Where the Shooters Come From

Mark Noonan53 Comments

RSM delved into the El Paso shooter’s background. Its pretty much exactly what you would expect. Parents are divorced. They taught him love and tolerance, but apparently neglected such basics as “right and wrong” and “how to use a GPS” (he got lost on his way to his massacre). His mom is a nurse and dad is a therapist…so, likely not poor people, but their son was on food stamps (how in heck a single man with no kids gets food stamps we’ll leave for another time).

Not too long ago I was in conversation with a 20 year old. A very bright person attending college. The product of a broken home, but still fairly well adjusted. Over the course of the conversation (several people were there) this youngster asserted to racist views. I was very surprised at this, at first. After the encounter, it stuck in my mind and I pondered it. How does a person brought up long after slavery and Jim Crow and put through an education system which relentlessly preaches against racism become a racist? It was simple once I hit on it: because this youngster was born after Jim Crow and was relentlessly taught not just that racism is bad, but that white people are inherently racist, and thus bad.

People, you see, don’t like to be taught they are bad. I’m sure it infuriated black people back in the day to have whole swaths of the system essentially preach their inferiority to whites. On balance, the petty racism a black person would encounter was probably less of an affront than his very government and society telling him that he was second rate. For a couple decades now, white kids in public schools have been taught precisely that: they are inferior. They are born racists; they have unearned privilege; on and on like that. None of it being remotely true; and some white kid gets an earful of that and becomes resentful. Couple that with being a failure (as all these shooters are), being entirely ignorant of actual history (and thus having no way to be proud of anything outside their miserable selves) and from backgrounds likely to remove all real moral instruction, and that’s where you get the mass murderers.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan42 Comments

Lots of things are being proposed in the wake of the mass shootings, the most pernicious being the red flag laws. Imagine an America where liberals get to turn you in to the police with the accusation that you’re insane, and then you have to prove you’re not in order to keep your right to bear arms.

Democrats, sick people that they are, are fundraising off the shootings. Beto has been the most vile in this, directly accusing the President of racism.

The Dayton shooter seems to have been a far-left kook, while the El Paso shooter supposedly had some rightwing leanings. This works out to the MSM covering El Paso while downplaying Dayton.

The people of Hong Kong are rising up against their Communist overlords – but they will not be successful. The Chinese government would like to defuse the situation with little or no bloodshed, if possible, but make no mistake about it: Hong Kong will be brought fully under the heel of Beijing. The people of Hong Kong have no way to resist: they don’t have guns.

Meanwhile, China is developing a plan for a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere…and like the last one attempted by Japan, they aren’t asking Great East Asia if they want to be part of it.

Leftists forced the New York Times to memory hole a headline about Trump the left didn’t agree with. Paper of record, ya’ll…its just a record of how to surrender to Communist apparatchiks.

Conservatism Recovered

Mark Noonan38 Comments

Excellent article by Julie Kelly about understanding what has really happened to Conservatism:

The realignment of the political Right has prompted a public confessional of sorts, a raw acknowledgement that millions of us were led astray by Republiican leaders we trusted, we voted for, and we defended during times of war. We only have ourselves to blame, of course, because we did it with our eyes wide open. But the Trump era is forcing many Republicans to reexamine what we once believed and reassess what actually is true.

In a fiery speech earlier this month at the National Conservatism conference in Washington, D.C., Fox News host Tucker Carlson talked about purging his “mental attic” to dust off the ideas that he had accepted as legitimate over past few decades.

“The Trump election was so shocking . . . that it did cause some significant percentage of people to say ‘wait a second, if that can happen, what else is true?’” Carlson said. “Just look around . . . who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? A lot of the people we’ve been told are good guys are not. Some of them are the worst guys. I’ll let you figure out who.”

One of the crucial things to understand about politics is that it draws layabouts like s*** draws flies. That is, it draws rent-seeking nincompoops who are determined to live well without having to actually produce anything. No political ideology is free from this. Heck, even the most productive companies in the world aren’t entirely free of it. There are always – always – people trying to get a free ride.

