in the cover-up of COVID-19’s origins through its president, Peter Daszak.

    Daszak served on the wildly compromised World Health Organization’s (WHO) COVID-19 investigation team. He championed the efforts to “debunk” the lab origin theory of the virus, despite mounting support for the claim…

  • When it comes to the factors that helped mislead the public about Flu Manchu, Daszak’s name comes up again and again:

    The more we learn about Peter Daszak, one of the main villains of the COVID epidemic, the worse it gets.

    Daszak is president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nongovernmental organization mostly funded by the US government. EcoHealth passed some of that money on to the lab in Wuhan, China.

    It was Daszak who organized the letter in The Lancet from February 2020 dismissing as “misinformation” claims that the virus may have originated from the Wuhan Virology Lab. The letter created the illusion of consensus, which internet companies proceeded to enforce through censorship, and the media reinforced by constantly interviewing Daszak ­himself.

    There might be journalistic value in hearing from the Chernobyl plant director about all those clouds floating over Ukraine. But if he suggests the rash of mysterious sores and cancers were due to a faulty shipment of microwaves recently arrived in Pripyat, you’d probably think he was engaged in a bit of “motivated reasoning.”

    Apparently not the World Health Organization, which invited Daszak to join their microwave hunt in Wuhan.

    In the last two days, Daszak has been removed from The Lancet’s own UN-backed commission investigating COVID’s origins, though whether he removed himself or was fired remains unclear.

  • I’m sure you’ll find it shocking that Daszak defended Fauci-funded gain-of-function research.
  • Haiti’s President whacked:

    Haitian president Jovenel Moïse was assassinated on Tuesday night in an attack on his home, the nation’s prime minister announced.

    First lady Martine Moïse was hospitalized for gunshot wounds she received in the attack. Unidentified gunmen broke into the president’s residence on the outskirts of the capital Port-au-Prince during the night and opened fire on the couple.

    “A group of unidentified individuals, some of them speaking Spanish, attacked the private residence of the president of the republic and thus fatally wounded the head of state,” Prime Minister Claude Joseph said in a statement. “The country’s security situation is under the control of the Haitian police and the armed forces of Haiti. . . . Democracy and the republic will win.”

    Moïse has ruled by fiat for the past two years after Haiti failed to hold elections and the parliament dissolved. Meanwhile, a new prime minister, Dr. Ariel Henry, was scheduled to be sworn in on Wednesday.

    Opposition figures said Moïse should have stepped down on February 7 of this year to complete a five-year term, and after Moïse refused to leave office thousands of Haitians protested in the streets. The government responded by arresting 23 people, including a senior judge and police official, whom Moïse accused of conspiring to assassinate him.

    He might have been right! But it’s not like Moise was some sort of Jeffersonian paragon:

    Haiti has experienced growing instability during the administration of President Jovenel Moïse, withunrest, high rates of inflation, and resurgent gang violence. The government’s failure to hold elections in October 2019 resulted in the terms of most of the Haitian legislature expiringon January 13, 2020, without officials elected to succeed them. Moïse is now ruling by decree. The judiciary is conducting ongoing investigations into Moïse’s possible involvement in various corrupt activities, which the president denies. Haitian Senate and Superior Court of Auditors investigations allege embezzlement and fraud by current and former Haitian officials managing $2 billion in loans from Venezuela’s PetroCaribe discounted oil program.

  • Speaking of getting whacked: “John McAfee Found Dead In Prison Cell After US Extradition Approved.” Ahem:

  • Also related:

  • Portland Can Blame ‘Woke’ DA Schmidt and Singer John Legend for the Police Riot Squad Walk Out.”

    It took 18 months of steady abuse by rioters and their overlords at city hall for Portland cops to say “no mas” and tap out. As one retired Portland police detective said, “If anyone did to a horse or a dog what has been done to PPB cops for 18 months, that person would have amassed hundreds of counts of felony animal abuse, but it’s perfectly OK to do it to cops, wholesale, and with an army of anarchist pals.”

    The police officers in the Portland riot squad, officially called the “rapid response team (RRT),” still work for the agency, but will no longer volunteer themselves for the duty that resulted in “nearly all” members being injured with “broken bones, torn ligaments, and cartilage, traumatic brain injuries, hearing damage, damaged eyesight, lacerations and burns,” in the words of the resignation letter sent to the chief by the squad’s leader.

    Expect more of this.

    Snip.

    The chaos started at the top by assuming rioters were victims and cops were criminals.

    In their letter, RRT leader Lieutenant Jacob Clark said rules on the books for dealing with protests and riots didn’t change, but interpretation of those rules changed often and were in conflict with interpretations by council members, the city attorney, and others. Worse, the changes in the interpretations were applied retroactively and officers, staying within the limits of the law, were suddenly written up under a new interpretation of the rules.

    Snip.

    You can trace the walkout by Portland cops directly to efforts that began with George Soros.

    Singer John Legend and BLM co-founder Shaun King followed Soros’s lead and poured money into the campaigns of district attorney candidates who believe cops are the problem, not the solution to keeping order. In fact, keeping order isn’t really a thing for these activists.

