Wow! Ben Domenech humiliates Chris Wallace on air for his Biden speech puffery

I confess that like most Americans, I had no interest in watching Joe Biden's non–State of the Union address to a mostly empty House chamber hosting a joint session of Congress.  That's why I missed a golden moment during the commentary afterward on Fox News Channel, one that surely stands as what the progressives like to call a "Profile in Courage."
 
You may have noticed that in recent weeks, FNC has been trying out various personalities from its stable of commentators as hosts of Fox News Primetime that airs in the 7 P.M. Eastern time slot, the lead-in to Tucker Carlson's program, its (and cable news's) ratings leader.  I presume that the personality who does what the executives deem the best job, or maybe gets the highest ratings, or the highest Q Score, will be rewarded with hosting duties on a regular basis.  This would be a Very Big Deal for the person snagging the honor.  Last week, the host of the program was Ben Domenech, co-founder of The Federalist.

With a potential plum like that a possibility, Domenech deserves a lot of credit for responding to Chris Wallace's praise for Biden's speech the way he did.  I don't know why FNC regards Wallace so highly, but he does host Fox News Sunday and virtually always serves as a commentator after major political events.  Somebody up there (on the executive floors of FNC) likes him.

Watch the 2-minute video embedded below while you can.  It is quite obviously an unauthorized recording of the segment, shot by a camera recording a TV screen, and therefore subject to being pulled down for copyright reasons.

I found the clip via Ace, who found it at a site that is new to me: Love Breeds Accountability, which called it a "Master Class In Speaking Truth To Power As Ben Domenech Exposes Chris Wallace's Journalism Grift." (read more)

Russian Security Council Chief Links Soros to Efforts to Destabilise Nations Worldwide, Including US

Billionaire hedge fund manager [and Rothschild protégé,] George Soros has committed hundreds of millions of dollars to "civil society initiatives" aimed at shaping political discourse and processes in many countries. Moscow banned the activities of his Open Society Foundations (OSF) in 2015, deeming they pose a threat to national security and Russia’s constitutional order.

George Soros and his Open Society Foundations undoubtedly played a role in the widespread unrest which rocked the United States last year following the police killing of George Floyd at the hands of police, Nikolai Patrushev, chief of the Russian Security Council, believes.


“Soros and his surrogates are moving toward independently establishing criteria about which governments are declared objectionable, with all the ensuing consequences of such a designation. I think the time is not far off when the West begins to impose sanctions or even launch military strikes against sovereign states on the basis of recommendations made by the reports of non-governmental organisations,” the official suggested.

Patrushev pointed out that something similar has already taken place in Syria, with the US and its allies bombing the Middle Eastern nation on the basis of (since debunked) reports of gas attacks by the White Helmets "rescue group."


Commenting on Soros’ special interest in Russia, Patrushev suggested that he was just one actor among many in centuries of Russophobic attitudes in the West. “Take, for example, [Czar] Ivan the Formidable, who is for some reason called ‘Ivan the Terrible’ in the West. The black legend about him as a cruel tyrant began to circulate during his lifetime thanks to Western chroniclers seeking to divert Europeans’ attention from what was going on in their own countries. They did not like the fact that the Russian czar did not recognise their political and moral leadership. Because even during this period a long time ago Moscow looked at the West with caution and saw what was happening there – massacres for religious reasons, the Inquisition, witch hunts, the monstrous colonial enslavement of peoples, and other deeds which the West now prefers not to remember.”


“Generally speaking, Russophobic practices remain the same today as they existed hundreds of years ago,” the official concluded.

Soros’ 40-Year Streak of ‘Civil Society’ Activism

Soros is a popular target for both governments and politicians across the political spectrum as the public face of questionable NGO activity in meddling in the affairs of sovereign countries. The hedge fund manager began his political activities in the 1980s in Eastern Europe, providing funding and organisational support to anti-communist forces in Hungary, Poland, and other Eastern Bloc nations. In the 1990s, his foundations spread into the former Soviet Union, including Ukraine and Russia, and provided support for the colour revolutions which rocked many post-Soviet states in the 2000s and 2010s.

By the mid-2010s, OSF had opened offices throughout the world, from Europe and Eurasia to Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and the United States itself.

During the presidency of Donald Trump, Soros’ foundations “partnered” with over 50 organisations aimed at bringing him down. In 2017, over 150,000 Americans signed a White House petition to have Soros declared a domestic terrorist and to strip him of his assets. Before the election, Soros actively supported Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, officially contributing over $10.5 million to her campaign, while also funding anti-Trump Republicans like the neoconservative McCain Institute. In 2020, Soros-supported district attorneys were accused of involvement in fighting the federal government in court during the George Floyd protests. Following Joe Biden’s election, Soros publicly committed tens of millions of dollars to lobby Biden’s “once-in-a-generation” $2.3 trillion infrastructure spending plan.

In the financial world, Soros is best known for his currency speculation operations against the British pound in 1992, which earned him a cool billion dollars in profits but caused a run on the pound and billions in losses for the British state. In 2020, Soros was convicted of insider trading by a French court, with the conviction upheld by the European Court of Human Rights in 2011. (read more)

Feds plan to indict Chauvin, other three ex-officers on civil rights charges

Ex-cop would face federal charges in two cases; three others just in Floyd case.

Leading up to Derek Chauvin's murder trial, Justice Department officials had spent months gathering evidence to indict the ex-Minneapolis police officer on federal police brutality charges, but they feared the publicity frenzy could disrupt the state's case.

So they came up with a contingency plan: If Chauvin were found not guilty on all counts or the case ended in a mistrial, they would arrest him [immediately] at the courthouse, according to sources familiar with the planning discussions.

The backup plan would not be necessary. On April 20, the jury found Chauvin guilty on all three murder and manslaughter counts, sending him to the state's most secure lockdown facility to await sentencing, and avoiding the riots many feared could engulf the city once again.

Now, with Chauvin's [show] trial out of the way, federal prosecutors are moving forward with their case. They plan to ask a grand jury to indict Chauvin and the other three ex-officers involved in George Floyd's killing — J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao — on charges of civil rights violations, a source said.

If the grand jury voted to indict, the former officers would face the new civil rights charges on top of the state's cases, meaning all four could be headed toward yet another criminal trial in federal court.

The backup arrest strategy and meticulous planning over the timing of charges illustrates the complicated synchronicity of two parallel investigations into the most high-profile case of police brutality in decades. Over the better part of the last year, as special prosecutor Keith Ellison's team pursued murder and manslaughter charges, federal authorities have been mounting their own case in private before a grand jury — a group of 23 citizens who meet in secret to hear evidence and ultimately decide if there is probable cause to charge.

Proving how delicate outside publicity was, Judge Peter Cahill repeatedly expressed frustration during jury selection in Chauvin's murder trial about the announcement of a $27 million payout from the city of Minneapolis to Floyd's family. As a result, two seated jurors had to be dismissed because they said it affected their ability to be impartial.

Under the contingency arrest plan, the Minnesota U.S. Attorney's Office would have charged Chauvin by criminal complaint — a quicker alternative for a federal charge that doesn't require a grand jury — so they could arrest him immediately, and then asked a grand jury for an indictment, according to sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly.

Prosecutors want to indict Chauvin in connection to two cases: for pinning Floyd down by his neck for more than 9 ½ minutes in May 2020, and for the violent arrest of a 14-year-old boy [who had assaulted his own mother and resisted arrest] in 2017. In the latter case, Chauvin struck the teen on the head with his flashlight, then grabbed him by the throat and hit him again, according to court documents.

The other three ex-officers would be charged only in connection with Floyd's death.

The federal case will be prosecuted by Justice Department attorneys in Minnesota and Washington, D.C.

The charges would run in addition to the Justice Department's civil investigation into whether Minneapolis police engage in a pattern and practice of unlawful behavior. Justice officials announced this investigation the day after Chauvin's guilty verdict, another calculated move designed to avoid interfering with the state's trial.

A spokeswoman for the Minnesota U.S. Attorney's Office declined to comment on the potential charges or the contingency arrest plan.
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Lawfare Groups Ask For Federal Intervention in Arizona Ballot Audit – Send Letter to DOJ Asking for Immediate Involvement

After the Democrat Secretary of State failed to get the Arizona State Attorney General to initiate an investigation of the audit; and after a Democrat state judge rejected the Democrat effort for a temporary restraining order; and after all other efforts have failed…. now we see three outside left-wing election groups (claiming bipartisanship yet led by lawyers from NYU) asking the DOJ to intervene in the Maricopa County, Arizona, ballot audit.

The audit started on April 23. A judge on April 28 rejected the attempt by Democrats to halt the process.

The Brennan Center, Protect Democracy and The Leadership Conference have signed a letter to the civil rights division of the DOJ asking them to get involved.

The arguments within the letter [pdf here] are identical to the arguments made previously by other Lawfare groups, including Perkins Coie, to a state judge.  The state judge rejected the arguments because there was no evidence submitted to the court to back them up.

Obviously there is a great amount of fear amid the network of Lawfare and leftist activists about this ongoing ballot audit.  The letter only highlights the worry they carry that Arizona’s election fraud might be demonstrably proven to the wider U.S. electorate.

[...]
Yeah, the “Brennan Center” from NYU…  Gee, who would that be?
(read more)

Progressive dimwits of the "climate crisis" persuasion want native and indigenous "communities" to provide input and wisdom in planning the climate con. Really? Methinks someone has spent too much time in a hogan smoking "strong medicine."

They specifically want American aboriginals and delegates from Chad to assist the con men planners.

What climate con redistribution expertise could we expect from a people best known for diabetes, alcoholism and domestic abuse? What could Chad, a third world shithole, bring to the table? If the Chadian delegates are such luminaries, why is their nation always at the bottom of any global list?

Do you want to learn something about the "sacred wisdom" of indigenous communities? Read this:

“... Indians who are at war with a neighbouring tribe hunt them as we would wild animals…. They recognize family and kin ties, but not those of humanity in general. No feelings of compassion prevent them from killing women or children of an enemy tribe. These latter are their favourite food after a skirmish or ambush.”

— Alexander von Humboldt, commenting on the fine young cannibals along the Orinoco River of what is now Venezuela

Don’t Look Now

There was Joe Biden, all masked-up at the Virtual Climate Summit Meeting, the only world leader with his face covered, like he was fixing to rob the joint. In reality — if such a place in space-time still exists — Joe was sitting all by himself in an otherwise empty room in front of a video camera, all vaxed-up, too, as is everybody else who comes and goes in the White House. So, what was the mask all about? Surely not the virus. Does Ol’ White Joe bethink himself some kind of international Lone Ranger?

This was only one of countless mysteries orbiting around the dimming star that is Joe Biden. The biggest one, the planet Jupiter of all puzzlements, is how the guy managed to get elected occupant of the oval office. Or, more to the point, how did others manage to get him elected? I mean, considering those few embarrassing campaign forays from the basement to a bunch of empty parking lots back in the fall of 2020, not to mention the supernatural victory on Super Tuesday that rescued his pitiful old ass from the glue factory of broken-down political war-horses.

We may be about to find out as [after so many roadblocks] Arizona’s State Senate finally got around to [carrying out] a full [forensic]audit of the November 3rd vote in Maricopa County, comprising Phoenix and its asteroid belt of suburbs, which amounts to more than two-thirds of the state’s population. The Democratic Party tried pretty hard to stop the durned thing, sending its gnarliest Lawfare warrior, one Marc Elias from the Clinton-indentured DC firm of Perkins Coie, and a posse of 70 other attorneys, to bury the proceedings in court orders. But all they [might have gotten] was a weekend pause from an Arizona judge who imposed a $1-million-dollar bond payment on the Democrats to cover expenses for the interruption — which would then be forfeited if the audit went forward. The Dems declined to pay up, so the pause [never happened] and the audit goes forward.

The usual suspects in the mainstream media attempted to bury the Arizona vote audit story or denigrate it — for instance the The New York Times, which characterized the inquiry in its Saturday lede as “false claims of a stolen election,” and then “a snipe hunt for skullduggery,” before asserting the boilerplate “baseless theories of election theft” to seal the deal with its avidly credulous readership. Rachel Maddow of MSNBC practically jumped up and down going woo-woo-woo to discredit the audit. What do you suppose they’re afraid of?

I’ll tell you: For one thing, if the vote turns out to have been compromised by fraud, Arizona is liable to lose a Democratic senator elected on Mr. Biden’s (possibly) phantom coattails — Mark Kelly (D) who defeated incumbent Martha McSally (R) — which would cancel the Democrats’ current one-vote majority grip on the body. The result of that would be the end of the party’s effort to jam various new laws down America’s craw: DC statehood, the HR-1 voter fraud act, the Supreme Court-packing bill, and, actually, anything else on the party’s Satanic wish-list for disassembling the republic.

Then, of course, there’s the tally for president. One thing probably for sure: if the audit uncovers any serious systematic mischief that would alter the November 3rd outcome, revealing that Mr. Biden did not win Arizona’s electoral college votes after all, then there would be tremendous pressure to look into the results of other swing states likewise under suspicion of gross balloting irregularities. The local authorities in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia will, no doubt, attempt to demur. But you may be sure these matters will be back in the courts, perhaps even the US Supreme Court, and this time they might not be able to duck the issue. At the very least, proof of a reversal in Arizona will cast Joe Biden as an illegitimate president in even more minds than the current half of the nation.

Another outcome should be the end of efforts to block real reform of the voting process in the United States. That should mean no more janky-ass computer voting machines, like the Dominion and Smartmatic system that lobbyists sold to twenty-eight states, often lavishly dispensing grift to git’r’done. Also, no more voting without ID (as in most other civilized nations) to prove that you are, at least, a bona fide citizen, no more promiscuous mail-in vote high jinks that forego chain-of-custody rules, and nix expanded voting periods beyond the constitutionally-mandated election day (the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November). Of course, the details would have to be left to the fifty states themselves, since the constitution also mandates that they are in charge of election law. None of that will determine whether only schmucks and rogues run for high office in this land, but at least they might be elected fairly. (read more)

At the Core of Progressivism

A strong case could be made that Progressives are the Party of Personal Irresponsibility and true Conservatives are the Party of Personal Responsibility.

Consider that Progressives, in so many ways, encourage and excuse irresponsibility and expect government and/or society to mitigate the consequences of said irresponsibility.

Let's say you were irresponsible and got pregnant. Don't worry, Progressives have so twisted the original intent of the Framers that abortion on demand became the Law of the Land. Don't even bring up forcible rape. Hedonism is the overwhelming cause of unwanted pregnancy. Forcible rape accounts for a tiny fraction of the total.

Let's say you were irresponsible and did not save for retirement (or did not build a strong multi-generational family to support you in your old age). Don't worry. Progressives enacted a social security income redistribution scheme the Framers would have found abhorrent.

Let's say you were irresponsible and cannot afford child care. Progressives want to make free child care an entitlement. I would ask, "Why did you have children you could not afford?"