Modern Conservatism got its start in reaction to the changes in American governance introduced during the Roosevelt Administration in the 1930s. It was correctly understood that the ultimate result of Roosevelt policies would be the end of the America founded in 1776. It was a movement to roll back the government; stand firm for American defense and defend the family and our social institutions from the remorseless attack of the Left. This movement reached its peak in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980…and I think we all thought that we really had won. That is, we thought that our ideas had proven correct and that going forward it would just be the increasing implementation of the ideas of Conservatism. We now know that it didn’t work out that way…and it didn’t work out that way because in the wake of Reagan, we got a host of political barnacles who spoke the words of Conservatism, but didn’t really have an interest in carrying out Conservatism. We were consumed by rent-seekers when we needed committed fighters.

But for the longest time, most of us went along with them – they were our leaders, after all. They wrote for prestige magazines. They had best-selling books. TV shows. And they did, indeed, speak the words of Conservatism…but always with a caveat which we ignored or didn’t understand. Now was always not the exact, perfect time to really press for Conservatism. We always had to do something else first, and getting that done invariably meant not fighting a particular battle for a Conservative principle. We were kept on the hook by endless promises that the New Dawn would come, and we’d finally be in the right moment where we could fight the left tooth and nail. But, it never came. Of course, it was never meant to come. The grifters running the Conservative show didn’t want that – because they weren’t really Conservative. They liked their swank gigs and they knew that to keep them they needed to keep talking right, but they weren’t about to go to their liberal friends and explain that they had to actually fight to defend the family, or even to defend the concepts of “male” and “female”.

Those of you reading me here have known that I had my doubts for many years – even stretching back to the Bush the Younger years…and, truth be told, some doubts even in the Clinton years. A gnawing feeling that we were being sold down the river and that not everything we were taught to revere was worthy. But I did keep to being a loyal foot soldier. Partly, of course, because no matter how bad the GOPe squish being foisted upon me, he or she was still miles better than the Democrat. But that was still folly on my part, and I see that now with blinding clarity. It has always been better to suffer even crushing defeat while fighting for what we believe in than to “win” with someone who will merely slow down our defeat. Douglas MacArthur was once asked his formula for defensive war and he gave a one word answer: “defeat”. You can’t win unless you attack – and attacking requires a ruthless willingness to take and inflict pain.

Trump isn’t a Conservative; not remotely. Except in one, crucial aspect: Conservatism is really just common sense, and Trump has bags of that. He’s not someone, I think, who has delved deeply into Adam Smith, Edmund Burke and F.A. Hayek. He’s not, that is, an intellectual of the Right. But, then again, who is? Bill Kristol? Max Boot? David French? If these are our intellectuals, then we’re doomed. Trump isn’t advancing Conservatism in a conscious sense – but by doing what makes sense, he’s advancing it all the same. It is common sense that the judges merely enforce the laws; to do otherwise means there is no law, and thus no chance for justice or mercy or even sanity. The only judges out there who will simply enforce the laws are Conservative judges…and, so, common sense dictates the appointment only of Conservative judges. It’d be stupid to waste even a single life time appointment on a non-Conservative judge because that means you’re just giving the anti-law, insane Left side of the aisle an unearned win and making life harder for yourself going forward.

So it is with act after act. True, it’d be nice if Trump would take on the national debt, but that is something that only concerns a small number of people. Yes, the debt is a looming national catastrophe and if we don’t get a handle on it, we’re going to pay a high price for our profligacy. But Trump isn’t particularly concerned about it and never has been. Can’t ask a man to be what he isn’t. And at the end of the day, the pretend-Conservatives who ran our movement since Reagan also didn’t do a damn thing about the debt. Perhaps Trump’s successor can be made to do what is necessary (it won’t really be hard: at it takes is a good economy and a really very small reduction in overall government spending over a period of 10 years to get to balance and debt reduction). But the bottom line is that outside of the debt, Trump is moving the Conservative ball forward even more effectively than Reagan (who also didn’t tackle the debt). And by doing this – by actually implementing Conservatism – Trump is doing the best thing anyone has ever done for us: exposing the traitors in our ranks.

Remember, these are grifters who merely want to live well without doing anything. They are best friends with their Leftist counterparts, who are also grifting (but who also do advance Leftism…so while the liberal foot soldiers are getting robbed just as blind as we were, at least Leftism is being advanced; this makes the Leftwing grifters the moral superior of the Conservative grifters). It was all fine as long as nothing actually happened in a Conservative sense. Along comes Trump and he starts doing Conservative things and they all had a choice to make: some choose to actually join the side they said they were on…others have decided to join the Left, which they always in fact were part of. For us, it means we have been able to recover Conservatism. We’ve taken it out of the hands of the thieves who stole it in the aftermath of Ronald Reagan…and no longer bound to anything that happened in the past, we are able to jettison even the mistakes that Reagan made, most notably the 1986 Amnesty. But we’ve also given up on nation building and endless war. We no longer desire to defend large corporations. We no longer defend “free trade” which merely meant middle class jobs being sent to Chinese sweated labor. We are able to start counterattacking the advances of the Left.