    In both cities, Leftists poured money behind DA candidates who promised to free criminals and do what they could to stick it to cops and police departments. Portland got Mike Schmidt and LA got carpet bagger George Gascon. These DA’s, aided by unhinged city council members – Jo Ann Hardesty in Portland, Kshama Sawant in Seattle, and their allies in city bureaus – have created less safe cities.

    Seattle’s city attorney and King County prosecutor’s lack of prosecutions against actual criminals – because woke ideology – has turned the Emerald City, like Portland and San Francisco before it, into a homeless encampment with no rules, free-flowing drugs, and free rent.

    Sounds familiar

  • Black mom slams Critical Race Theory at Loudoun County school board in Virginia:

  • You know that predicted lockdown baby boom? The exact opposite happened:

    Nine months after the declaration of a national emergency due to the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. births fell by 8% in a month.

    The December drop marked an acceleration in declines in the second part of the year. For the full year, the number of babies born in the country fell 4% to about 3.6 million, the largest decline since 1973.

  • The idea floated by Democrats that Republicans called for defunding the police is such ludicrous bullshit that even the Washington Post called them out for it. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Michael “Creepy Porn Lawyer” Avenatti sentenced to two and a half years in prison over Nike extortion case. Let’s take a stroll through memory lane over the endless MSM fawning over Avenatti:

  • 40 “progressive” groups sent Biden a letter saying that he shouldn’t let trivia like “Uighur concentration camps” outweigh pursuing the glorious illusion of working with China on “climate change.” What’s a little thing like “genocide” compared to self-righteous self-delusion?
  • UT has a CRT problem:

    s I previously reported, earlier this year, the University of Texas at Austin (UT) went off the deep end of all things “woke” and politically correct.

    Despite warnings from alumni, faculty, and organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the National Association of Scholars, UT quietly adopted a “Strategic Plan for Faculty Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity” that is genuinely chilling. Among other questionable practices, this plan institutionalizes the Critical Race Theory version of “equity” (equality of results, as opposed to equal opportunity, nondiscrimination, and meritocracy) as the paramount driver of decisions on hiring, promotion, tenure, leadership positions, and even teaching awards and endowed chairs at UT. It also creates a bureaucracy of diversity commissars in each college to enforce the new orthodoxy and mandates re-education of virtually all faculty in the new catechism.

    UT insiders tell me this plan was the brainchild and pet project of UT Vice Provost Edmund Gordon, a pronounced CRT advocate. UT’s adoption of this extraordinarily ill-considered plan was the last straw for me (and, based on responses I have received to my article, apparently many other UT alumni as well). UT President Jay Hartzell’s response to this criticism has been to ignore it, which seems to be his preferred modus operandi. President Hartzell’s calculus appears to be that, with the Texas legislature now safely adjourned from its biennial session. UT can continue on its merry way, unmolested by the unenlightened peasantry.

    He may be in for a rude awakening.

  • Russia unveils world’s largest submarine. I’m sure it will be well-engineered and quite capable (Soviet subs were), but I’m betting those “Intercontinental Nuclear-Powered Nuclear-Armed Autonomous Torpedoes” are almost pure vaporware.
  • More details of Mossad’s badass intelligence raid on Iran back in 2018.
  • The story of a woman who fell two miles from a plane and survived landing in the Amazon rain-forest.
  • Stop Extending the Eviction Moratorium. It’s a heavy burden both for landlords and for tenants who play by the rules.”
  • “Troy ISD to Consider $135 Million Tax Break for Solar Company that Pledges to Create One Job.”
  • Wells Fargo ending personal and portfolio lines of credit. Except for my mortgage, I don’t use credit these days.
  • “Hedge Fund That Bet Against GameStop Shuts Down As Backers Pull Money.” “White Square Capital, run by a former Paulson trader, has announced that it will return capital to shareholders. Some of the FT’s sources said the decision was likely due to heavy losses stemming from the firm’s GME short.”
  • Man wakes up to find $1.1 trillion in his Coinbase account. I think I could live on a mere half of that…
  • An $11 billion tunnel through the Alps.
  • The world’s most remote buildings.
  • When you go to church and a wrestling match breaks out:

  • Subway’s tuna sandwich isn’t.
  • I should probably save this one for Halloween:

  • Boom:

  • I think you may have overtorqued that.
  • “Biden Announces Putin Meeting Was A Success, Hunter Now Has A Job With Russian Pipeline.”
  • Requisite funny dog video:

  • LinkSwarm for May 28, 2021

    Friday, May 28th, 2021

    Like inflation and unemployment, crime rates are rising again. Biden is really the 1970s gift that keeps giving!

  • Democrats are weaker than they appear:

    Vulnerable red- and purple-state Democrats need some bipartisan cover if they’re going to vote for another massive spending bill. And Biden would prefer to have a unified Democratic Party blaming Republicans for the inability to come to a consensus than to have a divided Democratic Party with one side of the Senate caucus blaming the other side of the Senate caucus for the inability to come to a consensus.

    Chuck Schumer is largely bluffing when he says the Senate will pass an infrastructure bill in July, with or without Republicans. Democrats can go down this path, but it’s a risk that at least a handful of their senators don’t want to take, and when the Senate is split 50–50, the Democrats can’t afford to lose anyone. Those with long memories can remember when Democrats were convinced all the legislation they passed in 2009 and 2010 would protect them in the midterms.