Let's say you were irresponsible and cannot afford sickness care. Don't worry, Progressives in Congress with the connivance of a compromised Chief Justice enacted Obamacare to steal from the productive class and give to Big Pharma and the medical cartels.

The utopian Progressive agenda always depends on other people's money (with bureaucrats siphoning off their unfair share).

When I think of a "Progressive", I think of a cancer. Cancer is a progressive disease. Incurable cancer progresses until it kills. The incurable cancer of Progressivism will spread until it bankrupts or kills this nation.

The patriot paradox

Globalism is out. Nationalism is in. Progressives who think they can jump aboard are dangerously naïve

It’s hard to remember that, a generation ago, pundits, bankers and scholars formed a loud chorus declaring the nation obsolete. Flows of capital, ideas and goods ushered in a global age with new metaphors and a new narrative of globalisation, movement and circulation. Now, the global promise and plot line look shopworn. The nation is back.

Lurid, ethnocentric varieties of nationalism are not the only revivals; the patria is also waxing among liberals and progressives as the community that most needs healing in order to reclaim it from the nativists. There’s a new chorus to give it the narrative uplift that the nation needs after decades of globalist neglect and recent nativist abuse. Nations need an imagined past to connect their citizens to a shared experience; nation-builders create narrative foundations upon which to raise walls and roofs. In a drive to heal – some would say, to paper over – the fractures, a new breed of chronicler has scrambled to rebuild those foundations.

Progressives might think that this reclamation is a heroic counteroffensive against nativism. In truth, it’s an admission of defeat. Not just one, but two defeats. First, as the Cold War ended, many liberals threw in their lot with the promise of a market-unified world and shed the baggage of social welfare and social democracy. Then, as globalisation began to shake after 2008, nativist backlashers seized the flag in a fight against ‘globalist’ elites and ‘menacing’ migrants. Now progressives are leaping into a mosh pit over the national storyline.

At each step, progressives went on the defensive; at each step, they gave up something. By now, there’s not much left. After 1989, they cashed in the remains of their socialist endowment. Since 2008, many are giving up their internationalist heritage. As climate change bears down on us, a global migrant crisis grows, and a nuclear arms race heats up, the chroniclers of the redeemed nation are backing away from the search for global perspectives and narratives just when we need them.

For two centuries, the nation has been the organising principle for our concept of sovereignty and tethered, from the start, to a wider order. In the 18th century, Jeremy Bentham coined the term ‘international’ to envision an entanglement of nation states to replace the disorder of predatory empires. Declarations of national independence were announcements of interdependence, of a hope to be recognised and welcomed by other nations – and thereby to secure one’s freedom – and to pledge one’s willingness to be restrained to maintain the wider order. It was so foundational to international law that it’s been taken for granted, except by colonial societies that were, by definition, excluded from recognition and freedom. When they worked, international laws and norms ensured that nations didn’t become predators. When they failed, Nation-First zealotry took over, interdependence got weaponised, and the needs of the nation authorised conquest and extermination. This is what happened in the 1930s.

The fates of nationalism and internationalism have marched together. Technological changes and the end of the Cold War marked a fundamental break that we’re still struggling to understand. They brought the final round of decolonisation to cover the planet with nations while tearing down barriers to the flow of capital and commodities, spreading nations while deepening interdependence between them. A wave of free trade agreements and mobile money brought new rituals – the World Economic Forum – and institutions – the World Trade Organization (WTO) – to celebrate connectivity, liquidity, and a hypercapitalist sense of shared time. Unbound by place, the new barons sought to ‘serve the needs of our clients all across geographic borders’, in the words of one Merrill Lynch recruiting brochure from 1994.

After two centuries of heroism and horror, the nation was out. Global was in. Patriotism was consigned to the safety valves of World Cups and pharaonic Olympic villages. Historians, myself included, got in on the act to scale up, go big, go global, and swap out stories of nations for networks, citizens for connectivity.

As the flat-Earth apostles gloated, the language of the nation became the rhetoric of resistance, especially in the global South where globalisation didn’t come covered with pixie dust. In Argentina, piqueteros railed against the pulverising effects of austerity for citizens and payments for creditors. Taiwanese firms moved into post-apartheid South Africa to hire dispossessed workers into their value chains, pitting trade unions and community leaders against a fledgling African National Congress (ANC) government desperate for investment. ‘We have put you in power, now you must deliver,’ cried one protestor in mid-1997 to a beleaguered ANC council. Then the discontents that were largely kept to the global peripheries came home to its cores. The economic crisis of 2008 ripped the halo off the idea of a borderless world. Since 2009, the national flag has been a worldwide emblem of resistance against cosmopolitan elites and inscrutable WTO trade-dispute panels and their technocrats.

What made the revival of the patriotic resistance so powerful was that it performed two functions at once. It was a message against ‘globalism’ and ‘Davos Man’. It also asserted a claim over who belonged to the nation in response to whipped-up fears of invading migrants and minorities. When Brexiteers such as Nigel Farage lampooned Brussels regulators, it was a warm-up act for the real show: frothing about the menace of migrants marching their way up the Balkans to invade where Napoleon and Hitler had failed before them because Europe had forsaken the idea of the nation and the ethnic majorities that stood at its guard. To rescue the British nation from ethnocide, it had to secede from Europe.

The hysteria wasn’t restricted to the endangered ‘West’. In India, the chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, was tracing the same arc. Ever since the bloody riots in Gujarat of 2002 that left around 2,000 people dead, mostly Muslims, Modi had been unofficially boycotted by European envoys. As he rose in India while Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini ascended in Europe, it became harder to shun Modi and his Hindutva-nationalism. In January 2013, squirming European diplomats welcomed him to a secret lunch at the German embassy. Six months later, Modi bulldozed their qualms. ‘I’m nationalist. I’m patriotic. Nothing is wrong,’ he exclaimed en route to winning the leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the country’s premiership.

In a competitive, overheating and now plague-filled world, citizens have been left to find shelter in the bosom of the nation – and summoned to its defence. Universities and schools have become battlegrounds for the national narrative. In the wake of last summer’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations, the then president Donald Trump created a 1776 Commission to celebrate ‘patriotic education’. In Arkansas and elsewhere, proposed legislation would punish schools that teach the history of white supremacy as an American throughline. The Turkish government has ordered the firing of almost 6,000 disloyal academics. After the arrest of some 3,000 students in Hong Kong, Carrie Lam, Beijing’s sergeant, decried how the city’s campuses had failed to teach proper national values. ‘What is wrong with education in Hong Kong?’ she wailed. The Communist Party, meanwhile, reasserted its patriotic narrative. The city’s education secretary forbade students from singing ‘Glory to Hong Kong’, scrapped the mandatory civics course called ‘Liberal Studies’, and obligated the teaching of Chinese history. Meanwhile, libraries are being cleansed of anything that ‘endangers national security’. History textbooks must nurture ‘a sense of belonging to the country, an affection for the Chinese people, a sense of national identity, as well as awareness of a sense of responsibility for safeguarding national security.’

At the end of the summer of 1940, George Orwell entered one of his bleakest moments. The author and internationalist, who had fought alongside anarchists in Barcelona, had to reckon with the limits of his convictions once Stalin aligned with Hitler to partition the continent. After the fall of France, Orwell pronounced his conversion in the essay ‘My Country Right or Left’ (1940) and his willingness to put on a literary uniform to defend the nation. To him, the disaster at Dunkirk was more proof of the shortcomings of the British ruling class. In a later essay, he likened Britain to ‘a family with the wrong members in control’. Still, he rallied to the flag because only the nation could summon the emotions needed to fight fascism. ‘My Country Right or Left’ decried the bloodless ‘enlightened’ Left-wing intellectual class for failing to understand this; they are ‘people whose hearts have never [his emphasis] leapt at the sight of the Union Jack’ but ‘who will flinch from revolution when the moment comes’. For Orwell, what mattered was the affective power of country to defend democracy everywhere.

Orwell was aware of the risks that many current patriotic revivalists forget. Patriotic appeals work like chum in the waters of intellectual life. The sharks come out. The Right of our day want to save the nation and are willing to sacrifice democracy in its name. Wherever the nativist Right has ascended, a caste of intellectuals has swarmed to make the case for the nation. Lumping financiers, humanitarians and campus ‘activists’ together, authors such as Swapan Dasgupta of India, Jonah Goldberg of the United States and Éric Zemmour of France have been the mouthpieces of despair, proclaiming a stark choice between imminent demise or national renewal. They pose as the defenders of national heritage. The tweedy French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, once a man of the Left, claims to have seen the light. His apostasy made him a media icon in a country that once revered Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. His bestseller L’identité malheureuse, or ‘The Unhappy Identity’, (2013) warns of French decline thanks to Muslim migrants and Eurocrats in grey office blocks in Brussels. It’s not just the outsiders that concern Finkielkraut; it’s the fading patriotic spirit from within. Like his confrères elsewhere, he offers dire prophecies of self-inflicted ruin at the hands of unassimilated foreigners and multicultural natives who’ve lost their way.

Conservative nationalism pulls others into the cause of patriotic revival. Caught between Right-wing populism and the tax-free bliss of global elites, progressives have joined the fray and dimmed the appeal to internationalism; to be global has become a brand of shame.

Barack Obama, icon of America’s cosmopolitan self-imagery, exemplifies the dilemma of reviving the nation while retreating from the world. The biblical title of his political memoir A Promised Land (2020) underscores a theme about the tribulations of leading a nation as it loses its will to lead. As Obama rolled to victory in 2008, he reflected on W E B DuBois and the notion that American Blacks are forever condemned to a doubleness, at once Americans and Black. Obama bows to DuBois’s brilliance and ‘yet at no point had I ever questioned – or had others question – my fundamental “American-ness”.’ The signature of his ‘American-ness’ is a faith in the country’s exceptionalism, a model of liberty and welcoming for the rest. Tied to it, for good and ill, is a tradition of global leadership to reflect back its patriotic glory.

And yet Obama’s own foreign policy was shaped by his efforts to deflate expectations of what the US could do abroad while pumping loftiness at home. His opposition to the war in Iraq and his misgivings about receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, he writes, were both based on a ‘tempered belief in American exceptionalism with a humility about our ability to remake the world in our image’. This is why his realism was so confusing and ridiculed. Obama claimed to be returning to the heritage of Ronald Reagan but without the bravura that defined it. The ethical wasteland that was Trump’s creed has obscured Obama’s silence about abuses committed by Middle East autocrats, mass deportations, and publicly drawing a line in Syria – and then walking away from it.

This amalgam of lofty idealism at home and downsized realism abroad, fueled by the need to stoke patriotic bearings for citizens and the need to deflate them for others, shows up in a recent ‘case’ for the power of nationalism to solve the global climate crisis. A British journalist at home in Washington, DC, Anatol Lieven has covered the world from Pakistan to the Baltic republics, and straddles the security-industrial complex of think-tanks, the blogosphere and academia. Now, he argues, it’s time for climate activists to ditch their utopian solidarities and seize the nation from ‘sincere’ nationalists such as Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Modi and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and see that sacrifice will work only with the appeal to the nation. This isn’t Orwell rallying to the flag for a wider cause; it’s, as Lieven puts it in Climate Change and the Nation State (2020), ‘between stupid, short-sighted versions of nationalism and intelligent, far-sighted ones’. Internationalism is nowhere in sight. Lieven considered invoking a more tempered appeal to patriotism, ‘a less controversial term’. But why fuss? Boast the virtues of muscular nationalism and leave global idealists looking at the taillights of a new nation chasing its own causes.

Idealists have also reclaimed the nation. Jill Lepore might be the most famous historian in the US. A skilled writer and scholar, she makes quirky stories reveal wider truths, and bridges the Ivy League and the elite liberal media with peerless success. Lepore has also joined the nation-building club. She wants to take it back from ethnocentrists and from the neglect of cosmopolitans, especially among the professoriate, who let the nation go mouldy because they turned their attentions to smaller and bigger things; in going global, she claims in This America: The Case for the Nation (2019), they ‘disavowed national history’. This left the nation to be snatched by ‘less scrupulous people’. In Lepore’s view, progressives abandoned the nation; the bad guys seized it. It’s time to get it back.

In the pages of magazines such as Foreign Affairs and The New Yorker, as well as in This America, Lepore wants to make the nation cool again for liberals and progressives. Her version of the nation is open, welcoming, pluralistic, civic. It binds different people together and gives them shelter irrespective of their differences. Lepore admits the wrongs of slavery and racial exclusion into the master narrative; they lend the tension and drama to the unfinished, freedom-seeking plot line.

To Lepore, reviving the patriotic narrative means burnishing the exceptionalist claims that the US is different because it was, unlike other nations, born liberal. From that formative founding moment, Lepore rescues the nation from snarling nativists because it’s the liberal narrative of the nation that makes it exceptional. Without that critical adjective, liberal, the US looks like other nations. Make America Great Again rioters might claim alone to love the country, but ‘they will be wrong’, she exclaims at the end of This America. Why? Because they spurn what makes the US exceptional; their nationalism will devour liberalism and the virtues that make the nation great. The way to be a true patriot is to be a liberal one, to share Lepore’s founding narrative.

What Lepore doesn’t say is that her liberalism can survive only if it’s safeguarded by the nation; that’s why she wants it back. She wants her readers and her students to feel as much pride waving the US flag as Trump’s legions do. The challenge is to return to the national romance and restore a collective memory of its liberality for insiders, even as outsiders recede from view.

Or are whitewashed from the narrative.

What Lepore can’t see are the exclusionary features of her liberal-nationalist imagination. American nationalism is and always has been ‘complicated’, she concedes. Her complication starts with the Thirteen Colonies that shared little in common except some visionary charters of peoplehood, such as the Articles of Confederation. But it’s in the makeup of nations to create communions by including some while excluding others. Colonies, for starters, meant conquest and colonisation. But Native peoples, Mexicans, Hawaiians and Puerto Ricans are shadows in Lepore’s account. To restore the myth of the nation ‘born liberal’, to rescue it from ethnocidal nativists, means leaving others out of the story until they become ‘immigrants’ seeking shelter from illiberalism somewhere else.

There are alternative ways to reconstitute a shared past that confront the nation’s foundational exclusions. Few Australian, New Zealander or Canadian historians would try to craft such a patriotic epic without reckoning with the history of settler colonialism. Even before hockey games, fans north of the US border listen to what are called ‘land acknowledgements’ as reminders that their ideas of sovereignty were and are contingent, that the territory underneath the ice rink was the home to other nations, and that the existence of the traditional Canadian (or Australian or New Zealander) narrative had required generations of forgetting. What’s more, the power of Indigenous claims to recognition and reparation depended on – guess what? – the global circulation of ideas of indigeneity.

Lepore would agree with Orwell. The only way to defeat illiberalism is, as she puts it, by ‘making appeals to national aims and ends’. But would Orwell agree with Lepore? I don’t think so. He’d never have seen the defence of decency and rights as one that stops at the patria’s borders. What’s more, what has prevented nations from letting their exclusionary and exterminating powers run amok has been a fluid mix of global solidarity and rivalry that holds nation states in check, braced by Bentham’s ‘international’ of which the nation is a part, not apart.