In my view, it is time to forget 1989 to 2009. It was a wasted 20 years, as far as Conservatism was concerned. Anyone – even the most dyed in the wool Never Trump – is free to join or reject us; we don’t care what anyone chooses and no hard feelings against anyone who repents and gets on board. But we’re now going to fight. We still may lose, but we’re not going to roll over for the Left.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan17 Comments

Ace went off on a bit of a rant about the fact that both US and Brit intel people were passing messages back and forth wondering if both Brexit and Trump were the result of Russian interference:

These people are literally insane, and were in the grips of a hysterical delusion — “without evidence,” as the hysterical leftwing media might say — and they run the f***ing world without our consent and in secrecy.

These “intelligence officials” are so completely out-of-touch they cannot fathom even the possibility that the wider public might deviate from the BBC/MSM line that defines their reality, and immediately suspect RUSSIAN AGENTS must be behind any deviation from the expected left-liberal upper middle class consensus that they believe is the only mode of thought or possibility in the world.

Ace goes on to note that they are “pig-ignorant and stupid”. I fact checked that assertion and found it to be completely true. The people who run the world are mostly behind the scenes and man the corporate and government bureaucracies around the world. The all went to the same sort of schools and learned the same sort of things and are completely convinced they simply know better than everyone who isn’t in their clique. Trump, Brexit, Hungary, Poland…all these people and movements which propose to give regular folks a say are a terror to these people. They really do fear that if we secure power, we’ll immediately launch global nuclear war…that is, if we don’t immediately start committing genocide. They think we’re too stupid to be trusted with power…and so it came naturally to them to think that we dimwits were being fooled by someone into wanting Britain to be free or America to be great again. And we simply must get rid of them – the survival of our nation and civilization requires it. They have to go, by any means necessary.

Democrats are pretty much all-in on Medicare for All…but I don’t think it’ll play well with suburban voters. We’ll see.

Yes, the polls are biased:

While looking into this phenomenon in 2016, I contacted a number of polling groups. I knew that they “weight” and adjust their samples to make them reflect certain demographics of the U.S. population. In simple terms, if their sample ends up with too many young people, they assign greater weight to responses from older people. The methods they use to do so vary and are arcane, to say the least. For example, ABC states that it “adopted iterative weighting, also known as raking or rim weighting, in which the sample is weighted sequentially to Census targets one variable at a time, continuing until the optimum distribution is achieved.”

But one of the most interesting things I learned had to do with one big factor for which they typically don’t “weight” or adjust. It’s one that I think is arguably among the most important when it comes to polls measuring political issues: political affiliation. In other words, the national pollsters I spoke with told me that if they end up interviewing significantly more Democrats than Republicans — which is often the case — they don’t necessarily adjust the results to try to make the sample reflective of the U.S. voting population.

I also bet that, on the flip side, if they are finding significant numbers of Democrats who are going towards the Republicans, they toss that data out. It is how they missed PA and MI in 2016…they probably had somewhere in their data the indication that Trump was doing well in both States, but as it didn’t fit their pre-determined polling outcome, they just ignored it. Right now, except for a few outliers, all polling indicates that Trump is doomed – that there isn’t the slightest chance of him winning. They even have polling showing the Democrats are taking Texas. Now, I can’t say for certain, because I don’t have certain knowledge: but I will say I highly doubt all this polling. I doubt that Trump could raise the money and draw the crowds if he was in such bad shape that he was about to lose Texas. I also doubt that somewhat more than 25% of his 2016 Texas voters have suddenly discovered a desire for far-left Progressive policies. But, we’ll see…and what we’ll see, I’m guessing, will be a repeat of 2016.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan31 Comments

So, Trump called out Representative Cummings about how his District is lousy. Democrats, MSMers and Never Trump (bit I repeat myself) all jumped on it as racist – which shows how incredibly stupid they all are. Cummings has been in Congress for 23 years, “fighting for his constituents”…which means he’s the most incompetent fighter the world has ever seen.