  • Speaking of Democrats in trouble, rising violent crime rates are another thing that might doom them in midterm elections:

    A rise in violent crime is endangering slim Democratic congressional majorities more than a year out from the midterm elections and threatening to revive “law and order” as a major campaign issue for Republicans for the first time since the 1990s.

    Homicides in cities increased by up to 40% over the previous year, the biggest single-year increase since 1960, a trend that has not abated so far in 2021. Sixty-three of the 66 largest police jurisdictions saw a rise in at least one category of violent crime, ranging from homicide and rape to robbery and assault, according to the Major Cities Chiefs Association. Homicides and shootings have gone up for three straight years in Washington, D.C., and at least a dozen mass shootings were reported nationwide over the weekend.

    Democrats’ flirtations with defunding the police — a handful of lawmakers on the Left nearly scuttled a $1.9 billion Capitol security bill in the House — may make them ill-equipped to handle the reemergence of crime as a top issue for voters.

  • Speaking of rising crime rates, having Soros-backed Democratic District Attorney Larry Krasner overseeing Philadelphia has helped create the largest open-air heroin market on the East Coast:

    Mirrors are useful. A hooker walking down the street can easily fix their makeup. They can lean on them when they nod out too. In addition, when a heroin addict has no more veins left to inject in their arms, that mirror can help them find one in their neck.

    It’s kind of hard to inject a needle in your neck otherwise. Think about it.

    You’ll eventually get a sideview mirror ripped off your vehicle sooner or later. It generally happens as they nod out or “dip out” when the drugs kick in. When they slump towards the ground, they generally just take the mirror with them.

    You also become way to comfortable with people “dipping out”. It’s the local dance craze around here. As heroin takes effect, it’s almost like they fall asleep on their feet — slowly getting ever so close to the ground. Miraculously, they rarely hit the pavement. Many yoga masters couldn’t duplicate their prowess.

    Dippers are everywhere. It’s so common, YouTube has endless clips up and down Kensington Avenue; many have hundreds of thousands of views. A YouTuber named “HoodTime” has over 5 million views on a walk he captured through Kensington March of this year. Many others are following suit.

    Just walking through Kensington and filming gets you instant material. There’s always something to see here. It’s sometimes hard to tell if you’re in America or a third-world nation at points. But money hides in trash and addiction.

    As Mike Newall explains in his article for the Philadelphia Inquirer, some of the drug corners near where I work pull in over $20 million a year. He also quotes Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro as saying Kensington’s drug trade is close to a billion dollar a year enterprise.

    (Hat tip: Dwight.) There are ways to decriminalize drugs that don’t give a pass to widespread “quality of life” offenses. merely ceasing to prosecute people for open criminality doesn’t make the problems that open criminality engenders go away.

  • Even Ezra Klein says that rising crime rates are a threat to Democrats. Gee, I must have missed him expressing such concerns when antifa and #BlackLivesMatter were burning down large swathes of American cities last year…
  • In news of the Biden recession, both both inflation and unemployment picked up in April. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Gov. Ron DeSantis said Friday that he opposes teaching critical race theory in the state’s public schools, calling the ideas pushed by its advocates as ‘based on false history’ and ‘teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other.'” Good.
  • Kurt Schlichter: Bring on the ‘Asperger’s Republicans’:

    Far too many Republicans, for far too long, have found themselves distracted and/or enslaved by the elite consensus, restrained by norms and conventions that the liberal elite demands we observe, but that it itself flaunts when those rules limit its options. These Fredocons care what people who care nothing about them think, and they find themselves responding to the outside stimuli of the garbage mainstream media instead of focusing intently on conservative change while disregarding the slings and arrows of the haters. When it comes to fighting the establishment, political Asperger’s is indicative of awesomeness.

    And our next generation of Republicans needs to embrace their place on the Spectrum – the more inappropriate the liberal elite finds their reactions to its cues and signals, the better. No more tame, pliable sissies like Mitt (R-ish – Miracle Whip). No more of Nikki! Haley’s sucking up to the establishment while trying to grift the base by leveraging hack conserva-cliché’s from 2005 to present to us as hardcore instead of Jeb! in a dress. No more Kristi!s and Asa!s fronting as all tuff about men pretending to be girls to win races then folding the second the establishment disapproves. Instead, we need GOP politicians who are utterly immune to the siren song of a media and an establishment that seek to draw them in and crash them upon the rocks. Our pols need to ignore MSNBCNN and its hysterical horsehockey. They need to stop reading the NYT and WaPo and being scared that a bad write-up will get them uninvited to all the cool parties. They need to lock onto their target and take it out like an Israeli missile flattens a Hamas/AP frat house.

    Look at Ron DeSantis – he just doesn’t care what the bad guys say. Not at all. They scream that he won’t enforce face-diapering, that he’s too hard on election fraud, that’s he’s declared open season on those Antifa/BLM nimrods who trap normal citizens in their cars on public roads, and then DeSantis just goes ahead and does what he wants anyway. And it works – he’s super popular.