Those who make the case for reviving patriotic narratives aren’t just reclaiming the nation from bullies who lock up students, dismember journalists and exile intellectuals. They’re also admitting defeat. They’re in effect declaring an end to the search for narratives that reconcile membership in nations with questions of belonging to a wider order.

In 1951, Hannah Arendt made an appeal for new narratives. Herself still a refugee, a pariah who was applying for US citizenship, she told readers of The Origins of Totalitarianism that ‘only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity’ will nations be restrained from their worst habits. Yes, this had to reckon with the realities of territorial nation states. But this new principle shouldn’t license us to take ‘that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage’. The horrors of her age – and the sight of drowning refugees or the sound of orphaned children in ours – are no less real. ‘And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain,’ she wrote in her preface. For humanity’s sake, Arendt urged readers to see the nation as a necessity capable of such cruelty that it could never be entrusted on its own to do good. In the aftermath of the Holocaust and a century of imperial violence, the temptation to retreat into the comforts of nostalgia – to make any nation great again by returning to its heritage – ducked the challenge of creating narratives that transcend the false choice of belonging either to a nation or to a world that makes that nation possible.

Patriotic revivalists – if they want to improve their ‘case’ – need to square up to a paradox, and be more complicated. The world needs nations to do good things, such as reduce carbon emissions and stop treating stateless people as less human. To do good things, nations have to be good. But the condition for the existence of good nations is other good nations doing good things for each other – and for those who’ve had their homes taken away because their nations haven’t been good. Why not start there in the quest for new stories of nations for a new global age? (read more)

TERF IS A SLUR

Documenting the abuse, harassment and misogyny of transgender identity politics.
(read more)

Welcoming Our New Robot Overlords

How warnings of AI doom gave way to primal fear of primates posting

What ever happened to machines taking over the world? What was once an object of intense concern now seems like a punchline. Take one of the latest videos released by the robotics company Boston Dynamics, of its iconic two- and four-legged machines shaking it to “Do You Love Me?” by The Contours, which was met with sarcastic online quips about the robots doing victory dances after murdering humans. The revolt of the machines, subsumed into the background ambiance of generalized fears of tech dystopia, no longer seems like a distinctive worry. For those who remember an earlier era of techno-panic, that should be startling.

Once upon a time — just a few years ago, actually — it was not uncommon to see headlines about prominent scientists, tech executives, and engineers warning portentously that the revolt of the robots was nigh. The mechanism varied, but the result was always the same: Uncontrollable machine self-improvement would one day overcome humanity. A dismal fate awaited us. We would be lucky to be domesticated as pets kept around for the amusement of superior entities, who could kill us all as easily as we exterminate pests.

Today we fear a different technological threat, one that centers not on machines but other humans. We see ourselves as imperiled by the terrifying social influence unleashed by the Internet in general and social media in particular. We hear warnings that nothing less than our collective ability to perceive reality is at stake, and that if we do not take corrective action we will lose our freedoms and way of life.

Primal terror of mechanical menace has given way to fear of angry primates posting. Ironically, the roles have reversed. The robots are now humanity’s saviors, suppressing bad human mass behavior online with increasingly sophisticated filtering algorithms. We once obsessed about how to restrain machines we could not predict or control — now we worry about how to use machines to restrain humans we cannot predict or control. But the old problem hasn’t gone away: How do we know whether the machines will do as we wish?


If you had told a lay observer a decade ago that there would be a crisis over Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms banning the president of the United States [blamed by Democrats and the Deep State] for inciting a violent riot against Congress that included a bare chested, behorned man dressed as the “QAnon Shaman,” you would likely be accused of writing bad science fiction. But this is the platform politics crisis in early 2021.

As Aaron Sibarium recently argued in American Purpose, the event and the responses to it show the paradox of the online digital commons. In the leadup to the January 6 siege of the Capitol, President Trump and his allies could use social media as a coordination mechanism for a motley collection of illiberal forces to mobilize a fierce attack intended to generate a surreal spectacle, disrupt the certification of the presidential election, and assault any politicians unlucky enough to be caught by the mob as it breached the Capitol. But by January 9, Trump and many of his supporters were permanently banned from social media platforms, and Parler, a redoubt for Trumpists among others, had been dropped by Apple and Google app stores and even removed from the Amazon servers that hosted the site. Social media, Sibarium observed, could at once be too lax and too controlling.

But in this sci-fi, the villains raging out of control were not machines but human mobs — albeit mobs bolstered by world-sprawling tech platforms. Instead of a sudden, synchronized human revolt, a conventional science fiction event would have a sudden moment in which machines, without warning, turned on their human overseers. These kinds of scenarios didn’t just crop up in fiction; they also inspired a cottage industry of serious-minded people theorizing about the machine revolt — how it might come about, how it might be averted.

The ground covered in this literature varied widely. Some of it — like Bill Joy warning about self-replicating nanotech machines becoming a “gray goo” that destroys all life, Bill Gates raising the alarm about artificial intelligence overtaking humans, or Elon Musk telling us that we are on the verge of “summoning the demon” — was always ridiculous. The pronouncements of these tech celebrities paralleled a much more convoluted but equally strange and mystifying collection of online subcultures who debated the threat of inevitable machine superiority with the energy usually associated with forum fan-theorizing about Lost.

Ethicist David Leslie, in a 2019 review of a book on machine control, described how these cultures envisioned scenarios such as “an AI system that induces tumours in every human to quickly find an optimal cure for cancer, and a geoengineering robot that asphyxiates humanity to deacidify the oceans.” The common theme was the pathologies of runaway rationality — of machines programmed to achieve a certain end that got out of control. Many of these scenarios circled back to the technological “singularity,” a moment when the intelligence of some machine agent, or a collection of them, suddenly increases exponentially, with unknown consequences for the human race.

It is easy, perhaps too easy, to dismiss all this as crankbait. Tech entrepreneur Maciej Cegłowski argues that this intellectual pursuit is interesting but ultimately barren, a sort of “string theory for programmers.” It allows both academic theorists and members of niche online subcultures to “build crystal palaces of thought, working from first principles, then climb up inside them and pull the ladder up.” At worst, Cegłowski lamented, it stimulates grandiosity and megalomania. Scientists, technologists, and various interested parties became swept up in the belief that they alone had divined a world-ending calamity, that they were charged with finding their own idiosyncratic solutions and imposing them on “non-player characters” (read: the rest of us) who were supposed to just sit back and let the big brains go to work.

However, one could, more charitably, look at some of this literature as a valuable exploration into a far older problem than machine dystopia: the manner in which the road to hell is paved with good intentions. We say we want something, but as we pursue it we often come to realize that it is not at all what we had thought we wanted. The literature on runaway tech highlighted the elusiveness of our “true” desires and whether machines can be made to realize them (more about this in a moment).


Since the 2016 presidential election, fears about machine dystopia do not seem like nearly such a preoccupation. Instead, attention has shifted to online radicalization, misinformation, and harassment. This distinction may seem like two ways of talking about the same thing. After all, many tech critics ultimately place the blame for these online dysfunctions on software that encourages toxic behavior and on companies’ lax moderation policies. Perhaps fear of machine revolt has just morphed into generic fear about out-of-control algorithms that, among other things, fuel hatred, fear, and suspicion online. There is some truth to this, but it also misses important differences.

While online behavior is certainly shaped by platform mechanisms, the fear today is less of the mechanisms themselves than of whom they’re enticing. Prior emphasis on the machine threat warned of the unpredictability of automated behavior and the need for humans to develop policies to control it. Today’s emphasis on the social media terror inverts this, warning of the danger posed by unchecked digital mobs, who must be controlled. The risk comes not from the machines but from ourselves: our vulnerability to deception and manipulation, our need to band together with others to hunt down and accost our adversaries online, our tendency to incite and be incited by violent rhetoric to act out in the physical world, and our collective habit of spiraling down into correlated webs of delusion, insanity, and hatred.

While amenable in theory to fears of machine malevolence, there is no real mechanical equivalent in this picture to the central role played by the runaway machine of old. Actually, the roles of humans and machines have switched: The machines must now restrain the dangerous humans.

Large armies of underpaid — and often psychologically traumatized — human content-moderators wading through massive quantities of digitized records of man’s inhumanity to man are not enough. The only thing capable of handling the job of managing the online commons at scale is massive automated systems that filter content, delete it, and otherwise modify it to enforce platform policies. Reliance on mechanical moderation always reflected a mixture of reasonable pragmatism and unreasonable optimism about the ability of machines to handle the nuances of human language and social interaction. It also showed the desire of tech companies to find a way to deal with the toxic behaviors generated by their platforms without fundamentally altering their product or business models.

Automated moderation of content was never without criticism. Outsiders from across the political spectrum argued that it was opaque, unaccountable, and provided at best a fig leaf of liberal proceduralism. It was an attempt to pass off a robotic version of “rule by law” as “rule of law.” But the criticism was drowned out by even louder demands since 2016 to crack down harder on online misinformation and extremism.

These demands reached a crescendo between early 2020 and early 2021 — between the start of the pandemic [of lies] and the Capitol attack [by groups organized to discredit Trump and his supporters]. The massive expansion of automated rule-enforcement changed the nature of online speech. As Harvard lecturer Evelyn Douek observed in a widely cited legal paper,


The governance of content moderation online has now become a matter of which machine errors are to be preferred and what level of machine error is acceptable. At scale, perhaps, all machine ethics simply becomes a matter of probability. Instead of deliberating over the balance of goods at stake in allowing or restricting a particular post, moderation debates now assume that significant error and inconsistency are inherent hazards of the platforms and merely ask if the errors are going in the right direction.

The growing intellectual consensus is that a vulnerable public must be protected from having their minds hijacked by dangerous online memes. An ugly and messy struggle for control over online communication looms. Fears of machine revolt have faded, but the very machines that were once seen as future tyrants — automated systems — must now save humans from themselves.


The shift away from the fear of unpredictable robots and toward the fear of chaotic human behavior may have been inevitable. For the problem of controlling the machines was always at heart a problem of human desire — the worry that realizing our desires using automated systems might prove catastrophic. The promised solution (simple enough!) was to rectify human desire. But once we lost optimism about whether this was possible, the stage was set for the problem to be flipped on its head.

The most sophisticated robo-doomsayers observed how machines — and the bureaucracies that controlled them — were capable of acting in ways that evaded prediction and control. Given the power of machines to realize human desires, warnings of robo-doom asked us to carefully consider what those desires really are, the potential consequences of feeding them as inputs into the machine, and whether this would really produce what the human masters intended.

But strangely, mixed with grim contemplation was an optimism about the capacity of humans to rationally deliberate about their desires and how the machines would realize them. This optimism helped to navigate an inherent contradiction in the doomsayers’ ideas: Again, the problem of controlling the machines was at heart a problem of human desire — but human desire was also the solution. Cheap and false desires would bring about machine catastrophe — but wise, pure, and true desires could forestall it. But how can we know which desires are which?

The twentieth-century cyberneticist Norbert Wiener made what was for his time a rather startling argument: The machine may be the final instrument of doom, but humanity may be the ultimate cause. In his 1960 essay “Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation,” Wiener recounts tales in which a person makes a wish and gets what was requested but not necessarily what he or she really desired. For example, in the classic “The Monkey’s Paw” by English writer W. W. Jacobs, a man’s wish for 200 pounds is answered by a messenger at the door: The man’s son was killed in a work accident, and the company now sends 200 pounds as consolation. Wiener writes:


The two parties haven’t communicated sufficiently about what their common purpose is, and therefore the result of the partnership will be poor at best and catastrophic at worst.

How this plays out with social media — both with fomenting anger and with automated content-moderation — comes into focus with what Wiener says next:


Wiener was of course not talking about social media, but we can easily see the analogy: It too achieves purposes, like mob frenzy or erroneous post deletions, that its human designers did not actually desire, even though they built the machines in a way that achieves those purposes. Nor does he envision, as in Terminator, a general intelligence that becomes self-aware and nukes everyone. Instead, amid the Cold War, Wiener was writing about the prospect that “learning machines will be used to program the pushing of the button in a new push-button war.” In other words, he imagined a system that humans cannot easily stop and that acts on a misleading substitute for the military objectives humans actually value:


Some twenty years later, the film WarGames imagined a military command-and-control system that learned that the only way to win is not to play at all.

But Wiener’s essay was not just about the risks of machine systems. It was about anything — like a bureaucracy or a research community — for which we lack “an effective understanding of many of the stages by which [it] comes to its conclusion and of what the real tactical intentions of many of its operations may be.”

Wiener’s framing proved influential because he generalized it beyond literal human–machine cooperation to any situation in which two systems work together at different temporal and perceptual scales. Because choices made today with limited information can have terrible long-term consequences that cannot be foreseen, Wiener warns that “the purpose put into the machine” — be it a literal machine like a Twitter algorithm, or a metaphorical one like the corporation that runs it — should be the purpose that we “really desire” and not a “colorful imitation.”

This is why Wiener’s essay is broadly familiar to critics of rationalism, not just those who focus on the problem of controlling machines. The frustrating recurrence of partial and often misleading information about human preferences is a dominant theme in their writings about all that can go wrong when human preferences are built into a system. Wiener’s essay also became symbolically important, because it articulated a critique of techno-rationality using the language of techno-rationality, at a time when grand engineering and social-engineering projects were widely expected to solve many of humanity’s most intractable problems — and it came from a scientific celebrity.


There is a risk in Wiener’s distinction between what we desire and what actually happens in the end. It may create a false image of ourselves — an image in which our desires and our behaviors are wholly separable from each other. Instead of examining carefully whether our desires are in fact good, we may simply assume they are, and so blame bad behavior on the messy cooperation between ourselves and the “system.” We believe we have the best intentions — but then something mysterious intervenes between them and their tangible manifestation in the real world.

When robots programmed to realize our desires actually create nightmares, we might do well to interpret this as a discovery that within our desires lurked nightmares all along. Instead of enforcing our intentions more carefully, as Wiener would have us do, we might ask whether our intentions were actually so pure to begin with. On the other hand, it’s a lot more pleasant to avoid asking this — and so we find an out. The mysterious thing that intervenes may not be the machine but simply our own cognitive dissonance.

In the Soviet Union, officials cultivated a cynicism that allowed them to maintain a savvy distance from the consequences of the ideology they saw no future without. Publicly, they pledged allegiance to the state and its guiding maxims. Privately, they were all too aware of the corrupt and incompetent way the ideology was actually realized. Maintaining an artificial separation between the ideology, which was publicly affirmed, and the consequences of it, which were privately denounced, allowed one to simultaneously be a party man and say “I ain’t a sucker.” Something like this was at work too in Wiener’s simultaneous pessimism and optimism about human desire.

