No comment for the rest. I guess I'm too put down by the President caving in to a bunch of immorals hellbent on destroying the country.
MFBB.
"From now on Anuna (17) will skip class every Thursday for the climate: "What's a missed hour of mathematics, if you can also demonstrate for a better climate?"
And boy, did the message about skipping math class fall on deaf ears. Not. A couple of days later 4,000 youths skipped class to demonstrate in Brussels. For the climate. Again, via HLN:
"Eight days ago Anuna De Wever (17) and Kyra Gantois (19) decided to skip class every Thursday, to protest in Brussels and ask for attention for the climate. Yesterday was Day 1 of their action and - fasten your seat belts - a staggering 4,000 students demonstrated in Brussels. "I'm so fucking glad!"
You don't say. Indeed, what's a paltry 4,000 missed hours of mathematics? 8,000 by the week after? 16,000, 32,000, 640,000??? The Climate warming up is more important. Let Chinese and Indian schoolchildren study mathematics and let us demonstrate! Progress!!!"
"There was another conservative virtue-signaling stampede over the weekend. A short video from the Lincoln Memorial went "viral" (notwithstanding its ubiquity, I'm keeping the word in scare-quotes because, like any other virus, this one should be contained): it purported to show a group of Catholic schoolboys in MAGA hats harassing an elderly Native American drummer. The lads were instantly identified as students from Covington Catholic High School, which I'd never heard of but is clearly the kind of tony white-privilege joint where they book Brett Kavanaugh to spike the punch at the gang-rape prom. So naturally social media instantly convicted them and moved on to the usual doxing and death threats. The school itself leapt to dissociate itself from its own pupils and threatened to expel them.
Midst the present fevers, my advice and practice is that, when the media are in lockstep on a particular "narrative", proceed with caution and, if you must join the great thundering herd of independent minds, tag along at the tail end out of sight. A genuinely conservative temperament should be wary of crying "Me too!" and scampering after the media-Democrat-cultMarx bandwagon - if only because, regardless of the wrongs and rights, no true conservative should assist in furthering the nano-second due process of trial by social media, through which whole lives are destroyed by the reflex twitching drive-thru jury of Twitter. "Sentence first - verdict afterwards," said Alice's Queen. Hang him high - and we'll figure out later what, if anything, he's guilty of. That's about as deeply unconservative a proposition as one could find. The cure is worse than whatever disease (racism, sexism, transphobia, Islamophobia) it claims to be healing.
Yet, instead of a prudent skepticism, my former colleagues at National Review joined the stampede and decided to get way out in front of the story. My old friend Jay Nordlinger was anguished:
The images of those red-hat kids surrounding and mocking that old Indian are unbearable. Absolutely unbearable. An American disgrace.
Of course, the virtue-signaling availed him naught from fellow Tweeters. Alex Natt:
'Old Indian'?
Tracy Kennedy:
Yeah, 'Native American man' or 'Indigenous Man' or even 'Vietnam Vet'...
Etc.
National Review decided to up their game and published a piece by their deputy managing editor, Nicholas Frankovich (presumably the assistant to Jason Lee Steorts), with the arresting headline:
The Covington Students Might as Well Have Just Spit on the Cross
Unfortunately for the scolding schoolmarms of the right, the facts were not as they appeared to be from that brief clip. Over at Reason (with hindsight, a better name for a magazine than I used to think it was), Robby Soave watched the two hours of surrounding footage, and found - surprise, surprise! - that it told an entirely different story:
Far from engaging in racially motivated harassment, the group of mostly white, MAGA-hat-wearing male teenagers remained relatively calm and restrained despite being subjected to incessant racist, homophobic, and bigoted verbal abuse by members of the bizarre religious sect Black Hebrew Israelites...
They call them crackers, faggots, and pedophiles. At the 1:20 mark (which comes after the Phillips incident) they call one of the few black students the n-word and tell him that his friends are going to murder him and steal his organs. At the 1:25 mark, they complain that "you give faggots rights," which prompted booing from the students. Throughout the video they threaten the kids with violence, and attempt to goad them into attacking first. The students resisted these taunts admirably: They laughed at the hecklers, and they perform a few of their school's sports cheers.
Under sustained crude and obnoxious provocation, the boys were remarkably good-humored throughout - a credit to the school that threatens to expel them.
Halfway through, Jay's "old Indian" decided to insert himself in between the Black Hebrew Israelites and the MAGA cracker-faggot-paedo schoolboys, and start his "Native American drumming". A little ethnic drumming goes a long way with me. Have you ever heard that Japanese taiko drumming? It's not exactly Buddy Rich. So I wouldn't welcome someone doing it in my face, and needless to say, if a white male drummer (from the Edinburgh Tattoo, say) went up to some black kids and started drumming, it would be a hate crime."