  • Also weighing in against Critical Race Theory: Austin Knudsen, Montana’s Attorney General.
  • How Democratic foreign policy “experts” are projecting their own failures on Jared Kushner:

    For the past four years, there was no greater laughingstock in the American foreign policy cognoscenti than Jared Kushner. A full-on consensus reigned that cast the previous administration’s Middle East policies as hopelessly ignorant and one-sided, a view that went unchallenged in the smart set’s Op-Ed pages. There was no easier laugh to be had, no quicker way to pull a nodding agreement, than to mock the intelligence and good will of the former president’s son-in-law, charged with crafting an American peace plan, and obviously in way over his head.

    But the Young Pretender in charge of the Mideast portfolio is gone, and the mommies and daddies are back in charge, their think tanks falling over each other producing glossy full-color booklets promoting policies that would bring to bear the priorities of people who actually understood a thing or two about Israelis, Palestinians, international law, justice, and most importantly, American strategic interests.

    And four months into the methodical implementation of all the bright ideas reflecting off those glossy booklets, the situation on the ground in Israel and the Palestinian Territories has taken a dramatic turn for the worst.

    Though Kushner is long gone, this latest conflagration has been laid at his feet. His name trended on Twitter for days as hostilities between Israel and Hamas escalated. “They really put Jared Kushner, the slumlord millionaire who couldn’t properly fill out security clearance forms, in charge of Peace in the Middle East. Failure was inevitable,” read one viral tweet. “Kushner’s Absurd Peace Plan Has Failed” blared the headline to Michelle Goldberg’s New York Times column.

    This is not just wrong; it’s complete projection. Kushner-era policies—on Jerusalem, UNRWA, and regional diplomacy—were promised again and again to lead to an “explosion,” but didn’t. The return of the experts was supposed to improve lives and prospects for Israelis and Palestinians alike, but hasn’t. In fact, it was the foreign policy intelligentsia’s values and vision that have led to disaster.

    Back in March, mere weeks into the new Biden administration, a leaked internal State Department memo outlined the contours of a new direction on American policy toward the Palestinian issue. The document called for renewed diplomatic ties with the Palestinian Authority, restoring aid that had been cut, renewing American contributions to UNRWA, putting pressure on Israel for moves in Jerusalem that would make a new Palestinian Authority election possible, and pursuing a two-state arrangement based roughly on the pre-1967 lines.

    These were all priorities of the smart set miffed by a previous administration that was too close to Israel for their tastes. But they were also terrible ideas. Take the renewal of UNRWA funding. UNRWA is the U.N. agency dedicated to perpetuating, rather than solving, the Palestinian refugee problem. By cultivating the myth of a non-existent “right of return” rather than rehabilitating displaced persons and their descendants, UNRWA ensures that a negotiated two-state deal cannot be reached.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Drew Holden takes us on a trip down memory lane of various MSM talking heads declaring that the Wuhan coronavirus lab leak hypothesis was a “conspiracy theory,” including all the usual suspects (New York Times, CNN, etc.).
  • “Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine (D) filed an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon Tuesday, alleging that the e-commerce giant has unfairly raised prices and hurt innovation.”
  • Glenn Greenwald: “A federal appellate court on Thursday invalidated the racial and gender preferences in President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act as unconstitutional. The Cincinnati-based Sixth Circuit of Appeals ruled that provisions of that law, designed to grant preferences to minority-owned small-restaurant owners for COVID relief, violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.”
  • “Moms Demand Action [AKA another branch of the Brady Bunch Hydra] member-turned-congresswoman in hot water over bribe.” Allegedly newly-elected Illinois Rep. Marie Newman bribed opponent Lymen Chehade to drop out of the race, then reneged on the cushy congressional job.

  • “Support for Black Lives Matter Movement Collapses Among Whites and Hispanics, Drops For Blacks.” The only question is why it took so damn long, when it’s been obvious for a long time that it is radical marxist garbage.
  • Christian teacher suspended after opposing the district’s transgender doctrine. “The teacher, Byron “Tanner” Cross, made the defiant declaration at a Loudon County school board meeting on Tuesday, according to the nonprofit group, Parents Against Critical Race Theory.”
  • Ted Cruz gets Biden ATF director nominee David Chipman to admit under oath that he wants to ban the AR-15. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Speaking of Ted Cruz: Israel has a right to defend itself.
  • “Hunter Biden’s Ukraine salary was cut two months after Joe Biden left office.” What a curious coincidence!
  • China Warns Australia’s Military Is “Weak“, Will Be “First Hit” In Any War With Western Alliance.” Knowing Australia, this is far more likely to piss them off than make them cower. Maybe Australia should develop it’s own nuclear arsenal…
  • CNN hits new lows. I suppose I should clarify that’s new ratings lows… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Screwed up even by the standards of Baltimore.
  • Politifact tries to fact check The Babylon Bee yet again. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • IDF stats:

  • Interesting: Higher reasoning functions wake up first from anesthesia. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Enjoy the original video for David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”.” A very different sound mix as well.
  • If you’d told me 10 years ago that one day Windows would run Linux apps, I’d give you a funny look. But that appears to be happening. “New Windows 10 test build adds first preview of Linux GUI apps on WSL.” That’s “Windows Subsystem for Linux.”
  • Now you’ll finally get a chance to read John Steinbeck’s werewolf novel.
  • “Public School Teachers Issue Students Their Summer Book-Burning Lists.”
  • “Newsom Announces Sweepstakes Where 5 Lucky Winners Get To Move Out Of California.”
  • A vicious pack pulls down its pray:

  • Report On Police “Reform” In George Floyd Square Interrupted By Drive-By Shooting

    Tuesday, May 25th, 2021

    Man, those police “reform” efforts just keep paying dividends:

    If you put this in a novel, editors would reject it as too unsubtle.