The lesson here is this: If we do not recognize our own desires after we see the machines acting to realize them, we may simply be unwilling to reexamine our desires and ask ourselves whether they are truly good. Perhaps this unwillingness leads us to conceive an artificial separation between our real desires — which we can never truly formalize, quantify, and mechanize — and false imitations of them, which we hold responsible for the consequences we find abhorrent.

This separation has helped to estrange us from our desires, transforming them into autonomous forces separate from the meatbags they inhabit. In the calls today for machines to squelch online mobs, we can recognize a descendant of the estrangement we find in Wiener. In his day, he could still treat human desire as the problem — but also the solution to how machines can be controlled. Even though machines realizing our desires in the wrong way can lead to calamity, humans can yet “exert the full strength of our imagination to examine where the full use of our new modalities may lead us.” The pairing of this pessimism and this optimism was too unstable to endure, and would not survive the 2010s.


What do we really desire and how can we know it? Or are we in fact strangers to ourselves? Wiener’s phrase “two agencies essentially foreign to each other” is also how one might describe two aspects of human motivation and behavior: those that can be discerned through conscious introspection and those that cannot. This dichotomy has been a perennial subject of human fascination — and the stock cliché of every romance novel and romcom. If what we consciously want is different from what we unconsciously want, which of these do our actions reflect?

We may believe that we are the origin of our thoughts and actions, but we may instead obey unconscious instinct, sophisticated psychological patterns configured through evolutionary processes, or the inescapable influence of our peers and the societies we live in. If there is even just some truth to this, then in a very real way there is something foreign or strange about us, perhaps something we find uncomfortable or even cause for shame. We may believe we honestly like a work of art because it embodies aesthetic qualities we value. But where did those values really originate? In liking it, are we merely just signaling something desirable about ourselves to our peers? And if some aspect of our behavior is beyond our full knowledge and control, what if — collectively — these behaviors could be combined into something powerful, malicious, and overwhelmingly oppressive?

Now enter social networks. Wiener worried about whether or not we would sacrifice our true desires for cheap mechanical imitations, to our collective peril. But social networks are built on mass imitation — human imitation, yes, but performed on a scale many recognize as mechanical. The signaling to our peers we find so worrisome in another context is the platforms’ core feature. They take the underlying problem of the split between human desire and ultimate behavior implicit in Wiener’s essay and push it to the extreme.

Consider how social networks have systematized mass imitation. Geoff Shullenberger, in a July 2020 Tablet essay on the dynamics of online mobs, shows how social networks remove an underlying constraint on older forms of collective aggression. The hardest part of getting a group to be aggressive is usually the first act of aggression, not because of the cowardly unwillingness to throw the first stone but rather because throwing the first stone is an act without a pre-existing template. Nobody knows in advance exactly what kind of act may become contagious, and at what time.

But social networks provide a template for throwing the first stone: the public-shaming post. With a template for this first act, contagious aggression can piggyback off of the natural human tendency to emulate pre-existing behaviors and attitudes. Not only do social networks make it easier to both generate and replicate mass aggression; they also provide viral fame as a reward for the first person bold enough to throw the first stone. “It’s unsurprising, then, that some users are trying to make a name for themselves on the basis of first-stone throwing,” writes Shullenberger.

Now, mass imitation online may occur even without anyone really knowing who threw the first stone, and perhaps nobody knowingly did. This is one of the ways in which known and hidden desires combine online and produce terrifying mass behaviors of which we cannot clearly say whether anyone really intended them. This is because even when people act out of sincere belief in a particular cause — say, exposing a racially insensitive op-ed — the template for expressing that belief online, for example through public shaming, and for imitating it may dictate the behavior and so escape our control.

The anime TV series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex coined the term “stand alone complex” for copycat behaviors performed en masse without explicit coordination — by people who all believe themselves to be acting out of individual will and sincere belief in their cause. When asked about their motivations, they may all correctly state their belief in the cause, but they will leave out the manner in which their actions conform to a particular iconic template they imitated. Distressingly, no true originator may be identifiable after the cascade.

The “stand alone complex” illustrates how something very familiar — collective norms, values, and beliefs, for example political convictions — can be transformed by the digital commons into a threatening force alien to human understanding, beyond human control, and ultimately destructive. When we believe ourselves to be taking a righteous action we thought of all on our own, we may suddenly realize we are also in the company of ten thousand others all gripped by the same belief, swept along together in the hivemind frenzy of an outrage mob. Human desires, split off from human understanding and control, become something dangerous and malevolent, perhaps akin to occult forces and witchcraft.


Drawing on the work of Charles Taylor, L. M. Sacasas has argued in these pages (“The Analog City and the Digital City,” Winter 2020) that the emergence of a worldwide digital commons built on globe-spanning communications backbones has led to an inversion of typical assumptions about modernity and the self.

The premodern world was fascinated with “non-human agents” that had the ability to induce or impose meanings independent of our knowledge and control, and to bring about outcomes in the physical world. Premoderns felt themselves to be fundamentally “porous” in nature, unable to prevent the vulnerable self from being impinged upon by spirits and demonic forces. The vulnerable self required refuge within ordered societies that used common rituals and folkways to keep the bad magic at bay. Heresy was dangerous because even a single heretic could throw the safety of the community in doubt by diluting the purity that the rituals were painstakingly intended to maintain.

In contrast, the idealized modern human is — or rather was — autonomous, rational, and secured against outside harmful influences. Key to the emergence of the modern age was the rise of what Taylor calls the “buffered self.” This new self, Sacasas explains, “no longer perceives and believes in sources of meaning outside of the human mind” and is not disturbed by “powers beyond its control.” If the porous self is beset on all sides by harmful external forces, prone to corruption and manipulation from the unseen, and in perpetual need of community protection, the rational and autonomous modern self is confidently able to think and act alone due to its inviolability and stability. Meaning for moderns is only created by individual human minds — the only minds that count. The mind is sealed off from the world, autonomous and self-driven, and unconcerned with matters beyond its control. It is capable of tolerating heresy, because heresy is at best an intellectual error, not a potentially catastrophic event that leads to the compromise of the entire community.

This image of the modern self already began to crumble during the Cold War with the emergence of the forces of technological automation that Norbert Wiener discussed. But in the twenty-first century it has broken entirely. Sacasas argues that in our digital era “certain features of the self in an enchanted world are now re-emerging.” “Digital technologies influence us and exert causal power over our affairs,” and we find ourselves suddenly aware once again of how we operate “within a field of inscrutable forces over which we have little to no control.” These forces are not spirits or demons but rather “bots and opaque algorithmic processes, which alternately and capriciously curse or bless us.” One such force is, of course, Internet memes, and online content generally. Amplified and circulated by complex proprietary information platforms hidden behind corporate obfuscation, and often too complicated even for their own engineers to fully comprehend, these systems make their users vulnerable to external predation by harmful forms of social influence. The common factor in all the fears about rampaging memes is the belief that memes are like magic, with powers to cause real-world effects, akin to the premodern spiritual objects Sacasas describes.

But another way of understanding the power of meme magic is that it represents merely our own distorted perceptions of our split selves and of desires that have become alien to us through social-media imitation. Wiener asked us to check whether our desires were true or merely colorful imitations, but the construction of digital platforms founded on the promise of unrestrained imitation pushed these tensions to the breaking point.

So rather than hoping to rectify human desire and to rein in out-of-control machines, we now worry that out-of-control humans hooked up to machines threaten social stability. If the self in the digital age is indeed once again porous, it must once again take refuge in the comfort and protection of community rituals designed to ward off the spirits and demons of an older and supposedly more primitive world — a world that digital life has brought back. But the role of the community ritualists is now assumed by machines.


The machine-control theorists of old were fixated on the discrepancy between our desires and observable machine behavior. The machine may poorly imitate what the human overseer desires, and the gulf between what is desired and what is done may have lethal consequences. This way of putting the problem requires clarity about what our desires are and how they correspond to what the machines are doing. In the digital environment, we no longer have this clarity, nor do we know what count as true, authentic desires. And so we lose confidence in ourselves as the solution to the original problem and are left only with the burden of knowing that we are the problem — or rather some strange manifestation of ourselves with a tenuous link to our underlying “true” desires and intentions.

It then becomes obvious why the machines are now marshaled into service to rescue us. Much like ritualistic institutions in premodern times, the machines perform the purifying rituals that protect the self and the community from the threatening outside world and its malign forces. They filter and remove information, alter how it spreads, and expel heretical members.

But the software that is designed to protect the community’s helpless members from dangerous information at the very same time maintains their state of helplessness. It operates without transparency and accountability, leaving users perpetually in the dark about when and where it steps in, and forces them to resort to superstitious folk theories about why their social media feeds are what they are at any given moment. And although the machines are intended to serve the public community at large by protecting its members, they work on behalf of entities — social networks — that are not themselves really communities. As Jon Askonas and Ari Schulman explain in a recent National Affairs essay, online speech platforms have “failed to form coherent communities” and therefore lack “the legitimacy to enforce norms of speech.”

As platforms become more universal, less subject to visible control by human moderators, and less comprehensible to individual users, they become increasingly less like communities. The machines that police them are designed to enforce the values the community shares — but they lack the legitimacy of human guardians, who can be held responsible and, if necessary, replaced. The machines are assumed to embody the values the community cherishes and not misleading approximations of them, but the old question about how we know whether machines in fact do so have obviously gone unanswered. The question may not seem as salient as it once did, now that online mobs have replaced machines as bogeyman, but it is no less troublesome. Just because we do not talk much anymore about the problem of how to control autonomous machines does not mean the problem has vanished.

As our lives become more and more dependent on online platforms — especially during a pandemic [of lies] that [tyrants use to] limit our in-person communication — the stakes in giving the machines control over our speech and behavior are higher than ever. We have delegated this power to them such that they can protect us from all-too-real harms and safeguard certain liberties, with the assumption that they act in accordance with our fundamental values. But do they really? How do we know? And if it turns out that they are not in fact acting as we truly wish, how do we know, once we have granted them the power to correct our desires, that we will still be able to correct theirs?

The problem of how to control the machines has faded in cultural importance after the utopian promise of social networks became a nightmare, and humans rather than machines became the villains. So now the machines fight against the memes — ironically, for the people who devoted themselves to controlling the machines unwittingly invited them to control us. (read more)

Democrats and Republicans Can’t Agree on Anything. They Shouldn’t Have To

Let’s make this easier for bipartisanship and imagine the only condition that needs to be fulfilled is that both parties think a bill is a good idea. Outside of emergencies — and American politics cannot function only during financial crises and pandemics — the set of ideas that both parties can agree on is far smaller and blander than the range of ideas that one party or the other likes. To insist on bipartisanship as a condition of passage is to believe that it’s better for American politics to choose its solutions from the kid’s menu.

Virtually the entire Republican Party signed a pledge to oppose any and all tax increases, so a truly bipartisan approach would mean taxes were simply off the table for policymaking. That would plainly be absurd. But even where more reasonable compromise is possible, problems abound.

Bills both parties agree on are often bills that have seen their most dramatic or unusual ideas sanded off. Compromise bills can be wise legislation, but they often result in policy too modest and mushy to solve problems. We would never want industries to release only products that all the major competitors can agree on — we understand that it’s good for the public to have choices, and sometimes the best product starts as a risky bet, not as a consensus pick. (read more)

Racial Equality Frames and Public Policy Support: Survey Experimental Evidence

Abstract

How  do  racial  attitudes  shape  policy  preferences  in  the  era  of  [Only] Black  Lives  Matter  and increasingly liberal views on racial issues?  A large body of research finds that highlighting the benefits of progressive policies for racial minorities undermines support for those policies. However,  Democratic  elites  have  started  centering  race  in  their  messaging  on  progressive public policies.  To explore this puzzle, in this paper we offer an empirical test that examines the effect of describing an ostensibly race-neutral progressive policy with racial framing, as used  by  Democratic  elites,  on  support  for  that  policy.    To  benchmark  these  effects,  we compare  a  race  policy  frame  with  class,  class  plus  race,  and  neutral  policy  frames.    We demonstrate that despite leftward shifts in public attitudes towards issues of racial equality, racial  framing  decreases  support  for  race-neutral  progressive  policies.   Generally,  the  class frame most successfully increases support for progressive policies across racial and political
subgroups. (read more)

Can biological males be lesbians?

Can a biological male be a lesbian? If this question seems to you outlandish, it’s probably because you’re unaware of a new paradigm, in vogue in many millennial communities, progressive organisations, and University departments. This paradigm says that a transwoman can count as a lesbian; and that many do.

Though precise statistics are unavailable, many transwomen are exclusively female-attracted. Prior to transition, they’re what we would ordinarily call heterosexual, or straight: males stably attracted to the opposite biological sex. When transition occurs, this pattern of attraction usually persists. But, for some, it’s unacceptable to now think of themselves as straight – for this carries with it a lingering connotation of manhood, now rejected. Hence some transwomen self-identify as lesbians. They do so even where their transition is only social, and not medical – which is most of the time. The rest of us are now urged to accept the phenomenon of a ‘lesbian with a penis’, or even a ‘girldick’.

When a group of lesbians called ‘Get the L Out’ disrupted the London Pride procession last year with banners saying ‘lesbian=female homosexual’, many were quick to express disgust at what they assumed was transphobia. When  Labour activist Lily Madigan got involved in a Twitter argument last week with a lesbian academic about whether transwomen could be lesbians, many automatically took Madigan’s side, assuming this must be straightforward bigotry towards a vulnerable transwoman. However, a closer look at some documented background concerns here should slow down the knee-jerk outrage in both cases.  In a nutshell, the main general concern – which is a structural one, and not directed towards any particular trans individuals – is  given existing misogyny, when you admit males into a formerly female-only domain, certain predictable and harmful things start happening to females.
 
I’ll focus here on two such predictable things. The first is that, to put it crudely but accurately, males start badgering females for sex. A familiar phenomenon since time immemorial, one might think, though this time with an added twist: progressives are facilitating. Some trans ‘lesbians ‘ complain that lesbians won’t consider them as potential partners. Their focus is lesbians, because hitting on straight women might threaten the preferred narrative: a straight woman is attracted to men, after all. The resistance of many lesbians to have sex with male-bodied people is framed as a matter of inequality rather than orientation, and therefore something to be corrected in the name of progress. Lesbian resistance is sometimes referred to as the ‘cotton ceiling’, crassly riffing on the idea of a promotion ceiling for women at work, but substituting images of glass with that of underwear. Equally, sometimes those resisting are called ‘TERFs’, because it is assumed that their resistance is a result of trans-exclusive radical feminism, rather than because they are homosexual.