"... That doesn't quite do it for me. What's disturbing about this fake hate crime is not that the Twitter mob scented blood in its nostrils and went bounding after its prey, but that a big chunk of Conservative Inc piled on, as enthusiastically as the left. And Jay Nordlinger's finger-wagging about an "American disgrace" is absurd in its sanctimony: However you wish to characterize a professional tribal elder intervening in a showdown between upscale Catholic private-school pupils and "Black Hebrew Israelites", it isn't an "American" disgrace. An American disgrace is the declining life expectancy of white males due to addiction, or the collapse of the family in rural America, or a bipartisan political class admitting millions of unskilled illegal immigrants to the country so that MS-13 gangs are now a fact of life in suburban Long Island in order that the Dems can get voters and the GOP's donors can get cheap labor ...or any one of a ton of other "American disgraces" Conservative Inc doesn't talk about because it only takes to the field on the left's terms.
I talked on Rush last Friday about the folly, in philosophical terms, of always accepting your opponents' premises, even unto accepting and advancing the notion that "western civilization" is hate speech. How is that in the interest of even the most milquetoast and watery version of "conservatism"?
But accepting not just your opponents' framing of the argument but their most repulsive totalitarian rituals is even worse. The Orwellian Twitterstorm is something utterly disgusting: It reduces man to a cyber-jackal, feasting on whatever prey is tossed in his path. I have argued, at some length, that you cannot have truly conservative government in a liberal culture. Culture is like air - it's all around, and you don't even think about it. So we live in an age of social-media feeding frenzies that can vaporize a fellow's Oscar-hosting gig or drive an unfortunate porn actress to suicide. There is nothing in the least bit "conservative" about such a world: It's like the young student in Milan Kundera's great novel of Warsaw Pact totalitarianism, The Joke, facing the party committee and wondering why none of his friends will speak up for him - except that it's now at Spaceballs Ludicrous Speed, and the respectable right cannot even bring itself to forgo the pleasure of getting played for saps. Every time."
"A gang of Turkish Muslim men went to the club in the wee hours of the morning, and as some gay men emerged, this gang jumped them, beat them, and then, when they were down, sprayed the gay men in the face and eyes with acid.
The news report after the trial by the local newspaper, after the convictions and sentencing, reveal that it was homophobic, but there was a lot of silence and denial..."
"Detective Constable David Leitner, of the Central East Command Unit, led the investigation. He said: "Seven violent and dangerous men have been removed from London's streets today and will now spend a lengthy time locked up in prison.
"The level of violence used in this attack, coupled with the speed that this incident escalated, are truly shocking.
"A group of people who were enjoying themselves at the end of a night out were subjected to a sustained and relentless wave of violence including the use of a corrosive substance - because they acted as good Samaritans to help a male being subjected to a vicious assault.
"The original victim who was attacked by the group has never been traced but I hope he, and all those who were set upon by this violent group of individuals, will take some comfort from the fact that this group has been convicted."
At Wood Green Crown Court on 21 November 2018, three of the group were found guilty as follows:
Huseyin Onel was found guilty of eight counts of applying a corrosive fluid with intent and violent disorder.
Mehmet Tekagac was found guilty of applying a corrosive fluid with intent and robbery. He had earlier pleaded guilty to violent disorder.
Onur Ardic was found guilty of applying a corrosive substance with intent. He had earlier pleaded guilty to violent disorder.
The six other men earlier pleaded guilty at Wood Green Crown Court to violent disorder.
"One student wrote to a local news outlet begging it to tell the full story about what happened at the march:
I am a student at Covington Catholic and was present at the occurrence. Here is what truly happened …
In the midst of our cheers, we were approached by a group of adults led by Nathan Phillips, with Phillips beating his drum. They forced their way into the center of our group. We initially thought this was a cultural display since he was beating along to our cheers and so we clapped to the beat. … However, after multiple minutes of Mr. Phililps beating his drum directly in the face of my friend (mere centimeters from his nose), we became confused and started wondering what was happening. It was not until later that we discovered they would incriminate us as a publicity stunt. … To reiterate, we did not partake in any physical or verbal abuse … After that initial occurrence, we were then verbally assaulted by four or five African-American men who called us “faggots” and berated one of our African-American students for being friends with us. The truth needs to come out. I pray that you read this …
Phillips told a Detroit newspaper that he had “tried to keep the peace between a group of mostly white students attending a March for Life event and a gathering of about four black members of a religious group known as the Black Hebrew Israelites.” He added: “These young men were beastly and these old black individuals was their prey.” He claimed that the students had chanted “build the wall” — a claim that the student above explicitly denied.
Phillips also told the Washington Post “he felt threatened by the teens and that they swarmed around him.” But the full video makes it clear he had approached the students, who were already there, rather than the other way around....
One individual is seen on video telling the students, “White people, go back to Europe, where you came from,” as Phillips was still banging on his drum.
“This is not your land,” the individual continued, adding other racial epithets.
The Gateway Pundit also pointed out that Phillips had been involved in similar confrontations before.
On Saturday, cartoonist and political commentator Scott Adams said that the students had behaved like “assholes.”
On Sunday, he apologized for that remark and called the entire story “fake news,” saying that CNN and other news sources had inverted the perpetrator and the victim. He added that the full video suggested that the students had acted with composure under the circumstances, and had objected to a gay slur being used by one of their opponents...."