    Maybe CNN will tell us it was a mostly peaceful drive-by…

    Deroy Murdock Isn’t Having Your Critical Race Theory BS

    Monday, May 24th, 2021

    Deroy Murdock is less than impressed with Critical Race Theory:

    Critical race theory may be the Democrat left’s filthiest, ugliest big lie. It defines America as inherently and irredeemably bigoted, denounces all whites as racial oppressors, and diminishes all blacks as racially oppressed victims.

    Lies, lies, lies.

    The third lie is the worst.

    Black Lives Matter, the “diversity” police, and other “systemic racism”-mongers relentlessly claim that white privilege and white supremacy blockade black success. Blacks think, “Yes, we can.” The Democrat left replies: “No, you can’t.”

    Last June, Seattle staged something called Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness. This segregated brainwashing program for white municipal workers accused them of rendering people of color “unable to imagine a way forward that comes from a place of humanity and empowerment.”

    So, blacks are paralyzed victims, as helpless as butterflies ensnared in a tarantula’s web of white racism.

    < That Guy > Tarantulas do build webs, but typically not to ensnare pray. < /That Guy >

    This frightful fantasy is concocted to leave blacks cold and scared—all the better to swaddle them in the warm, loving arms of the left. Ultimately, like every Democrat effort, this is about getting elected, retaining power, and controlling Americans as tightly as possible.

    If this cleaves America like a log split by an ax, so be it. If whites must be vilified unfairly as bigots—to a man, woman, and child—who cares?

    And if blacks feel not empowered but enfeebled within an alleged whirlpool of white hate, then too bad. The Democrat left’s insatiable thirst for political domination must be quenched, by all means necessary.

    Snip.

    These “anti-racist” racists are serving social cancer from huge, boiling cauldrons. They are ladling defeatism into the bowls of black people and sickening the entire nation with their evil stew.

    They must be ridiculed, shunned, defunded, and dismantled.

    Read the whole thing.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

    LinkSwarm for May 21, 2021

    Friday, May 21st, 2021

    Biden behaving badly, Palestinian backers beating Jews, Portland crime soars, and the latest pause to the latest Israel beatdown of Hamas. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Dispatches from the swamp: “Former FBI director Louis Freeh gave $100,000 to a private trust for Joe Biden’s grandchildren and spoke with the then vice president in 2016 ‘to explore lucrative future work options’ with Hunter as the middle man.” Who watches the watchmen?
  • Joe Biden is the new Jimmy Carter, but worse:

    There has been a lot of discussion recently comparing the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter with the failing presidency of Joe Biden, but I will clue you in on something. Biden’s presidency is worse, and Biden is worse as a man and human being.

    We’re five months into Biden’s presidency, and already he seems determined to outdo all four years of Carter’s incompetence by Christmas. Inflation is rising, the southern border practically doesn’t exist, the Middle East is in turmoil, and we recently experienced a gas shortage thanks to hackers easily breaching our digital infrastructure.

    Snip.

    For Carter, this came in the form of skyrocketing inflation and fuel shortages, the hostage crisis in Iran, compounded by an inability to work with Congress and constantly butting heads with Tip O’Neill and the Left wing of the Democrats. Carter, simply put, did not get how to work with Congress when he arrived in Washington, having spent his entire career playing Georgia politics. Unfortunately, this contributed to his inability to pass legislation, even though at the time Democrats controlled the Senate.

    Moreover, Carter’s inability to get his own messaging right added to his problems. The best episode of this is of course the notorious “Malaise” speech, where Carter essentially told Americans that their best days were behind them. This certainly didn’t inspire confidence when there was indeed a crisis of confidence on the home front, while abroad the Soviets and Iranians caused their fair share of mischief. It took the conservative presidency of Ronald Reagan to fix things.

    During the 1980 campaign, an observer took note of the difference between the two men saying, “If you ask Jimmy Carter what time it is, he’d tell you how to build a watch but if you asked Ronald Reagan what time it is, he’d say it time to get this country moving again.” Reagan always knew where he was going and where he wanted to lead the nation,

    Today, Biden only seems capable of being led by the hand by his staffers and signing whatever Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer shove across his desk. When he does bother to make rare appearances, he seems to always pour gasoline on the proverbial fire.

    Already, inflation is rising under Biden’s direction, and despite a jobs relief bill that spent trillions of dollars, less than 300,000 new jobs were created as a result. On top of that, Biden seems determined, come Hell or high water, to ignore the crisis on the southern border, so much so that he refuses to call the situation an actual crisis. Did I also mention he’s done little to nothing to help Israel while Hamas pounds it with rockets lately?