What Trump did was a flash of strategic brilliance – he’s forcing Democrats to defend the indefensible (ie, the places they’ve run into the ground) while also, just perhaps, opening a few eyes. The inner city – entirely Democrat run – is a festering sore on the nation. Places with no jobs (except for the political connected), no hope; fatherless families; high crime; drug addiction; abuse of various types. They are havens for gangsters. Their infrastructure is crumbling. Disease is common. Garbage goes uncollected. They are getting infested with rats. But we’ve all pretty much pretended that none of it was happening – for fear of being called racist as a huge number of the politicians directly in charge are black. Well, Trump has the guts – and now the Democrats have to defend what they’ve done. It will end badly for them. They made these areas what they are – and they are horrible.

A Christian heretic becomes an apostate – some geebo who wrote a while back ago that if you do A and B and C, then God will surely give you D, in this case in relation to sex. It doesn’t work like that: God isn’t a vending machine. People are always trying to fit Christ’s message into their own desires…they manage this trick by ignoring such crucial things as the command to take up your cross and follow Him. God doesn’t promise you joy and wealth on Earth…He promises you eternal life, which is vastly more important, and next to which any sufferings here are nothing. You may get joy and wealth, but rely on it you didn’t get them because you’re special. And you may get suffering – in which case, you rely on God and do your best.

Don Surber has more faith in PM Boris Johnson than I do – but that is because I think Britain is already dead. I’ll be pleased to be proven wrong.

Anti-Semitism will get you fired from CNN…but only if someone NOT from CNN uncovers it. If only CNN had people who were trained to investigate things and report the facts…

Open Thread

Mark Noonan44 Comments

Interesting article about the Trump/Bolton dynamic. You may have been wondering – many have – how an Establishment guy like Bolton manages to work with Trump? Well, the bottom line is that Bolton is a patriot, first and foremost. Bolton knows that his job is to provide the President with the best advice possible…and then let the President decide the course of action. Bolton is, apparently, abrasive and pushy (and this does some times rankle Trump), but at the end of the day, when the President decides, Bolton backs the President. This isn’t the first time a leader had someone like that on his team – and the best leaders have two or three like that. You have to, if you want to win…you need people who aren’t afraid of you, who can shake you up, but who will also do as they’re told.

Omar’s family is keeping to Omerta about her marriage issues – to the point where even reporters trying to figure it all out just can’t do it. To me this means that there is something in there hideously embarrassing.

NR article about how the Left is convinced they’ve already won in 2020. I’ve seen this for about a year – especially after the mid-terms. the Left isn’t convinced they will win: they are convinced that they already have won; with a subtext that if Trump did somehow manage to win, it could only be via fraud. The Left looks at the vision of future America and the 2044 Presidential election wherein a majority of Americans will be non-white and so their future is assured, no matter what. No one seems to have told them that Texas is only 45.35% white. But, be that as it may, they are certain – and that is why they are pushing themselves ever further Left. They’ve already won, you see? And that means the Left has won…so by insisting upon open borders and Medicare for all, they are just doing what they were elected to do (next year, but don’t confuse the poor dears).

Meanwhile, some polls have Trump garnering support of 45% of Latino voters.

Boris Johnson will be the next British PM…and he’s pledged to get Brexit done, but I doubt he will. Certainly not the full break with the EU that the Brexit vote ordered. Britain is done. They lay supine under Iranian threats because they don’t have a fleet large enough to fight. They get arrested for saying The Bad Words. There’s nothing left.

Cory Booker says he’d like to beat Trump up. I doubt that Trump is worried.

We have to discuss nutsack waxing because our Tru-Con Expert Betters spent the last 50 years making sure Big Corporation was taken care of while civilization died.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan32 Comments

Team Trump and the GOP are building a rather large ground game for 2020:

The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee (RNC) are mobilizing thousands of volunteers in more than a dozen battleground states, including a handful that President Trump lost in 2016, as they seek to expand the electoral map ahead of 2020.

Trump Victory, a joint operation comprised of the Trump campaign, the RNC and state Republican parties, kicked off a “National Week of Training” on Friday in a bid to train more than 6,000 volunteers and register voters in 14 states that Republicans have set their sights on for 2020.

At the same time, the committee is adding to its roster of state directors overseeing its organizing efforts, hiring staffers in Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Virginia, Republican officials told The Hill.