Impervious to the point that not being attracted to male bodies is the sine qua non of lesbianism, progressive academics and organisations are unstinting in their support of this quest to overcome lesbian boundaries. So, for instance, UK LGBT charity Stonewall is currently sponsoring transwoman Morgan Page to become a ‘transgender leader’. A few years back, Page was the organiser of a Toronto workshop ‘Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling’, but, despite advocating for lesbians as part of its remit, Stonewall apparently doesn’t mind. Diva magazine, a publication ostensibly exclusively for lesbians, proudly advertises itself as trans inclusive. Another popular publication aimed at lesbians explains how to have lesbian sex with a transwoman. And a recently advertised conference at the University of Brighton asks ‘How can gay space be made more trans-inclusive?’ citing ‘groups, bars, bedrooms’ as relevant examples. It’s not hard to work out whose bedrooms they’re talking about. (Hint: it’s not straight people’s).

When questioned, such organisations tend to dismiss any concerns by talking generically about consent: “If a person of any gender doesn’t consent to sex with a transwomen, then of course that’s not OK!” (said vehemently). But this ignores other insidious effects of construing homosexual orientation as a form of unkind exclusion. These impinge in particular upon lesbians whose sexuality is emerging. Very often, young lesbians gravitate towards queer communities, where ideas of trans ‘exclusion’ are now endemic. Male socialisation guarantees that male voices will be loudest in these communities, irrespective of self-identified gender. Meanwhile, female socialisation makes it likely that females will be the ones to placate, to reassure, and to go along with things. Message boards testify to the confusion and shame that this can bring to lesbians trying simultaneously to discover their sexuality, and to do the right thing by people they perceive to be marginalised. The relative lack of similar narratives from gay men tells its own story.

There’s another reason facile assurances about consent won’t help here. For if males with penises can be lesbians, then what counts as consent? A transwoman with a penis who failed to disclose her status as such to a new lesbian sexual partner might normally be thought of as raping her, since informed consent was in effect absent. Yet if transwomen are to be thought of as lesbians too, the case for rape by deception is much harder to make. Some theorists even argue, egregiously, that this is in fact as it should be, handily ignoring the fact that residual differentials in size, strength, and aggression between the sexes mean that any such legal change could only tend to disfavour females.

A further familiar objection is to point to lesbians already in sexual relationships with transwomen: are you saying that these females aren’t lesbians either? (said indignantly). Here, admittedly, appropriate classification is more difficult, especially since, as noted, the category of transwomen as potential sexual partners ranges from wholly ‘passing’ MTF transsexuals with vaginoplasty to unreconstructed bodies with male genitalia and no hormone treatment. Perhaps lesbians can be sexually attracted to ‘passing’ transsexuals without automatically counting as bisexual; perhaps not. It’s complicated to say. But either way, note that this is a very different question to whether males can count as lesbians, and is often introduced rhetorically as a distraction from that question. (An even dafter distraction tactic, which I’ll ignore here, is to question whether the category of females exists at all).

A second predictable thing that happens in mixed-sex domains is that, due to well-entrenched habits on the part of both sexes, males soak up attention and resources. This is particularly pernicious when female members in the group already face inequality within wider society, as lesbians do. Charity spending and political focus from LGBT-focused organisations tends to prioritises males over females; males often outnumber females in senior positions in both gay and trans advocacy organisations; organisations formerly aimed exclusively at helping lesbians have been forced via social pressure to widen their remit to admit males and so diffuse their focus. Gendered habits of socialisation unfortunately aren’t discarded along with pronouns.

Classification isn’t aggression. Rather, it furnishes us with a rich variety of conceptual tools to name different aspects of reality. Avoiding naming female homosexuals, as such, won’t mean female homosexuals cease to exist. It will just mean we can’t talk about them properly, and so can’t advocate for them as a distinct group, with a distinctive history and set of interests. In other words, lesbians will no longer have effective political representation. This is devastating, given the long history, extending to the present, of discrimination against lesbians for being sexually and reproductively deviant from the female heterosexual norm. 

For these reasons, all genuine progressives should firmly defend the definition of a lesbian as a female homosexual. They should refute any charge of unkindness, in doing so. ‘Unkind to whom?’ one might well ask, since the interests of vulnerable females matter just as much as those of transwomen, no matter what you might have lately heard. Female-attracted transwomen can have our strong support without usurping the category of lesbians. (read more)

LOL, women’s sports are such a f**king joke. It’s such an insult to me that we allow this display of narcissism, dishonesty, privilege, amorality and vanity in our society.

Imagine celebrating the pitiful athleticism of a human female, when pet dogs can outrun the fastest humans even when the human has a 50m head start. Just look how stiff, robotic, retarded, unflexible, and autistic these women look compared to the effortless grace of the dog (who spends most of its time laying on the couch).

If women want to be in front of an audience they can twerk. These stiff spines look like they couldn’t even do that.

— Anonymous [425]

Parents Revolt After Texas’s No. 1 School District Tries To Institutionalize Racism
 
Parents of kids attending Texas’s top-performing school district found out what their schools have been teaching in the name of ‘racial justice,’ and they are livid.

A suburb of Dallas, Texas has exploded into national media coverage and arrests of school board members after parents found out what their schools have been teaching in the name of “racial justice.” They’re fighting back with lawsuits and challengers for two school board seats in an election that finishes May 1.

Carroll Independent School District of Southlake is the top-achieving school district in Texas. It has no racial achievement gaps, which is nearly unheard of. That’s because Southlake attracts high-achieving families of all races.

The local median income is more than four times the national average and poverty there is statistically nonexistent. According to district data, “microaggressions,” bullying, and racially charged incidents happen approximately three times per month in the district of 8,500 students, meaning they involve 0.3 percent of students a year.

Yet, beginning in 2018, the district rushed into an eye-popping “cultural competence” plan after two videos of students singing the n-word along with rappers went viral on social media. Media outlets went nuts on the story, and so did local school board meetings, where sometimes-crying taxpayers, parents, and students spent hours insisting their lives have been forever damaged by the kind of “institutional racism” in Southlake illustrated by the rap sing-alongs.

They weren’t complaining that rappers stud songs with racial slurs, or that parents let their kids listen to such music. They were complaining about things like teasing and graffiti. They demanded the school district end such annoyances, and even treat them like crimes, or be convicted in the court of public opinion of enabling “institutional racism.”

Is Everyone to Blame for What a Few Racists Do?

Retired Dallas Cowboys player Russell Maryland and Robin Cornish, the widow of another Cowboy, who both have kids in the district, used national media appearances to pressure the town to enact a “Cultural Competence Action Plan,” or CCAP. A long-form article from NBC News in January that quotes Cornish accuses the town of harboring racists.

Cornish also told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in February 2019 the school district was “sweeping this under the carpet, and they are complicit. Unfortunately, this is the way our country is right now. Southlake is a microcosm of that. We have someone running the country right now who says it’s OK to be racist.”

“The idea that America is fundamentally flawed because some people have a [racist] problem in their minds, that’s a recipe to keep you in poverty and unhappiness for the rest of your life,” said Juan Saldivar, a father of a Southlake student, to explain his opposition to restructuring Southlake schools around “systemic racism.” “My parents always told me it doesn’t matter whether people like you, it matters whether the law protects you, and it does.”

He said most parents who oppose the district’s rush into racial extremism over the past three years don’t want to talk to media outlets because their perspective is depicted as racist, even though their true goals are combating racism and ensuring equal treatment and continued academic excellence for all Carroll students. A local parents group organized to oppose CCAP, Southlake Families PAC, makes that clear throughout their website and other materials.

Through the district’s spokesman, school board members and Carroll administrators refused any comment on this story, even through their lawyers. The spokesman cited ongoing litigation that has paused CCAP and led to two school board members posting bail after being indicted in a lawsuit alleging they conducted meetings about CCAP in secret in violation of state law.

A look at what numerous district employees and contractors were using public resources to teach suggests some other reasons they’re declining comment. Here’s a sampling of what Carroll ISD has been doing in the name of “cultural competency” and “combatting racism.” It’s evidence of the district seeking to push extremist views on kids—a completely different story than CCAP proponents claim and corporate media have reported in the past three years.

Racial ‘Competence’ Means Shaming White People

During a 2019 retreat, Carroll administrators were given a preview of the kind of instruction they would be expected to oversee and carry out under a “cultural competency” regime.

In slides presented at that retreat, teachers and administrators who choose to treat students, parents, and colleagues equally regardless of their skin color or ethnicity were accused of “cultural blindness”: “a state in which differences were ignored and one proceeds as if differences don’t exist.” The slides claimed, “White privilege is being able to navigate daily life in the American culture without having to think about race.”

The administrators were encouraged to construct a “white identity,” discussing “What does it mean for you to be white?” and “whiteness,” as well as “Nam[ing] some characteristics of white culture.” While being encouraged to think of themselves in terms of race, however, administrators were also told that being white is a bad thing. It includes “white fragility,” “a state in which even a minimal amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves (anger, fear, guilt.. silence).”

Ironically, the presentation also warns against “stereotyping,” which it says “happens when you generalize about a person while ignoring the presence of individual differences.”

“This is how bad it has to get before most white people notice: Burning crosses, Swastikas, KKK, the N-word,” Carroll administrators were told in the presentation.

Everything Could Be Racist, Even Eye Contact

On August 10, 2020, Assistant Principal Rene James gave a presentation to Carroll High School teachers focused on race. It directed them to think about their teaching through “The Lense of Equity,” which means racializing every possible interaction: where students sit, who raises his hand (and doesn’t), which students take advanced classes, and so forth, in extreme detail.

The presentation included this video from a California nonprofit group about “racism” in schools. An unnamed young black woman in the video claims “Black and brown students” need extra resources because they “have to work extra hard and do like double the work just to succeed.”

James’s presentation also links to an “equity rubric,” or things teachers should change about their professional practices, that include “The teacher is aware of their [sic] biases and privileges,” “The teacher utilizes identity-affirming strategies,” and “The school’s core policies and practices indicate a prioritization of Equity.” Teachers were instructed to document “evidence of progress” on metrics like this.

James’s presentation also links to “A Resource for Equitable Classroom Practices 2010,” a 40-page document that includes detailed instructions for greeting students, calling on them in class, and classroom decorations, all with an eye to race. It implies that behaviors such as mispronouncing a student’s name, making both too much or too little eye contact, or not equally distributing how a teacher walks around the classroom is racist.

The document also demands that teachers who don’t want to be considered racists “Use[] body language, gestures, and expressions to convey a message that all students’ questions and opinions are important,” and include non-English words in classroom materials.

Equality Is Actually Racist

A “culturally competent” professional development session held on Sept. 9, 2020 for Carroll ISD staff included similar material. It claimed that teachers who “maintain[] long held traditions over [a]changing population’s traditions” and “neglecting to or refusing to each from a culturally relevant perspective,” as well as striving to treat all people equally regardless of skin color, were negative behaviors teachers should shun.

It called on teachers to “Understand, [sic] there is a system and culture of power dependent on the suppression of other cultures in order to maintain itself” and claimed “educators no longer have the luxury of being color-blind or color-mute in a society socially constructed around race.”

This “training session” was held in conjunction with a publicly funded regional public school cooperative known as Education Service Center Region 11, which oversees 76 Texas public school districts that encompass approximately 600,000 students.

The presentation further called on teachers to consider how they can be a “more critically race conscious leader and educator (in America).”

The presentation depicted as educators’ ultimate goal to encourage students to “work to be agents of change,” and along the way learn to “view problems and issues through different ethnic lenses.” It called on teachers to develop environments that push students to “become actively engaged in solving real-world problems centered around diversity, culture, power, equity, and social-justice.”

Dad: A Poisonous Recipe for Poverty and Unhappiness

CCAP proponents like Maryland depict this kind of material as teaching children basic human decency. But those who oppose it see materials like these and draw the conclusion that there’s a lot more going on here.

Saldivar is a retired colonel who graduated from West Point and remained in Southlake after he was stationed in the area on a military assignment. He strongly opposes this kind of instruction trickling down into his daughter’s fourth-grade classroom.

“I did everything I could to get my child into [Carroll] and it’s No. 1 in Texas, and I say I do not want my child growing up with this stuff being injected into her brain because it’s poison,” he said in an interview. “It’s the seeds of destruction that ruin one’s ability to grow up happy and be a leader in society.”

A Mexican-American grandson of immigrants, Juan was the first in his extended family to go to college. He said he’s experienced racism from both white people and “people of color,” but said racist actions by individuals don’t indict the entire nation he’s put his life in danger to protect and that has given his immigrant family opportunities far beyond their sharecropper past.

“The outcome is nothing less than the survival of our national identity itself. No nation can survive a generation of citizens who hate their country,” Saldivar said to explain why he finally decided to speak his mind despite the social pressure he knew he’d face for it. “That’s why I say education is a higher endeavor than war. It has a longer-lasting impact.” (read more)

Former US Ambassador To Mexico: Cartels Control Up To 40 Percent Of Mexican Territory
 
Former US ambassador to Mexico, Christopher Landau, says Mexico has taken a 'laissez faire' approach to cartels, which now control vast swaths of territory.

Christopher Landau, U.S. ambassador to Mexico during the Trump administration, said during a roundtable event with former diplomats last week that drug cartels control between 35 and 40 percent of Mexican territory.

“I think there is no doubt that they play a broad role in the governance of Mexico,” Landau said.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, he added, has taken a passive approach to the cartels. “He sees the cartels as his Vietnam,” Landau said, noting that López Obrador has tried to avoid open conflict, and instead adopted a “laissez faire attitude towards the cartels.”

In comments Wednesday, López Obrador dismissed Landau’s assessment, saying, “It’s not like that,” and boasting, somewhat implausibly, that he travels all over Mexico without bodyguards.

But after a string of high-profile attacks and assassination attempts by cartels last year, along with a dramatic string of indictments and intrigue among top former Mexican officials, it’s hard to argue with Landau’s assessment.

Last June, in an unprecedented and brazen display of force, dozens of cartel gunmen armed with grenades and .50-caliber sniper rifles ambushed the armored vehicle of Mexico City police chief Omar García Harfuch. The dawn attack, thought to have been carried out by the powerful Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or CJNG, took place on Paseo de la Reforma, a boulevard leading to the posh neighborhood of Lomas de Chapultepec, home to various foreign embassies and mansions — just about the last place one would expect a cartel ambush.

Harfuch was shot several times but ultimately survived the assassination attempt (two of his bodyguards and a female passerby were killed), but the fact that the attack happened in broad daylight in an exclusive neighborhood of Mexico City underscored the impunity with which cartels now operate in Mexico. “There has never been an attack as blatant,” Landau said, “And, to my surprise, the central Mexican government basically did nothing.”

The same could be said of the Battle of Culiacán in October 2019, when the Mexican military captured a son of jailed drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and were quickly besieged and outgunned by Sinaloa cartel forces that blocked all exits to the city, dispatched custom-built armored vehicles, and kidnapped the families of the soldiers holding El Chapo’s son. After launching more than a dozen separate attacks on government forces in Culiacán, López Obrador himself ordered the Mexican military to stand down, release El Chapo’s son, and surrender to the cartel.