    That’s all well and good (Biden is hardly the first president to bungle domestic and foreign policy) but Biden seems to genuinely care little for the country he was elected to govern.

    Unlike Carter, who to his credit is a patriot, Biden has caved to the whims of the radical deconstructionists by ignoring the very real threats of Antifa and BLM. Biden has entertained the possibility of giving federal grants to schools that teach Critical Race Theory (CRT), which postulates that all White Americans are born evil and that all Black Americans are born victims. While on paper CRT is supposed to teach “diversity and inclusion,” in reality it’s undoing the sacrifices of the Civil Rights pioneers who wanted us to not see color or race.

    Jimmy Carter was a bad president but he wasn’t a bad man. Biden is a bad president and a bad man. Carter never at his worst ever contemplated the things Biden does willy nilly, such as revoking Donald Trump’s protection of American statues from the evil of BLM and Antifa.

  • “‘Out of Control’ Shoplifting in Democrat-Run San Francisco Closes 17 Walgreens.” Electing the hard-left to control your cities the quickest way to destroy your quality of life. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Masking doesn’t do jack against Flu Manchu:

    The predominant conclusion is that face masks have a very important role in places such as hospitals, but there exists very little evidence of widespread benefit for members of the public (adults or children) as well as evidence that masking is truly an ineffectual way to manage pandemic-related spread of viral disease. As Kolstoe stated, it has become less about the science and more about politics and a symbol of solidarity.

  • Israel reaches ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza.

  • Of course the Associated Press knew they were sharing an office with Hamas:

    The AP reporters certainly knew they had Hamas neighbors. In fact, Tommy Vietor, former spokesperson for the National Security Council under President Barack Obama, even said as much on Saturday. “I talked to someone who *used* to work out of that building periodically who said he believed there may have been Hamas offices there,” Vietor tweeted. In other words, anyone who worked in the building on a regular basis understood that they likely shared an address with the Islamic Resistance Movement. Vietor also acknowledged on Twitter that terror groups “purposefully co-locate operations with civilians. But that is not a new problem.” Terror groups use human shields, and the press apparently volunteers to shield them.

    Here’s the thing: There’s nothing surprising about Western press organizations making arrangements with terror regimes. It happens all the time in the Middle East. CNN refrained from reporting on Saddam Hussein’s atrocities in Iraq in order to keep its office in Baghdad open. The New York Times famously led a tour group to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

    This situation is even more overt and obvious in Gaza. The only reason a press outfit like the AP has to open a bureau there is to cover Hamas, but it’s never been interested in reporting on how the group stores missiles in homes, schools, and hospitals, or on how little of the money it receives from Tehran goes to building civilian infrastructure or responsible governance. That’s because the only story Hamas wants coming out of Gaza is about the fundamental evil of the Zionist entity. Through direct threats as well as fixers and minders appointed to steer journalists in the right direction, Hamas lets every press outfit and journalist in Gaza know that if they do not understand this fundamental angle, they are not welcome in Gaza.

  • Peace-loving Palestinian supporters in London: “‘F**k the Jews’ ‘Rape their daughters.'”
  • More of the same fun in New York City: “‘Pro-Palestinian’ Gangs Attack Jews In Multiple Locations in Manhattan.”
  • “China aligns with Palestinians to deflect criticism of Uyghur Muslim genocide.” Call it the Axis of Scumbags. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Brandon Smith on why the U.S. military will never be woke:

    The language of leftists and globalists can be rather confusing because they never mean exactly what they say. The word “diversity” generally means “more leftists/Marxists”, not more brown people. Leftists are incredibly racist towards any minority person that argues from a conservative or moderate position. The phrase “white supremacist” is usually a hatchet reference to all conservatives. So, to translate their woke gibberish, the goal of the Pentagon under Biden will be to divest the ranks of the military of conservatives and replace them with more regime friendly leftists.

    The goal of propaganda is often to create false word associations in the minds of the masses. The mainstream media constantly mentions “white supremacists”, “neo-nazis” and “extremists” within the same articles they mention “conservatives”. Though there is no evidence whatsoever to link the majority of conservatives with race identity groups, the hope within the establishment is that the conservative base in the US can be dismantled through guilt by manufactured association.

    Anyone who stands against the social justice mob is labeled “white supremacist”. Therefore, all conservatives are white supremacists, because the social justice cult controls who gets labeled. The social justice cult thus becomes the self anointed arbiters of who gets canceled and who does not. See how that works?

    As far as the military is concerned, the obvious intent is to link all conservative views with “extremism and racism”, thereby creating an artificial rationale for removing conservatives from the ranks or denying them the ability to sign up in the first place. The Pentagon is already openly discussing plans to comb through the social media histories of troops in order to root out those with “extremist backgrounds” (conservatives and constitutionalists). In theory, this would only leave devout social justice warriors behind. It is a political and ideological cleansing of the armed forces.

    The Cult of Woke is like a hive of parasitic termites that feeds its way through the various pillars of western society until they crumble; once a pillar is hollowed out, they move onto the next one, and the next one until the nation or civilization breaks apart completely. As the nation is destabilized, they then offer their own social model as a solution to the problem. Invariably, their model is one that eliminates all individual freedom and inherent rights in the name of collective “safety” and “equity”. It is totalitarianism posing as compassion.