I’ve been wondering if Minnesota will correct its horrendous error of 1984, and 2020 might be the year it happens. We GOPers have looked and looked and looked at Minnesota and just haven’t been able to crack it. But, that’s how we thought about Wisconsin for the longest time, as well. In my view, the untold story of 2020 – though it will be told afterwards – is that the swing States are no longer Florida and Ohio, but Pennsylvania and Minnesota. Yes, I’ve heard the stories of Democrats surging in Texas…but, for 2020, that’s drivel. Trump will win Texas, easily. But, it can’t be taken for granted. Fortunately, the GOP is strong and well lead in Texas. Expanding the map is important, in and of itself, but I see something else at work here: Trump wants to win the popular vote, and he wants the House back. He’s got second term plans (most Presidents really don’t – which is why second terms are usually hideous and end up with the other party winning the next time around…Trump, I think, will change that).

Related: Democrats on the campaign trail are bedeviled by Trump’s strong economy.

Also Related, and enormously funny: factions of the Democrat party prepare to primary each other. Another untold story of 2020: the white, upper class, far left base of the Democrat party is going further and further left…so far left that Indys are being turned off and, just perhaps, a slice of Latino and African-American voters are being turned off, as well. Seriously: imagine yourself a middle or working class black guy…does anything these weirdos talk about resonate with you? Green New Deal? Open borders? Meanwhile, over there is Trump… and he’s at least a hell of a lot more fun than the Doofuses of Intersectionality.

The New York Times decides that the Soviets are the people to celebrate on the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11. This surprises none of you.

Memo to the Left: Stop Insulting Me

Mark Noonan33 Comments

I lost a friend over politics yesterday. Truth be known, it was a long time coming. I had just held back as this person went ever more into the insane leftist ideology. But, yesterday, this person posted a “If you support Trump, you’re a racist” meme and I noted that, hey, this means you’re calling me a racist. The conversation went downhill from there until the “unfriend” button was clicked and that was that.

I don’t care.

You see, I’m tired of being insulted. I do know my Christian duty: to love those who hate me and pray for those who despise me. And, as best I can, I try to live up to that and with God’s grace, I’ll get better at it. But I just can’t stand being insulted any longer – especially as the insults are all damnable lies. I’m not a racist. I’m not a sexist. I’m not a homophobe. I’m not anti-immigrant. I’m not a fascist. I’m not a Nazi. But I’ve been called all of these things, over and over again, for decades. It is past time to call a halt – and the only way I can do that is to vigorously push back whenever someone issues a slander about me.

Of course, the full blown leftist out there will vigorously assert I am all those things but that I don’t realize that I am. And that’s fine: you can believe whatever bullsh** you want – but because you believe something monumentally stupid it does not follow that I have to meekly accept insults. You insult me, and I will call you out on it. Don’t want to be my friend any more? That’s your business. I won’t be insulted. Not any more; I’ve had enough.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan33 Comments

America: love it or leave it. That is all Trump’s tweets really amounted to. He didn’t mention race: all he said was, “if you really hate it here that much, leave”. And that is the truth of the matter.

You can’t fix what you don’t love – you must love something before it is lovable. People like Omar and AOC clearly do not love this country. Not the country founded in 1776. To them, that country is racist, slave-owning, genocidal, sexist, homophobic, rapacious, war criminal. They hate it and want it gone, to be replaced by an America they will love…a country which has torn down the Washington Monument and will consider its founding moment to be MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech (not that they believe a word of what King said that day). They want an America which despises the Pilgrims; the Founders, the Westward Expansion. That rejects the Constitution and the idea that the individual matters. It is not an America I will ever be part of – first off, because they’ll jail or kill me, and those like me; but mostly because I’ll die fighting such a thing.

Democrat says that skin color is the only thing which matters. This is racist.

They’ve decided to kill the James Bond franchise by making the next 007 a woman. This is just stupid. Bond is a male fantasy: we kill the bad guys while dressed well and looking sharp and get all the hot women. No man will want to go see Super Chick do that…nor will women, I suspect.

Don’t know why any parents let their kids have their own internet accounts: 17 year old girl murdered by loser she met on line.

The Ninth Circuit gave a win to pro-lifers. Yes, that Ninth Circuit. Trump is remaking the Courts. That, alone, is enough to re-elect him next year.

I’ve stared the sequel to Mirrors, to be called Secrets. Don’t want you guys to have to binge-read, so you’d better pick up a copy of Mirrors, today!