The Real History of Antifa
Kyle's a good guy, and a careful worker in his field, which is the study of radical organizations. You can trust his findings.
Concerns about Government Power
Some of us have been here for a while, as Ellen Reynolds at the Federalist notes.
Distrust of government is a tradition going back to our founding. “I am not a friend to a very energetic government,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in a letter to James Madison. “It is always oppressive.”It would be nice if these newly-shared concerns opened a path forward to solutions such as shrinking the size and power of the government -- to include the police agencies. We could even have fewer laws!
As a result, the founders carefully limited the scope and power of the federal government. Since then, conservatives have continued to be skeptical of strong government and big government programs.... But in the last century, liberal progressives have celebrated the expansion of the federal government and its growing power. It was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a champion of the Left, who transformed the size and function of the federal government, specifically the executive branch, when the Brownlow Committee recommended the creation of the Executive Office of the President in 1937. (Roosevelt’s predecessor, Herbert Hoover, was criticized when he replaced the president’s singular secretary with four aides.) Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, lauded by the Left, dramatically increased the role that the federal government played in Americans’ daily lives.
Under the administration of democrat Lyndon Johnson, federal programs (and their influence and power) expanded again, with “Great Society” initiatives such as Medicare, Medicaid, federal involvement in education, and public housing programs. Certain bureaucratic failures of these programs aside, the Great Society posed another reach by the federal government into Americans’ lives.
Today, a man who was almost the Democratic presidential nominee (twice) advocates for dramatically expanding the power of the federal government. Sen. Bernie Sanders has plans for the nanny state to become the provider of higher education, housing, healthcare, child care, and even high-speed internet. He also wants to erase the constitutional right to bear arms, and plans to pay for his excessive programs by taxing Americans.
For the last hundred years, the Left has been the standard-bearer for the growth of government. And suddenly, they’re reaping the results. They’re horrified at a strong federal government and its power to police its constituents. On behalf of limited-government conservatives: welcome to the club.
The Perils of Gentrification
There is more than one peril. One is that it will bring the Left's rich, white faction into conflict with minority group factions -- such as in this post, "Cats v. Communists."
But perhaps sometimes the friction produces not just conflict but hybrids.
But perhaps sometimes the friction produces not just conflict but hybrids.
Beginning in the 1960s and the ’70s, with the Weather Underground terrorists, and continuing in the 1990s, with “black bloc” vandals traveling around the world to smash office and hotel windows at global financial meetings, there has been a violent subculture on the radical left in the United States and Europe. For the most part, the members of groups like Antifa, the latest incarnation of the violent left, have always been the pampered children of the white overclass. Twenty-somethings who are poor and working class lack the money to buy fancy black ninja outfits and the leisure to spend time plotting in advance of demonstrations....The article is generally down on these spoiled children playing ninja, but sympathetic to the working class that's being supplanted. For those who remain on the fringes of the gentrifying areas, police are used intensively to protect the Cat Cafes owned by children of the overclass. This produces occasional brutality, which produces protests, which the children of the overclass feel very proud about joining and supporting. But they're the ones who are stealing, in the analysis of the poorer members being run out of those neighborhoods. The overclass children are stealing not just the neighborhood itself, but also the right to speak about these issues -- framing them instead in ways that are about the overclass' children's own issues.
What is new about the nationwide riots of the last week that have followed the death of George Floyd is the convergence of these two previously separate streams—traditional urban riots in poor neighborhoods triggered by police-related incidents, and the ideologically motivated vandalism by young white members of the overclass in downtown districts. This convergence is the result of hub city gentrification....
Gentrification explains why there are so many white young adults, both ordinary protesters and anarchist vandals, compared to African Americans in the videos we see of protests and riots in big cities across the United States, compared to images of urban riots in generations past. Thanks to rising rents, young white leftists and liberals have been displacing the nonwhite working class and poor, many of them social conservatives, in places like Brooklyn and Oakland and Austin.
The black poor and working class first had their urban industrial jobs taken away from them by corporate executives in the white overclass who offshored them to Mexico or China. Then they were replaced in their former urban neighborhoods by the hipster children of the white overclass. Now even their grievances like protests against horrific police brutality are stolen from them by their supposed allies in the white overclass and turned into an occasion for virtue-signaling or vandalism by the elite.They're sure too that they're the ones on the right side, the very side of justice.
Oops!
As the Russia hoax unravels, Rod Rosenstein admits to Congress that he wouldn't sign the Carter Page FISA warrant with the facts now in evidence.
A Headline You Don't See Everyday
"Bolivian orchestra stranded at ‘haunted’ German castle surrounded by wolves."
I suppose it's no surprise given the year we've been having.
Test Post #2
This post is also being written in 'the New Blogger,' which I'm told is going to become the default soon. This time I'm writing the HTML code by hand like I usually do.
BB: "Episcopalians Confused By Strange Book Trump Brought To Church."
Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, though, was nonplussed, saying she was confused by the strange book Trump had brought to church.... "No real Christian reveres a book like that. Well, maybe the Communist Manifesto or something. But not an old-looking leather book. It looks like one of those religious books, and Jesus wasn't about religion. He was about causing societal upheaval and burning things down."
Some Episcopalians suggested it was a cookbook and that Trump was only offering to bring something to the next church potluck. Others said it was a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, a revered religious text among the Left.There might be some good casserole recipes in there.
A Test Post
This post is being written with "the New Blogger," which I'm told will become the default soon. I've still been using the old one; we'll have to see if this changes things dramatically.
Here's a piece on the interview Rush Limbaugh gave with a radio host called "Charlemagne tha God" (apparently the same one Biden was talking with whom he, Biden, told that 'he ain't black' if he doesn't know how to vote). I think the author raises some good points:
RUSH: How do you stop it? (crosstalk)
CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD: I have a question for you. I want to know. How are you gonna use your privilege as a white male to combat this prejudice. You got a direct line to Donald Trump. (crosstalk)
RUSH: No, wait a minute, I don’t buy into the notion of white privilege. See, I think that’s a liberal —
CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD: You’re being —
RUSH: That’s a liberal — (crosstalk)
CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD: You’re being delusional.
RUSH: — political construct right along the lines of political correctness. It’s designed to intimidate and get people to shut up and admit they’re guilty of doing things they haven’t done. I don’t have any white privilege — (crosstalk)
CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD: Do you know what white privilege is? White privilege is that what happened to George Floyd would not have happened to a white man.
RUSH: If what happened to George Floyd had happened to a white man we probably wouldn’t have even heard about it.
CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD: Huh?
The pause lasted more than four seconds, as Charlamagne and his colleagues were caught by surprise.
Of course there have been white victims: Tony Timpa, for example, died in the custody of Dallas police in 2016. But his death did not provoke riots or become a national cause — nor did anyone take it as evidence of the conduct of police in general.
Charlamagne had not considered the problem from that angle. But what was even more revealing was that he was unwilling to discuss solutions to racism unless they involved Rush Limbaugh committing to ending “white privilege.”
In other words, Charlamagne gave power over his life, over black America itself, to a white man.
“An Unarmed Person Comin’ at ‘Em with a Knife”
More lessons on violence from Joe Biden. It’s the latest in a series.
You know, Joe, severing the femoral artery reliably leads to death too.
You know, Joe, severing the femoral artery reliably leads to death too.
Ymar’s Post
We are going to try something new, whereby Ymar gets a post of his own to comment upon. He’s agreed to put all the metaphysical commentary here, rather than in other posts. Those interested in that approach to understanding current events can thus get all of it in one place.
Today’s is the first such post.
Today’s is the first such post.