    To be sure, the Department of Defense is fast-tracking the woke agenda.

    Snip.

    Straight white men are noticeably absent from the Pentagon’s new series of commercials, and the people represented are a perfect pie chart of diversity hiring, even though the US is around 70% white and around 96% straight (according to Gallup).

    But who are these commercials really made for? The Army admits they had to search a worldwide roster of soldiers, obtaining only 100 submissions that fit their woke criteria, and then filtered those submissions down to just a handful that met the diversity requirements of the marketing campaign. Some of the commercials are subtle, and some of them are not. The US campaign seems to be mimicking the “Snowflake” ad campaign used by the UK military in 2019 in a bid to attract what they call “Me Me Me Millennials”.

    Clearly, the percentage of soldiers that check most or all of the woke boxes is tiny. The commercials are also notably in cartoon form, because SJWs have a hard time absorbing information unless it is animated.

    Snip.

    Globalists are very mindful of statistical realities, and they know that the current military dynamic is against them; hence their growing thirst for the wokification of our branches of defense. I want to remind conservatives that this is a good thing. They are trying to force social justice politics into the military because the military is the exact opposite of what they want it to be.

    For example, polling in 2016 showed that around 31% to 35% of the US military is Republican, while around 25% to 29% votes Democrat. But what about the remainder? The media often calls the remaining current serving voters “moderates” or “independents”. As it turns out, up to 40% of the military is actually libertarian or constitutionalist leaning according to polls.

    The mainstream media tries to hide this fact by only talking about “Republican votes” and “Democrat votes”, but the reality is that the vast majority of the military is conservative oriented, with values based in personal freedom and constitutionalism. That 40% of libertarians and constitutionalists is what the elites are really worried about. This is who they are referring to when they talk about “extremists” in the military.

    And what about the 25% to 29% of Democrats? That is the extent of the left’s hold within the general ranks of the military and it is improbable that most of these democrats are hard leftists. Further studies also show that the majority of veterans leaving the military identify overwhelmingly as Republican, conservative or “independent”, not as Democrat or leftist.

    This is probably why the latest social justice recruitment commercials by the Army are getting ratioed into oblivion by soldiers and the public alike. In response the Army YouTube page has shut down comments. Last I checked, the new LGBTQ and feminist inspired “Emma: The Calling” Army video had only 700 up-votes and over 33,000 down-votes. This is an epic fail. Where are all the hardcore social justice warriors just itching to join the military and “get some”? They don’t exist. The establishment is trying to appeal to a phantom demographic.

    The fact is, the only place you will find a preponderance of woke lunatics in the military is among the brass and sometimes in the officer corps; the leadership within the pentagon has been carefully groomed to create a leftist/globalist consolidation, and this has been going on for decades. Generals are for the most part politicians, not warriors (SPECIAL NOTE: Never trust retired generals or retired CIA agents, even if they claim to be on the side of liberty).

    While military leadership might go woke, this does not mean the rest of the military will, nor does it mean that troops will follow unconstitutional orders from such people.

  • Thanks to antifa, a Soros-backed DW and underfunding the police, Portland is enjoying record-breaking levels of violence and homicide.
  • They’re also the only big city that doesn’t use body cameras for police. Probably because they’d exonerate police and help convict their precious pet antifa rioters, and the powers that be in Portland don’t want that…
  • Alan Dershowitz wonders why the hard left loves Palestinian terrorists.

    In a world in which massive violations of human rights have, tragically, become the norm, why has the hard left focused on one of the least compelling of those causes — namely, the Palestinians? Where is the concern for the Kurds, the Chechens, the Uyghurs, the Tibetans? There are no campus demonstrations on their behalf, no expressions of concern by “the Squad” in Congress, no United Nations resolutions, no recurring op-eds in The New York Times, and no claims that the nations that oppress these groups have no right to exist.

    On the merits and demerits of their claims, the Palestinians have the weakest case. They have been offered statehood and independence on numerous occasions: in 1938, 1948, 1967, 2000-2001 and 2008. Israel ended its occupation of the Gaza Strip in 2005. Yet, even now, Palestinian leaders refuse to sit down and negotiate a reasonable two-state solution. As the late Israeli diplomat Abba Eban once aptly put it, the Palestinian leadership never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

    Nor are history and morality on their side. The Palestinian leadership allied itself with Nazism and Hitler in the 1940s, with Egyptian tyranny and antisemitism in the 1950s, and with international terrorism from the 1960s forward.

    The usual history snipped.

    The Palestinian people have suffered more from the ill-advised decisions of their leaders than from the actions of Israel.

    Back to the present: Hamas commits a double war crime every time it fires a lethal rocket at Israeli civilians from areas populated by its civilians, who they use as human shields. Israel responds proportionally in self-defense, as President Biden has emphasized. The Israel Defense Forces go to extraordinary lengths to try to minimize civilian casualties among Palestinians, despite Hamas’ policy of using civilian buildings — hospitals, schools, mosques, and high-rise buildings — to store, fire and plan their unlawful rockets and incendiary devices. Yet the hard left blames Israel alone, and many on the center-left create a moral equivalence between democratic Israel and terrorist Hamas.