Images and footage of the battle could have been mistaken for scenes from Syria or Yemen, where central governments really don’t exercise total sovereignty over those countries. It’s not too much to say that the Battle of Culiacán marked a turning point in the collapse of the Mexican state. Unable to pull off the apprehension of a high-ranking cartel member, and unwilling to exert the force necessary to defeat paramilitary cartel forces, the Mexican government left little doubt about who is in charge of Sinaloa — or the rest of the country for that matter.

That conclusion was bolstered by the release and subsequent exoneration in January of former Mexican defense minister Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda, who was arrested in the United States late last year on drug trafficking charges. Specifically, General Cienfuegos, who served as defense minister under President Enrique Peña Nieto from 2012 to 2018, was accused of taking bribes in exchange for protecting drug cartel leaders. They apparently referred to him as “El Padrino,” or The Godfather.

But his arrest in Los Angeles triggered a mini-diplomatic crisis. An outraged Mexican government demanded that Cienfuegos be released to Mexican authorities, and assured the U.S. Justice Department that the full weight of the Mexican justice system would be brought to bear on his case. The United States complied, turning over Cienfuegos and hundreds of pages of evidence against him. Not long after, the general was completely — and very publicly —  exonerated, and the classified evidence against was made public. In a statement, the Mexican attorney general’s office claimed, absurdly, that Cienfuegos “never had any encounter with the members of the criminal organization.”

As shocking as it might seem that such a high-ranking member of the Mexican government was in the pay of a powerful cartel, the Cienfuegos case wasn’t isolated. In December 2019, Genaro García Luna, former security chief under President Felipe Calderon from 2006 to 2012, was arrested on charges he took millions in bribes from the Sinaloa cartel when it was under the leadership of El Chapo.

To grasp how big of deal Luna’s arrest was, understand that he served as the head of Mexico’s Federal Investigation Agency from 2001 to 2005 (the equivalent of our F.B.I.), and from 2006 to 2012 was Mexico’s secretary of public security, a cabinet-level position under Calderon. In that role, it was his job to lead Calderon’s war against the cartels — chief among them the Sinaloa cartel, which, it turns out, he was working for all along.

Given all of this very recent history, it’s not a stretch to say, as Landau did last week, that cartels play a broad role in the governance of Mexico. In some places, they act as the government, not just by controlling police and security forces, but also in providing welfare and public services to local residents, as they did this past year during the pandemic shutdowns, distributing food and aid packages to the public, sometimes in boxes marked with cartel branding and logos.

As the border crisis deepens, the cartels’ role in fomenting and profiting off illegal immigration has also become clear, leaving no doubt that at least in northern Mexico cartels really do control much, if not most, of the territory. (read more)

North Carolina protests kick off as judge REFUSES to release bodycam of Andrew Brown, Jr. being shot dead by cops: Family will only be allowed to watch 'redacted' footage

• Brown, 42, was shot and killed by police in North Carolina at 8.30am on April 21
• Police are yet to release bodycam footage; his family have called it an execution
• Judge Jeffrey Foster on Wednesday denied a media petition to release the footage publicly for at least 30 days, saying it would impede the investigation
• Brown's family will be allowed to watch redacted footage from five body cams
• The family can watch the footage within ten days but not take copies
• Their attorneys said the decision was 'deeply disappointing', adding: 'Video evidence is the key to discerning the truth and getting well-deserved justice'
• District Attorney Andrew Womble had earlier told the judge he disagreed that Brown's car was stationary when the shooting started
• That was a characterization by attorneys for the family of Brown Jr.

A judge has refused to release bodycam footage of Andrew Brown Jr. being shot dead by police to the media after a prosecutor said he hit deputies with his car before they fired the shots that killed him.

Brown, 42, was shot and killed by police in Elizabeth City, North Carolina at 8.30am on April 21 while at the wheel of his car in his driveway. Police are yet to release bodycam footage of the incident; his family have called it an execution.

Judge Jeffrey Foster denied a media petition to release the footage publicly for at least 30 days, saying it might impede the ongoing investigation.

Brown's family will allowed to watch redacted footage from five body cameras and and one dashboard cam within the next ten days.Their attorney said up to eight officers were at the scene. The family can watch the footage but not take copies. 

District Attorney Andrew Womble had earlier told the judge that he viewed body camera video and disagreed with a characterization by attorneys for the family of Brown Jr. that his car was stationary when the shooting started.

Attorneys for the Brown family called the judge's decision 'deeply disappointing', adding: 'Video evidence is the key to discerning the truth and getting well-deserved justice.'

An attorney for the officers said they are 'very distraught' and opposed the footage being released, but added: 'We believe the shooting was justified.'

The FBI launched a civil rights probe Tuesday into the death of Brown Jr., as his family released an independent autopsy showing he was shot five times, including in the back of the head. 

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper called for a special prosecutor while pressure built on authorities to release body camera footage of last week's shooting.

Police said they were carrying out an arrest warrant for drugs offenses and claim Brown was a drug dealer with a rap sheet dating back to 1988. Brown had a 180 page criminal record and had been filmed selling narcotics in the weeks leading up to his death, Fox News reported Monday. 

DA Womble, who opposed the footage's immediate release, said Wednesday the video shows that Brown´s car made contact with law enforcement twice before shots could be heard on the video.

'As it backs up, it does make contact with law enforcement officers,' he said, adding that the car stops again.

'The next movement of the car is forward. It is in the direction of law enforcement and makes contact with law enforcement. It is then and only then that you hear shots.'

In response to Womble's remarks in court, lawyer Chantel Cherry-Lassiter, who watched the footage with Brown's son, defended her description of the footage.

'At no time have I given any misrepresentations. I still stand by what I saw in that clip,' she said, adding that she watched the clip 'over and over,' taking notes.

Womble argued that body camera video from the shooting, a portion of which was shown to the family on Monday, should be kept from the public for another month so that state investigators can make progress on their probe of the shooting.

Foster ruled: 'The release at this time would create a serious threat to the fair, impartial and orderly administration of justice. Confidentiality is necessary to protect either an active internal or criminal investigation or a potential internal or criminal investigation.'

Judge Foster said he would revisit the issue of making the footage publicly available in 30 to 45 days, adding: 'The court will, in its discretion, consider at that time further release of the video based on the factors as they exist at that time.'

A North Carolina law that took effect in 2016 allows law enforcement agencies to show body camera video privately to a victim's family, but it generally requires a court to approve any public release.

Media attorney Michael J. Tadych said there is 'absolute public interest' in releasing the tapes. The sheriff's office supported the release of videos, according to Pasquotank County Attorney R. Michael Cox. (read more)

"An initial search warrant signed off by North Carolina Superior Court Senior Resident Judge Jerry R. Tillett on April 20 states that Agent R.D. Johnson of the Dare County Narcotics Task Force was in communication with a confidential source who said they had been purchasing narcotics from Brown for over one year. The informant claimed that they had purchased different quantities of cocaine, “crack” cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine from Brown on numerous occasions.

"Investigators believe the establishment at 421 Perry St. in Elizabeth City “is being used to store, package and distribute narcotics, namely ‘crack’ cocaine,” the warrant states. Two vehicles regularly seen at the residence were believed to be in Brown’s possession and were being used by him to store, traffic and distribute illegal narcotics. There is reason to believe that the home was being used by Brown as a “secure location” to store drugs, currency and recordation of sales or monies owed, the warrant says."

"The Radical Left Democrat Party has gone absolutely INSANE in fighting the Forensic Audit of the 2020 Presidential Election Scam, right now taking place in the Great State of Arizona. They sent a team of over 100 lawyers to try and stop it because they know what the result of the Arizona Senate sponsored audit will be—and it won’t be good for the Dems. The audit is independently run, with no advantage to either side, but the Democrats don’t want to hear anything about it because they know that they lost Arizona, and other scam election States, in a LANDSLIDE. They also know that the Arizona State Legislature approved virtually none of their many election requests, which is totally UNCONSTITUTIONAL. The people of Arizona are very angry, as are the people of our Country. If we can’t have free and fair elections, we don’t have a Country. The audit must continue. America deserves the TRUTH!"

—  Donald J. Trump

Heather MacDonald: How “Black Lives Matter” Kills Black Americans

Heather MacDonald is the author of “The War on Cops” and “The Diversity Delusion”. After the initial Ferguson Riots and the birth of the “[Only] Black Lives Matter” movement, she coined the term “Ferguson Effect” to describe the deadly effect BLM and de-policing have on vulnerable minority communities. Since the George Floyd riots, the murder rates in US cities have spiked an average of 30%. Gateway Pundit spoke to Heather MacDonald about the Derek Chauvin trial and what it will mean for the US in the future.

You coined the phrase “Ferguson Effect”. What will the “George Floyd Effect” be?

The “Ferguson Effect” refers to the twin phenomena of officers backing off from discretionary proactive enforcement under the accusation that such enforcement is racist, and the resulting emboldening of criminals.  The first iteration of the Ferguson Effect in 2015 and 2016, following the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, led to the largest two year increase in homicides in 50 years. Another 2000 blacks died of homicide over those two years compared to the benchmark of 2014.

The George Floyd Effect dwarfs anything seen so far.  2020 saw the largest percentage increase in homicides in U.S. history.  Over 2000 more blacks have been killed in drive-by shootings in 2020 compared to the already high benchmark of 2019.  When final tallies come in, there will likely have been about 8500 black homicide victims in 2020, more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined, even though blacks are only 12% of the U.S. population.

Four dozen black children were gunned down fatally in 2020 in their beds, living rooms, and front porches; at birthday parties and barbecues; while sitting in their parents’ car. Not a single one of those child victims drew a protest from [Only] Black Lives Matter activists because their killers were all black. Likewise, the vast majority of black adult homicide victims are killed by other blacks, which is why they are ignored by the media and by left-wing politicians.

The police could end all fatal shootings tomorrow and it would have a negligible impact on the black death by homicide rate. Every year the police kill about 1000 people, the vast majority of whom are armed and dangerous. Whites make up about 50% of those police-shooting victims; blacks about 23-25%–again, almost all those police-shooting victims posing a violent threat to the officer or to bystanders. In 2020, the police fatally shot 18 allegedly “unarmed” blacks (and 24 “unarmed” whites)—unarmed being defined liberally to include suspects grabbing the officer’s gun or fleeing in a stolen car with a loaded revolver on the seat next to them.  Those 18 “unarmed” blacks make up 0.2% of black homicide victims in 2020, and a percentage of the 40 million black US population too small to calculate.

Blacks between the ages of 10 and 43 die of homicide in the U.S. at 13 times the rate of whites—killed not by the police, not by whites, but by other blacks.  Indeed, interracial rates of violent crime skew massively towards black-on-white crime, contrary to the “White Supremacist” narrative.  Blacks commit 88% of all interracial non-fatal violent crime between whites and blacks and between blacks and whites.

The George Floyd Effect is continuing into 2021 unabated, with city after city reporting its highest crime totals in decades.  While the victims remain overwhelmingly black, the violence is spilling over into the suburbs, especially with carjackings.  Drivers are being run over, dragged while hanging out the door, and shot.  Chicago set up protected times at gas stations when drivers could fill up their cars under police protection without having to fear getting carjacked.

Because the U.S. turns its eyes away from the cultural breakdown in the black ghetto and remains in deep ignorance regarding the extent of crime disparities in the U.S.  (for example, a black Chicagoan is 50 times more likely to commit a drive-by shooting than a white Chicagoan; blacks in New York City commit 75% of all shootings, though they are 23% of the population, while whites commit less than 2% of shootings though they are 34% of the population), the only thing that will reverse the policy decisions that have led to the George Floyd Effect is when white children start getting mowed down in drive-by shootings.

Have police officers begun to quit?

Police officers are quitting in droves or taking disability leave.  Recruiting has become almost impossible.  Officers are telling anyone who may be considering a career in policing to forget about it.  Why train for a profession when the day you start you are marked as a racist?  Officers who get out of their cars to investigate suspicious behavior or to make an arrest in the inner-city find themselves routinely surrounded by hostile jeering crowds, cursing at them, sometimes throwing things.  Violent suspects have been primed to resist arrest even more than usual, having been told that the police are racist. It is suspect resistance that leads officers to escalate their own force on a resisting suspect. According to one study, blacks resist arrest at 4 times the rate of whites.  The more resistance, the more risk of fatal police shootings, leading to more riots and more depolicing.

Was the trial of Derek Chauvin fair?

Going forward after the Chauvin trial, it is an open question whether any police officer can receive a fair process, free from mob pressure, should he be prosecuted for use of lethal force. The terrified preparations in Minneapolis and elsewhere in anticipation of the verdict—the razor wire and barricades around government buildings, the activation of the National Guard, the declaration in Minnesota of a “peacetime emergency,” the fortified police presence, the curfews, the cancellation of school, the boarded up businesses—all raised serious questions about the rule of law in the United States.  Had the jury failed to convict Chauvin on all three counts of murder and manslaughter, the ensuing riots would have made the conflagrations of 2020 look like a Girl Scout campfire.

The threat of black rage and riots blackmails American institutions into submission.  No one dares speak the truth about the pathological inner-city culture that gives rise to disproportionate criminal behavior and academic failure. Riots are regarded as a natural response to perceived black grievance. Law enforcement responded weakly to the riots of 2020 and 2021 for fear of being perceived as racist. As a result, the anarchy continues.

What do you expect to come of this in the near future?

The near future holds more white-bashing and more craven capitulation to phony charges of white supremacy.  Far from being a bigoted country, there is not a single mainstream institution in the U.S. that does not employ massive racial preferences to hire and promote blacks, often with qualifications that would not get an applicant past the door if presented by whites and Asians. But the yawning academic skills gap is also a taboo topic in the U.S.

The only allowable explanation for the lack of racial proportionality in employment and academia is racism; the fact that the average black 12th grader reads at the level of the average white 8th grader is not permissible to notice.

There will be more evisceration of meritocratic standards of achievement in order to avoid the inevitable disparate impact that such colorblind standards have on blacks.  And the violence in the streets, whether the daily grind of stupefyingly mindless, brutal drive-by shootings, or the joyful torching of government symbols, courthouses and police cars, the assaults on police officers, and the rapacious looting of stores will escalate.  The only thing that will stop the unwinding of Western civilization in the U.S. is the public repudiation of the myth of bias and white supremacy. (read more)

We Can’t Police These People

[...] Like many other whites, I’m exhausted. Unlike Tucker Carlson, I don’t think we need a chance to catch our breath or pursue change more slowly. We need radical change.

Every confrontation between a white officer and a non-white criminal is a potential riot. The process is corrupt because judges, jurors, and politicians know that the mob has a veto over the verdict. The rule of law is dead.

The answer is separation. Without it, this will never stop.

The strange reality is that there is almost no difference now between being a notorious white advocate or any white guy. Derek Chauvin went, in just one day, from a heartwarming “softie” who married a Hmong refugee to the embodiment of white supremacy. A few days ago, it was a soldier who stopped a black guy from accosting women. He had to be chased from his home. Tomorrow it could be you.

You could try to stop a crime. You could fight back against an assault. Maybe you just look at someone the wrong way. Maybe you do nothing at all. But if you donated $10 to a cause the media don’t like — or even if you didn’t — you could be the mark for the next great hate hoax.

I write this reluctantly. Many of us become white advocates kicking and screaming, afraid to see the truth. We all get here through experience, usually painful.

However, no matter how far you run, how earnestly you plead, what you say, or even whom you marry, you will always be white to those with power. That means many despise you. At some point, you must decide to stand or kneel, and a society that kneels before the memory of a George Floyd is not one worth serving or saving.

Whites created this country. They sustain it. Without whites, there is no America. America is an extension of Western Civilization, white civilization, on this continent. Whites pay to support people who hate, curse, and sometimes kill us. We gain nothing. They owe everything. What they have, we gave them, through weakness, folly, and good intentions.

We deserve reparations for trillions wasted in a 60-year effort to babysit a population that pays us back with violence and hatred. Most importantly, we deserve liberation from this albatross that prevents any kind of real national life. Almost any price would be worth paying if we could be sovereign and free, something our ancestors took for granted.

All the quasi-theological abstractions about “privilege” and “critical theory” melt away before one immutable truth: They need us; we don’t need them. Until we have the will to say so, all of us — including you — are just one “viral” incident away from ruin. (read more)

Nine [Black] Kids Shot [by Black Male] at 12-Year-Old's Birthday Party and 'Not One' of the 60 Attendees Will Make a Statement to Police

Oh, this is awkward. At least nine kids were shot at a 12-year-old’s birthday party in Louisiana on Saturday night, as reported by the New York Post, and not one of the reported 60 attendees was willing to make a formal statement about what the hell happened or why.

Gunfire erupted after a feud broke out at the home party in LaPlace, Louisiana, according to a press release from the St. John the Baptist Parish Sheriff’s Office. Again, at least nine kids — first reported as six — under the age of 18 were struck, seven of whom were treated and released, while two of the victims remain hospitalized as I write.




As reported by NBC News on Monday, the victims’ ages ranged from 12 to 17. The young victims collectively sustained injuries to the arm, ribs, foot, legs, stomach, head, and more.

Yet? Here’s Sheriff Mike Tregre:


What’s wrong with this picture? Nine kids shot. Two remain hospitalized. Not one person in attendance is willing to cooperate with law enforcement officials, including loved ones of the victims? Ever hear of such a thing? Me neither. Until now.




Not weird at all. You know, because “ongoing feuds” lead to mass shootings at birthday parties of 12-year-olds all the time. “How was the party, honey?” “It was great, mom!”

Rashad Bolden, who lives two doors down from the home at which the shooting took place, told the local CBS affiliate he saw wounded kids taken from the scene via ambulance.


With all due respect to Mr. Bolden, of course, they were old enough to know what “heartless” means. If not, how about common sense? Who thinks shooting up a garage full of kids is an “okay” thing to do? Including the shooting of a 12-year-old girl?

Oops — was that “sexist,” or any of the ridiculous “phobic” terms the left prefers?




“We will not stop,” Sheriff Tregre insisted. “Somebody’s gotta come forward. This cannot just go on like this.” But it does “go on like this,” sheriff. On a daily basis. Walk around the bloody streets of Chicago’s Southside and ask a few questions; you’ll see what I mean.

I can’t wait to watch Don Lemón’s extensive coverage on “The Most Trusted Name in News,” tonight. Hang on a sec— BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! (read more)

How is Ma’Khia pronounced?

I’m guessing the apostrophe is a glottal stop and the “kh” is a voiced velar fricative like you find in Arabic or German.

Just kidding,

it’s probably muh-KAY-uh.
(read more)

“The requisite number of valid signatures has been reported to our office to initiate the recall of Governor Gavin Newsom.”
(read more)

"From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy trannies
Named Bruce in a past life
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver California!"

“Pregnant people experienced the same side effects as others following vaccination,”

— Rochelle Walensky, illegitimate director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 23 April 2021

Millions Are Skipping Their Second Doses of COVID Vaccines

Probably because the first injection was such fun?

Millions of Americans are not getting the second doses of their Covid-19 vaccines, and their ranks are growing.

More than five million people, or nearly 8 percent of those who got a first shot of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, have missed their second doses, according to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That is more than double the rate among people who got inoculated in the first several weeks of the nationwide vaccine campaign.

Even as the country wrestles with the problem of millions of people who are wary about getting vaccinated at all, local health authorities are confronting an emerging challenge of ensuring that those who do get inoculated are doing so fully.

The reasons vary for why people are missing their second shots. In interviews, some said they feared the side effects, which can include flulike symptoms. Others said they felt that they were sufficiently protected with a single shot.

Those attitudes were expected, but another hurdle has been surprisingly prevalent. A number of vaccine providers have canceled second-dose appointments because they ran out of supply or didn’t have the right brand in stock.

Walgreens, one of the biggest vaccine providers, sent some people who got a first shot of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine to get their second doses at pharmacies that only had the other vaccine on hand.

Several Walgreens customers said in interviews that they scrambled, in some cases with help from pharmacy staff, to find somewhere to get the correct second dose. Others, presumably, simply gave up.

From the outset, public health experts worried that it would be difficult to get everyone to return for a second shot three or four weeks after the first dose. It is no surprise that, as vaccines are rolled out more broadly, the numbers of those skipping their second dose have gone up.

But the trend is nonetheless troubling some state officials, who are rushing to keep the numbers of only partly vaccinated people from swelling.

In Arkansas and Illinois, health officials have directed teams to call, text or send letters to people to remind them to get their second shots. In Pennsylvania, officials are trying to ensure that college students can get their second shots after they leave campus for the summer. South Carolina has allocated several thousand doses specifically for people who are overdue for their second shot.

Mounting evidence collected in trials and from real-world immunization campaigns points to the peril of people skipping their second doses. Compared with the two-dose regimen, a single shot triggers a weaker immune response and may leave recipients more susceptible to dangerous virus variants. And even though a single dose provides partial protection against Covid, it’s not clear how long that protection will last.

“I’m very worried, because you need that second dose,” said Dr. Paul Offit, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory panel.

The stakes are high because there is only one vaccine authorized in the United States that is given as a single shot. The use of that vaccine, made by Johnson & Johnson, was paused this month after it was linked to a very rare but serious side effect involving blood clotting. Federal health officials on Friday recommended restarting use of the vaccine, but the combination of the safety scare and ongoing production problems is likely to make that vaccine a viable option for fewer people.

The C.D.C.’s count of missed second doses is through April 9. It covers only people who got a first Moderna dose by March 7 or a first Pfizer dose by March 14.

While millions of people have missed their second shots, the overall rates of follow-through, with some 92 percent getting fully vaccinated, are strong by historical standards. Roughly three-quarters of adults come back for their second dose of the vaccine that protects against shingles.

In some cases, problems with shipments or scheduling may be playing a role in people missing their second doses. Some vaccine providers have had to cancel appointments because they did not receive expected vaccine deliveries. People have also reported having their second-dose appointments canceled or showing up only to find out that there were no doses available of the brand they needed.

Some people can be flexible about being rebooked. But that’s harder for people who lack access to reliable transportation or who have jobs with strictly scheduled hours, said Elena Cyrus, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Central Florida.

Walgreens booked some customers for their second appointments at places that didn’t have the same vaccine that they had received for their initial doses. The company said it fixed the problem in late March.

Susan Ruel, 67, was scheduled to get her two vaccine doses at different Walgreens stores in Manhattan. She said she got her first Pfizer dose without incident in February, but when she arrived for her second appointment, she was told that the store only had Moderna doses in stock.

A Walgreens pharmacist told Ms. Ruel that there was another Walgreens pharmacy less than two miles away with Pfizer doses in stock. While Ms. Ruel was waiting for the subway to take her there, she got a phone call: That Walgreens store had run out of Pfizer doses, too.

Ms. Ruel managed to get the Pfizer dose at yet another Walgreens the next day. But she said many people in her situation probably wouldn’t have tried so hard. “All you need is hassles like this,” she said.

In the Chicago area, for example, pharmacists at two Walgreens locations said the problem was causing headaches. They said that Walgreens’ appointment system was sending each pharmacy anywhere from 10 to 20 customers a week who need a second Pfizer shot, even though both pharmacies stock only the Moderna vaccine.

It is not clear how widespread the Walgreens dose-matching problem has been or how many people have missed their second doses because of it.

Jim Cohn, a spokesman for Walgreens, said that the problem affected “a small percentage” of people who had booked their appointments online and that the company contacted them to reschedule “in alignment with our vaccine availability.” He said that nearly 95 percent of people who got their first shot at Walgreens have also received their second shots from the company.

Walgreens has also come under fire for, until recently, scheduling second doses of the Pfizer vaccine four weeks after the first shot, rather than the three-week gap recommended by the C.D.C. Pharmacists have been besieged by customers complaining, including about their inability to book vaccine appointments online.

In other cases, though, access to vaccines is not the sole barrier; people’s attitudes contribute, too.

Basith Syed, a 24-year-old consultant in Chicago, nabbed a leftover Moderna vaccine at a Walgreens in mid-February. But when the time came for his second shot, he was busy at work and preparing for his wedding. After the first shot, he had spent two days feeling drained. He didn’t want to risk a repeat, and he felt confident that a single dose would protect him.

“I didn’t really feel the urgency to get that second dose,” Mr. Syed said.

By early April, his schedule had calmed down a little, and he went looking for a second Moderna shot. But by then, the Walgreens where he had gotten his first shot was only offering Pfizer shots. He couldn’t find slots at other Walgreens stores. Mr. Syed is no longer actively looking for a second shot, though he still hopes to eventually get one.

The C.D.C. says there is limited data on the vaccine’s effectiveness when shots are separated by more than six weeks, although some countries, including Britain and Canada, are giving shots with a gap of up to three or four months.

Mr. Syed’s experience is part of a broader shift in Illinois. When vaccines were mostly being given to health care workers, residents of long-term care facilities and people over 65, almost everyone was getting their second shots. In recent weeks, though, the number dipped below 90 percent, though it has since rebounded slightly, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health.

In Arkansas, about 84,000 people have missed their second shots, representing 11 percent of those eligible for those shots, said Dr. Jennifer Dillaha, the state epidemiologist. Workers recently began calling people who are due or overdue for their second shots.

College students pose a particular challenge. Many recently became eligible to be vaccinated and are getting their first shots, but they will have left campus by the time they are due for their second doses.

In Pennsylvania, health officials have instructed vaccine providers to give second doses to college students even if they did not receive their first doses from that location.

Some vaccine providers have put on special clinics for people who need a second dose. In South Carolina, the health system Tidelands Health started a program specifically for people who received their first Pfizer doses more than 23 days earlier but hadn’t been able to find a second shot. The state health department sent the health system 2,340 doses for the effort.

Demand has been strong, and Tidelands only has a few hundred doses left. The majority of takers have been people who “were having difficulty navigating all the various scheduling systems and providers,” said Gayle Resetar, the health system’s chief operating officer.

In many cases, vaccine providers had canceled second-dose appointments because of bad winter weather. “It was up to the individual to reschedule themselves on a web portal or web platform, and that just became difficult for people,” Ms. Resetar said.

There are rare cases in which people are supposed to forgo the second shot, such as if they had an allergic reaction after their first shot.

Zvi Ish-Shalom, a religious studies professor from Boulder, Colo., had planned to get fully vaccinated. Then, an hour after his first shot of the Moderna vaccine, he developed a headache that hasn’t gone away more than a month later.

There is no way to know for sure whether the vaccine triggered the headache. But after weighing what he saw as the risks and benefits of a second dose, Dr. Ish-Shalom reached a decision about how to proceed.

“At this point in time, I feel very clear and very comfortable, given all the various elements of this equation, to forgo the second shot,” he said. (read more)

Dash-cam footage shows moment Michigan's youngest-ever lawmaker, 26, resists arrest as state troopers tackle him to the ground after 'drunk driving' crash

• Michigan House Rep. Jewell Jones, 26, was arrested on April 6 after crashing his car in a ditch on I-95 in Fowlerville
• Police said his blood alcohol level was double the legal limit and he had a gun
• Dash camera footage of Jones resisting arrest was released over the weekend
• He is seen refusing to hand over his driver's license before two state troopers pulled him to the ground, pepper-sprayed and tasered him
• Jones told the troopers: 'If you hit me it's going to be very bad for you. I'll call Governor Whitmer right now. I run y’all budget bro'
• He was ultimately charged with resisting and obstructing a police officer, possession of a weapon and other intoxication while driving charges
• Jones made history in 2016 by becoming the youngest-ever member of the Michigan House at the age of 21 

Rep Jewell Jones - who made history in 2016 by becoming the youngest-ever member of the Michigan House at the age of 21 - was arrested on April 6 in Fowlerville, about 64 miles outside of Detroit.

Police said Jones, 26, was driving with a blood-alcohol-level double the legal limit and a loaded gun in his [cup holder] when he crashed his black Chevy into a ditch on the side of I-96.

In video released over the weekend, Jones, a Democrat, is heard taunting two state troopers who responded to the scene even after they tackled, pepper-sprayed and tasered him as he resisted arrest. 

'If you hit me it's going to be very bad for you. I'll call Governor Whitmer right now,' Jones tells the troopers.

'I'm telling you if you do, it's not going to be good for you. I run y’all budget bro.'

Shortly before 6pm on April 6, state troopers received multiple calls about a black Chevy with a vanity license plate reading 'ELECTED' which was speeding and driving erratically on I-96.

At 6.09pm, police and EMS say they responded to a crash involving the same vehicle, according to a police report obtained by DailyMail.com.

The responding officer wrote that the driver, later identified as Jones, appeared to be 'highly intoxicated.'

His speech was slurred and 'his eyes were red bloodshot and glassy and his fine motor skills were poor,' the officer wrote. 

In the new video recorded by a camera in the officers' squad car, Jones is seen speaking to one of the troopers while another stood directly behind him. 

Much of the conversation is unintelligible due to noise from passing traffic but Jones appears to be trying to convince the officers to let him go because he's a 'state rep'.

When one of the officers asked for Jones' driver's license he responds: 'I can't do that.'

The officers then move to put Jones in handcuffs. A struggle ensues and the officers pull Jones to the ground, where he threatens to call the governor.

'I don't give a f*** bro, when I call Gretchen [Whitmer] I'll need y'all ID's, badge numbers, everything,' Jones says. 

'I'm not giving you my arm unless you shoot me. You shoot me, I'll get up.'

It took at least three officers to put Jones in handcuffs, according to the report, even after they used a taser and pepper spray to subdue him. 

Jones also allegedly pushed an emergency medical technician in the chest, the report said.

A second video showed Jones sitting in the back of the squad car. He appeared to struggle to stay upright and had his eyes closed. 

At the end of the clip he tells officers in a slurred voice: 'I would like to go home.'

Jones' blood alcohol content was 0.19, more than double the the legal driving limit of 0.08, according to the police report.

During the arrest, police found a loaded .40-caliber Glock handgun in the cup holder in the center console, according to the report.

Jones was ultimately charged with resisting and obstructing a police officer, operating a motor vehicle with a high blood alcohol content, operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated, possession of a weapon while under the influence of alcohol and reckless driving.

He was virtually arraigned on April 16.

Carolyn Henry, Chief Assistant Prosecuting Attorney at Livingston County, said Jones was 'combative and confrontational.'

Around the time of his arraignment, he posted a message on his Instagram expressing his confidence that God will protect him, the Detroit Free Press reported.

'This last week has literally been the craziest week I've ever had ... as a civilian,' Jones said.

But because of his religious faith, 'even now, in the midst of so much confusion, I find peace,' he said, according to the Detroit Free Press.

The post appears to have since been deleted.

Gideon D'Assandro, spokesman for Michigan House Speaker Jason Wentworth, a Republican, said the lawmaker hadn't decided on what if any discipline Jones might face, according to the Free Press.

Jones' lawyer, Ali Hammoud, told the Detroit Free Press that Jones is presumed innocent.

Hammoud told the Detroit newspaper that he could not comment on the details cited in the police reports because he was still reviewing evidence.

In 2018, Michigan State Police pulled over Jones for speeding, window tinting and an obstructed license plate, the Free Press reported, citing the Dearborn Press & Guide. It said troopers found 'open intoxicants' in the car, though neither he nor anyone else was drunk.

Jones is serving his third term in the Michigan House, which ends on Dec. 31, 2022, but he can't run again because of term limits.

He is a member of the National Guard and Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps, and an auxiliary officer in Inkster, Michigan, where he lives.

In the Legislature, Jones is Democratic vice chairman of the House Military, Veterans and Homeland Security Committee. (read more and watch videos)

Toddler, 3, is shot dead at his own birthday party in Miami

• Elijah LaFrance was killed on Saturday at a birthday party being held in Miami's Golden Glades neighborhood
• A 21-year-old woman was also shot but is expected to survive her injuries
• The shooter fled the scene and police have appealed to the public for information

A three-year-old boy has been shot and killed at his own birthday party in Miami's Golden Glades neighborhood.

Elijah LaFrance was killed on Saturday night, according to Miami-Dade police, who said a 21-year-old woman had also been shot but is expected to survive her injuries.

An altercation happened outside an Airbnb on NE 158th street after 8pm, police said. Shortly afterwards, shots were fired and the shooter fled the scene.

Police were alerted to the shooting Saturday night by a system that detects and tracks gunshots.

When they arrived at the home, officers found the toddler suffering from a gunshot wound and took him to a hospital where he died, according to a news release from the Miami-Dade Police Department.

Adrian Annestor, LaFrance's uncle, told CBS Miami that this nephew child 'couldn't even say mom and dad'.

'They killed him. Oh God, he is still on my mind. I was just playing with him,' Adrian Annestor, LaFrance's uncle told CBS Miami.

'I wish it could have been me because I've lived long enough. He couldn't even say mom and dad,' Annestor, who had been at the party, said.

A neighbor told NBC 6 that they heard 20 or 30 shots and that one of the bullets struck his car.

He claimed his roommate saw the shooter, who they had described as male, but the roommate did not speak to the network.

Police have not released any details about the suspected shooter and have appealed to the public for information.

Family told NBC 6 that the party on Saturday was held for Elijah and his little sister. (read more)

Baby boy is murdered after ultra-woke San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin let his 'killer' go free TWICE after domestic violence allegations

• San Francisco District Attorney has been blasted by domestic violence advocates for failing to prosecute Joseph Williams after two previous arrests
• Williams, 26,  was let go twice after being arrested on suspicion of assaulting his partner in 2021
• Boudin's office said the partner had refused to press charges against Williams
• He's now been charged with the murder of 7-month-old baby boy Synciere Williams
• California Governor candidate and reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner condemned the prosecutor over the incident on Twitter
• Kathy Black, executive director of La Casa de las Madres, a shelter for domestic violence victims, said DA Boudin had abdicated his duty
• Boudin was condemned in January after freeing an armed robber who is alleged to have caused a double hit-and-run shortly afterwars 
• City cops arrested 131 people on felony domestic violence in final 3 months of 2020, but Boudin's office dismissed 113 of them and charged just 13 of them

A San Francisco man allegedly murdered a seven month-old baby after the city's scandal-hit district attorney twice failed to charge him with domestic violence.

Joseph Williams, 26, was charged over the death of Synciere Williams after the infant arrived at at California Pacific Medical Center showing signs of severe trauma last week.

Police admitted Williams, said to have been caring for the baby at the time of the murder, had been arrested twice in separate domestic violence incidents in January and March of this year, but he did not face charges from either incident. 

DA Boudin claimed they had been unable to book Williams for the assaults because the alleged victim who he was in a relationship with had not wanted to file charges.

But California State law considers domestic violence a crime against the state, with campaigners saying it was Boudin's duty to find a way to make a case stick. 

Boudin's comment angered domestic violence advocates in San Francisco who say the District Attorney fundamentally misunderstood the nature of family violence cases.

Boudin's decision also came under fire from Caitlyn Jenner, who is running to unseat Governor of California Gavin Newsom, after she claimed the Golden State's prosecutors were being too soft on criminals.
[...]
Figures from show the rate of charges in domestic violence cases dropped significantly last year.

In the last three months of 2020, city cops arrested 131 residents on felony domestic violence, but Boudin's office dismissed 113 of them and charged just 13 of them, one as a misdemeanor.

The other five are still being reviewed.

Joseph Williams' first arrest came on January 7 when he got into a shoving match with a woman he was in a relationship with on a street corner in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco.

The woman suffered bruising to her neck and said Williams had attacked her. A 10-month-old baby girl was in a stroller besides the altercation, police said.

Two months later on March 26, Williams was arrested again after police were called to an apartment to find the same woman with a cut to her lip and marks on her forehead. She told police she'd tried to kick Williams out of the flat and he'd attacked her.

A baby was also found at the address.

In both cases, the woman refused to lay charges.

'Given the lack of cooperation with prosecution, we were unable to move forward with either of those cases,' Rachel Marshall, a spokesperson for the District Attorney's Office, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Boudin became district attorney of San Francisco in 2019, pledging a commitment to restorative justice over incarceration.

But he was condemned in January after allowing a robber to get out of prison on parole, with that criminal then allegedly going on to kill two women in a hit and run in the city on New Year's Eve last year.

Troy McAlister had just been released from prison on parole for a robbery conviction when he killed Hanako Abe and Elizabeth Platt as they walked across a street in the SOMA neighborhood, it is claimed.

Police believe McAlister allegedly stole the vehicle from a woman he had just met on a dating app. Police found a gun and drugs in his car.

Boudin's parents David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin were members of the Weather Underground, a radical left militant organization involved in a series of terror attacks in the 1970s.

Boudin was 14 months old when his parents left him with a babysitter so they could take part in the botched robbery of an armored car that left two police officers and a Brink's truck guard dead. Both were convicted of murder as a result.

His father Gilbert is still in prison for murder and robbery, while his mother was released after serving more than two decades inside. (read more)

Nashville police release bodycam video of officer shooting man with 2 butcher knives during traffic stop

'I don't want to shoot you,' officer yells as man with two butcher knives runs toward him

Nashville police released body camera footage Saturday showing an officer fatally shoot a man who charged at him with two butcher knives during a traffic stop about a potentially stolen vehicle.

Metropolitan Nashville Police Department Chief John Drake said it appeared Officer Christopher Royer was "possibly justified" in shooting the knife-wielding man. He said the officer was left with "no choice" but to shoot after he retreated and asked the individual to drop the weapons several times -- even as the man entered the driver's door of the police car and charged toward the officer.

"No officer wants to encounter these types of situations. It's always the unknown when we respond to calls and he did everything he could. He retreated. He ordered him to put the knives down," Drake said. "This appears to be possibly justified. We'll find out once the investigation moves forward but officers are put in these situations, and it's unfortunate."

Drake also rejected the notion Royer should have used a Taser to deescalate the situation, telling reporters an officer "can't use a less lethal [force] if someone is attacking you with a knife."

Officer Royer was on "routine patrol" just before midnight in the area of Clarksville Pike and Ed Temple Blvd. when he checked the license plate of a white late model Mercedes sedan, police spokesman Don Aaron said at a press conference on Saturday.

The license plate on that Mercedes came back registered to a 1998 green Chevrolet and Officer Royer conducted a vehicle stop to investigate the license plate issue, he said. The driver of the Mercedes saw Officer Royer’s blue lights and stopped at 3236 Clarksville Pike.

"The driver presented no issues at any time," Aaron said at the press conference. "The passenger, however, immediately got out of the Mercedes with two large butcher knives, one in each hand, and began running around erratically."

"Officer Royer repeatedly yelled for the man to drop the knives – even as he momentarily entered the driver's door of Officer Royer’s police car," Aaron said. "The driver of the Mercedes also repeatedly yelled at the passenger 'What are you doing?’ and 'Stop'. Ultimately the passenger charged Officer Royer with the knives as Officer Royer back peddled some 25 yards from his police car."

Body camera footage released by the department Saturday showed the officer get out of the police car and yell "Hey, hands in the air" and "drop the knife." As the officer backs up, the man opens the driver’s door of the police car and the officer yells, "Get out of the car, drop the knife. Drop the knife."

"I don’t want to shoot you. I don’t want to shoot you," the officer is heard yelling, as the man runs toward him. Three shots can be heard in the video, and the officer radios that shots were fired.

"Stay over there," the officer yells to the driver who by then had gotten out of the Mercedes.

"What are you doing man?" the officer says. "I did not want to have to do that."

The man died shortly after arriving at Vanderbilt Medical Center, Aaron said. He has not been publicly identified by authorities. Royer is a four-year veteran of the Nashville Police Department, and, per policy, was placed on administrative assignment as the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and Davidson County District Attorney’s Office investigate and analyze this incident, Aaron said.

"Our police department will also be conducting an administrative review of this action to ensure it meets the high standards that is expected of our officers," he added.

"When I got the call this morning, I had mixed emotions especially with all that’s going on around the nation and this city," Nashville Chief of Police John Drake said. The shooting happened just days after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was [wrongly] convicted of the murder and manslaughter of George Floyd last May. (read more)

“Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.”

— Will Durant, 1926

Virginia To Eliminate All Accelerated Maths Classes Prior To 11th Grade. Because ‘Equity’

Dumbing down America so that no one achieves more than others

Last week, Katya wrote an outstanding essay about the perils of woke math. This week, Virginia’s Department of Education announced that it will be eliminating accelerated maths classes in all public schools as they strive for “equity.”

Fox News reports:


Needless to say, people have thoughts (via Twitchy).




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Apparently, and as in all things woke, the goal is to stoop to the lowest bar possible and then force everyone under it. Equity apparently means methodically ensuring through systemic governmental and institutional power that everyone but the elite and ruling class is equally uneducated, ill-informed, and devoid of an ounce of curiosity or capacity for independent thought. (read more)

Media, Fact Checkers, Twitter All Rush to Stacey Abrams’ Rescue After MLB Boycott Backfires
by  “Sister Toldjah”

The Usual Suspects are lining up to do damage control after Abrams and other Democrats including [illegitimate] president Joe Biden and [illegitimate] Sen. Raphael Warnock helped stir up the toxic atmosphere surrounding the Georgia voting law that left the MLB little choice but to decide to move the game.

At the quick paced news cycles typically run, it seems like Major League Baseball announcing their decision to pull their All-Star game from Georgia was ages ago, but in reality, it was just a few weeks ago.

The announcement happened just two days after [illegitimate] president Joe Biden told ESPN in an interview that he would “strongly support” such a move. MLB cited Biden’s comments in their write-up on Commissioner Rob Manfred’s statement.

Not mentioned by MLB—but reportedly nevertheless a key factor in their decision to pull the game—was failed 2018 Georgia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams, who led the way in making false comparisons between Georgia’s voting law and the Jim Crow era. Abrams repeatedly referred to the bill that eventually became law as “Jim Crow 2.0,” and Biden dutifully followed suit.

The heated rhetoric about the bill from Biden, Abrams, [illegitimate] Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) and other Democrats urging corporations in so many words to “take action” to oppose the bill had already begun to do its intended damage to the state by the time MLB said they were going to move the game.

Just a few days after MLB caved to the mob, Fox Business reporter Charlie Gasparino tweeted that the decision was made after MLB spoke with Stacey Abrams:




But now the Usual Suspects—including so-called “fact-checkers” in the media and on Twitter—are lining up to conduct damage control on this issue for Abrams after Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) blasted her during a Senate hearing last week for laying the groundwork for boycotts in her own state:




Cotton daring to reveal inconvenient truths about Abrams’ lies triggered CNN “fact-checker”/Democrat apologist Daniel Dale, who claimed Cotton’s remarks were “misleading”:



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Except no, what Cotton said was not “misleading” at all, for reasons explained by Real Clear Investigations senior writer Mark Hemingway and others:



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Plus, one of the pieces of supposed evidence used by Dale to defend Abrams was to cite an op/ed she wrote which, as it turns out, was stealth-edited after the MLB made their decision public:




[Ministry of Truth] Politifact got caught doing the same thing re: the Abrams op/ed:




Twitter did their part to try and rescue Abrams as well, allowing this “moment” about Abrams to trend on their platform for nearly two days straight:



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Abrams making public statements against boycotts ahead of MLB’s decision was a way for her to try and save face because she knew the inevitable was coming. And she also knew that once it happened the media and fact-checkers would be eager to run interference for her in the aftermath.

Also, she knows very well from prior boycott campaigns against Georgia (like the one over their pro-life bill two years ago) that left-wing activists typically respond to legislation they don’t like—and to prominent figures like Abrams giving hellfire and brimstone speeches about it—by immediately jumping on the boycott bandwagon.

She knew the moment she started referring to the law as “Jim Crow 2.0” how the outrage mobs on the left would respond, and yet she continued for weeks to lie about it. She and her knights in shining armor in the media can play word games all they want to here, but the actual facts about the toxic atmosphere she and other Democrats stirred up over the law speak for themselves. (read more)

NC Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson Blasts Democrats For Opposing Election Integrity Measures

“The notion that people must be protected from a free ID to secure their votes is not just insane—it is insulting”

North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson (R) gave yet another stellar speech in support of our Constitutional rights.

Robinson, you may recall, first rose to prominence for his outstanding defense of the Second Amendment back in 2018.  He subsequently ran for and won the office of Lieutenant Governor in 2020.

Speaking at a House Judiciary Committee meeting on Thursday, Robinson blasted national Democrats’ racist and insulting insistence that black people cannot figure out how to get a voter ID. He also noted that Democrats are focused only on obtaining and keeping power.

The Daily Signal has the transcript. Here’s a portion of Robinson’s speech.

(read more)

“One of the most dangerous signs of our times is the growing number of individuals and groups who believe that no one can possibly disagree with them for any honest reason.”

— Thomas Sowell