Insurrection Act
The President didn’t say it in so many words, but whoever wrote the speech knows what he just said satisfies the terms for invoking the 2002 version of the 1807 Insurrection Act. Of course, there is in fact an insurrection ongoing, but it’s still worth marking. Battle-hardened paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne will soon be deploying to American cities.
Have faith in them. They took the same oath we did.
Have faith in them. They took the same oath we did.
Second look at home schooling
Did too many parents get a look at the public schools' typical offerings via ZOOM?
We asked 626 registered voters, “Are you more or less likely to enroll your son or daughter in a home school, neighborhood home school co-op, or virtual school once the lockdowns are over?” In response, 40.8% said they were more likely to choose one of the alternative schooling methods, while 31.1% said they were less likely to do so.
While home schooling is often associated with conservative or religious families, surprisingly, there seems to be no significant difference here with respect to party affiliation. In fact, Democrats were slightly more likely (45.7%) to express increased interest in home schooling, compared to Republicans (42.3%).
The data gets even more interesting when you look at the breakdown by ethnicity. Only 36.3% of whites said they were more likely to choose home schooling, and just 38.2% of Hispanics. That number was much higher for blacks (50.4%) and Asian Americans (53.8%).
The Ships at Sea
The nearly-forgotten virus exposes a threat to naval forces: what if a single case aboard could disable a major warship, even a fleet? Fortunately, that is not the case this time out.
The Theodore Roosevelt has now returned to sea, and the final data offered by the Navy remains at 1,102 cases, with only one reported death. Presumably, additional deaths aboard the ship would qualify as a “significant change,” and thus we can assume that, while still tragic, only one person, 41-year-old Chief Petty Officer Charles Robert Thacker Jr., died of the virus. The Navy has not disclosed whether Thacker suffered from any underlying health conditions.Unfortunately, staying young is not an option. Staying healthy may not be either, although staying in shape is something most of us can do.
Doing some simple math, COVID-19 aboard the Theodore Roosevelt had a death rate of 0.09 percent, while the estimated death rate for the seasonal flu is 0.1 percent.
This data point offers incredibly useful insight into how COVID-19 affects a young and healthy population. Most enlisted sailors are under 30 years old.
A similarly low death rate has been seen on France’s Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier, where more than 1,000 sailors contracted the virus but zero died. These death rates are even lower than estimates in a new CDC report, which estimates the death rate for people under 50 years old at only 0.05 percent.
No Help from Police in Raleigh
At the capital of my new home state, the police chief says that she will not put an officer in harm's way to protect your property from destruction. We have to understand, she says, that it's not just law enforcement that is racist: it's the whole society. The police chief is in favor of group punishment of Americans for our collective sins.
North Carolina law currently does not allow for the use of lethal force to protect property, either, so citizens protecting their own businesses are putting themselves in grave legal peril. For the moment, at least: I expect that after the election we may well have some new laws on that subject. Also, you might have trouble finding a jury to convict someone for protecting their businesses after the police chief formally disavowed any duty to (or interest in) such protection.
North Carolina law currently does not allow for the use of lethal force to protect property, either, so citizens protecting their own businesses are putting themselves in grave legal peril. For the moment, at least: I expect that after the election we may well have some new laws on that subject. Also, you might have trouble finding a jury to convict someone for protecting their businesses after the police chief formally disavowed any duty to (or interest in) such protection.
Armed Voluntold
You should probably be prepared to hear this.
If the police dispatcher tells you "Do what you have to do," what are you prepared to do? You're a citizen. You have the right to keep and bear arms, and a duty to protect the common peace and to uphold the republic.
Some of you took oaths to the Constitution, but probably all of you said the Pledge of Allegiance at some time in your life. Did you mean it?
If the police dispatcher tells you "Do what you have to do," what are you prepared to do? You're a citizen. You have the right to keep and bear arms, and a duty to protect the common peace and to uphold the republic.
Some of you took oaths to the Constitution, but probably all of you said the Pledge of Allegiance at some time in your life. Did you mean it?
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