    Why? The answer is clear and can be summarized in one word: Jews.

    The enemy of the Kurds, the Tibetans, the Uyghurs and the Chechens are not — unfortunately for them — the Jews. Hence, there is little concern for their plight. If the perceived enemy of the Palestinians were not the Jews, there would be little concern for their plight as well. This was proved by the relative silence that greeted the massacre of Palestinians by Jordan during “Black September” in 1970, or the killings of Palestinian Authority leaders in Gaza during the Hamas takeover in 2007. There has been relative silence, too, about the more than 4,000 Palestinians — mostly civilians— killed by Syria during that country’s current civil war. It is only when Jews or their nation are perceived to be oppressing Palestinians that the left seems to care about them.

  • Arizona’s Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema isn’t having any of it:

  • Orthodox Jews: “Live Near Hipsters, Vote Like Mormons.”

    The Pew study highlights a more interesting recent development among Orthodox Jews. They increasingly consider themselves—and are considered by others—to be separate within the Jewish community. Only 9 percent of Orthodox Jews feel “a lot” in common with Reform Jews, and a similar percentage of Reform Jews say the same about the Orthodox. In fact, both groups report feeling more in common with Jews in Israel than with their fellow citizens of the same religion but different denominations.

    Like their secular counterparts, Orthodox Jews are clustered in the Northeast, but they differ in having lower levels of educational attainment. About 60 percent of Jews overall are college graduates, almost double the rate of the American population as a whole, but only 37 percent of Orthodox Jews have college degrees. And even though these religious Jews are largely urban and suburban, they vote like rural religious voters. As Alper and Cooperman wrote, “among Orthodox Jews, three-quarters say they are Republican or lean that way. And that percentage has been trending up.”

    This split raises questions about the size of the various communities. The non-religious part of the Jewish community has long been and remains larger than the Orthodox component. Only 9 percent of American Jewish adults identify as Orthodox. They are, like the rest of the Jewish community, grouped largely in blue states. Only eight states have more than 200,000 Jews: California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. All of these but Florida voted Democratic in the last presidential election, and six of the eight—all but Florida and Pennsylvania—have voted Democratic in every presidential election this century. However, adding in the seven states with Jewish populations in the range of 100,000-200,000 yields a decidedly more purple cohort: Arizona, Connecticut, Colorado, Georgia, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia. The Jewish vote may be small, but it matters.

    The Pew study also makes it clear that the Jewish community is changing. Eleven percent of Jews under 30 were Orthodox in 2013—largely in line with their percentage among the older set. In the new study, that number rose to 17 percent—a remarkable shift in an eight-year period. At the same time, the older generation has a disproportionately low representation among the Orthodox. Only 3 percent of Jews aged 65 and older identify as Orthodox, and only 1 percent of Jews over 65 belong to the Haredi, or non-Modern Orthodox, community. Given Pew’s other findings on the Orthodox community, including much lower rates of intermarriage (2 percent vs. 47 percent in the non-religious community), and given the fact that Orthodox Jews continue to have more children, it is reasonable to assume that the Orthodox percentage of the Jewish community will grow even more in the future.

  • Kamala the unpopular. “Her favorability is just at 41%, and her unfavorability stands at 48%. Most problematic: One in 5 Democrats polled deemed her unfavorable, as did nearly 3 in 5 independents.”
  • Things that make you go “Hmmmmm”:
    

  • Facebook “fact check” is just there to push the proper narratives, the truth be damned.
  • Scottish university may expel law student Lisa Keogh for daring to point out women have vaginas.
  • AT&T Strikes $43 Billion Deal With Discovery To Launch New Streaming Giant.” “AT&T’s vast WarnerMedia holdings, which include CNN and HBO, will combine with Discovery’s assets – including Discovery Channel and Animal Planet – to create what management hopes will be a formidable competitor to Netflix and Disney.” Yeah, no. CNN is probably a negative asset at this point. And the price tag sounds a whole lot less impressive. And the price tag sounds a lot less impressive when you realize AT&T paid $85 billion for those assets less than three years ago…
  • Follow-up: “The DarkSide ransomware affiliate program responsible for the six-day outage at Colonial Pipeline this week that led to fuel shortages and price spikes across the country is running for the hills. The crime gang announced it was closing up shop after its servers were seized and someone drained the cryptocurrency from an account the group uses to pay affiliates.”
  • “19-Year Veteran Cop Suspended for Allegedly Running Meth Lab Out of NJ Home.” I think they frown on that even in New Jersey…
  • Speaking of New Jersey, a single rural New Jersey deli has a market cap of $100 million.
  • “Man Hijacks School Bus Full of Children, Gets Frustrated And Lets Everyone Go Because The Kids Won’t Stop Asking Him Questions.”
  • Speaking of attempted crimes gone wrong:

  • Boom:

  • Rudy Tomjanovich inducted into the basketball hall of fame. Long overdue.
  • “BLM Sends Rioters To Gaza To Protest Israel By Burning Down Palestinian Businesses.”
  • “Biden Worried Gas Shortages May Hurt Carter’s Chances Against Reagan.”
  • I laughed: