Category Archives: Social Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Cruz Versus Trump

21 Comments

The National Journal seems to be afraid of Cruz. But this betrays the usual ignorance of the Left about what constitutes conservatism:

Cruz isn’t merely a toned-down version of Trump. He’s just as conservative and just as volatile, though probably a little less erratic. The thing is, Cruz isn’t merely a toned-down ver­sion of Trump. And this makes him all the more dan­ger­ous, from a pro­gress­ive point of view.

As Jonah (and others, and I) have said, here’s nothing conservative about Trump. He’s a populist, willing to say whatever he thinks people want to hear. He must also be immensely frustrated that Cruz continues to refuse to take his bait. The debate tomorrow night should be interesting.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s a perfect example. Trump willing to “look into preventing people on the No Fly List from having guns.” Constitution and due process? We don’t need no stinkin’ Constitution and due process.

[Update a while later]

Annoying the media–OK, make that making their heads explode–is the only reason I can think of to vote for Trump, but it’s not a sufficient one for me.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

“Assault Weapons”

3 Comments

Support for banning them reaches a twenty-year low.

Part of the problem is that the nimrods who want to ban them can’t even consistently explain what they are, or understand what a semi-automatic gun is. And you’re a complete numbskull if (like Barack Obama and Josh Earnest) you imagine that terrorist attacks are going to make us more eager to be disarmed.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Los Angeles

3 Comments

City of losers.

Hell, it’s a whole beautiful state of losers:

Later, at the site where world leaders are meeting to negotiate a climate pact outside of Paris, Brown urged a small crowd to “never underestimate the coercive power of the central state in the service of good.”

“You can be sure California is going to keep innovating, keep regulating,” the Democratic governor said. “And, shall I say, keep taxing.”

Texas beckons. I just hope the transplants don’t ruin it there, too.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

About Donald Trump

24 Comments

Mollie Hemingway hates everybody. I agree.

[Update a while later]

“Choose the form of your destructor“:

People who are unhappy with the things Trump is saying need to understand that he’s only getting so much traction because he’s filling a void. If the responsible people would talk about these issues, and take action, Trump wouldn’t take up so much space.

And there’s a lesson for our ruling class there: Calling Trump a fascist is a bit much (fascism, as Tom Wolfe once reported, is forever descending upon the United States, but somehow it always lands on Europe), but movements like fascism and communism get their start because the mechanisms of liberal democracy seem weak and ineffectual and dishonest. If you don’t want Trump — or, perhaps, some post-Trump figure who really is a fascist — to dominate things, you need to stop being weak and ineffectual and dishonest.

They can’t help it. It’s who they are. It’s what they do.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Right To Bear Arms

…is not up for debate:

When debating the wisdom of the Constitution’s Second Amendment, the media tends to start from the presumption that the question is purely scientific, and that the answers can — and should — be derived from statistical analyses and relentless experimentation. This approach is mistaken. The right of the people to keep and bear arms is not the product of the latest research fads or exquisitely tortured “data journalism,” but a natural extension of the Lockean principles on which this country was founded. It must be protected as such.

…Reacting to this argument, we often hear advocates of gun control propose that the Founders’ observations are irrelevant because they could “not have imagined the modern world.” I agree with the latter assertion: They couldn’t have. As well-read in world history as they were, there is no way that they could have foreseen just how prescient they were in insisting on harsh limitations of government power. In their time, “tyranny” was comparatively soft — their complaints focused on under-representation and the capricious restriction of ancient rights. In the past century, by contrast, tyranny involved the systematic execution of entire groups and the enslavement of whole countries. The notion that if James Madison had foreseen the 20th century he would have concluded that the Bill of Rights was too generous is laughable.

Nor could the Founders have imagined the entrenched tyranny that would arise in their own country. Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Company were hypocrites, certainly — like so many at the time they spoke of equality and liberty while indulging slavery — but the generation that met at Philadelphia did at least consider that the institution would die out peacefully. Instead, it was abolished only by bloody force, and then transmuted into something almost as abhorrent.

And as he notes, proposals for gun control have always been profoundly racist, and remain so.

[Update a while later]

Related: The historical African-American tradition of firearms.

[Afternoon update]

No, the right to bear arms isn’t absolute. So what?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

The Democrats And Gun Control

11 Comments

This is what it looks like when the tide is turning:

Everyone sees that Obama and his minions not only cannot protect us, but that they will actively seek to stop us from doing it ourselves.

Everyone sees that Obama is simply trying to not let this crisis go to waste by stripping real Americans of their ability to protect themselves from Islamist murderers – and from his fascist dreams.

Everyone sees that we are on our own.

Bill Clinton definitely gets it; for all his myriad faults, he knows Americans and he knows “Give me your guns even though I’m utterly incompetent” won’t sell outside of Manhattan. It is even dawning on Hillary, a woman so dumb that she failed the District of Columbia bar exam. And it’s dawning on the down-ticket Dems who had been dreaming of retaking the Senate in 2016, but now get to run in red states on the platform of “Let’s bring in more Muslim immigrants and take your guns!”

But they can’t help themselves. They’re imploding.

[Late-morning update]

The Democrats have become unhinged and ugly on gun control.

To be fair to them, that’s not really anything new.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Loretta Lynch And The New York Times

8 Comments

How they made me join the NRA:

I wouldn’t doubt the editorial board of the NYT is also aware that the policy of the Nazi party was pretty close to what they are recommending, the confiscation of guns — for the National Socialists so that they could be sure they were only in the hands of those deemed acceptable (not Jews, etc.). To use Orwell’s term this time, that would make the NYT “objectively pro-fascist.”

But perhaps less harmful than our own government. Reacting to the San Bernardino Islamic ideology-based terror rampage… er, workplace violence… the first thing out of our attorney general’s mouth was to warn James Comey, director of the FBI, that the real danger from this event was anti-Muslim backlash and to watch his language. In other words, don’t call a duck a duck. According to DCWhispers, the order had come down from Obama and Jarrett to Lynch, in which order was unspecified, that Comey’s statements should be bowdlerized. It was.

Okay, I’ve had it. Mr. LaPierre, as I told you, I’m in. You’ve got another one-time Jewish lefty in the NRA. That should make at least one of us.

If these people want a civil war, they should be careful what they wish for, and shouldn’t delude themselves that they’ll win it. I don’t know if America will survive, but they sure as hell won’t.

[Update a few minutes later]

Barack Obama is getting what he wanted:

We now know from media reports that the President intends to call for gun control. He may even try by executive order.

This was the plan all along. Just like Europe.

Get Americans worried and fearful about terrorism, show that the government is incapable of dealing effectively with it, then declare that the only solution is to round up guns so terrorists cannot get them.

It is all by design. The President never had any intention of working aggressively to stop domestic terrorism. He needed it to fester and call it something else, just as he needs problems with Obamacare to fester to get to single payer, in order to curtail our freedoms.

Many of us saw this coming eight years ago. But more didn’t, or did and were cheering for it.

[Update a few minutes later]

The New York Times is calling for immense expense and a political civil war to reduce gun violence a negligible amount.