Steven Crowder Apologizes

Will the Universities Start to Collapse?

People used to talk about the ends of the university and how the academic establishment was failing its students. Today, more and more people are talking about the end of the university, the idea being that it is time to think about closing them rather than reforming them.

Last month at a conference in London, the distinguished British philosopher Sir Roger Scruton added his voice to this chorus when responding to a questioner who complained of the physical violence meted out to conservative students at Birkbeck University.

There were two possible responses to this situation, Sir Roger said. One was to start competing institutions, outside the academic establishment, that welcomed conservative voices.

The other possibility was “get rid of universities altogether.”

That response was met with enthusiastic applause.

Sir Roger went on to qualify his recommendation, noting that a modern society required institutions to pursue science and engineering. But the humanities, which at most colleges and universities have devolved into cesspools of identity politics and grievance studies, should be starved of funding and ultimately shut down.

It’s an idea that is getting more and more traction.

In a remarkable essay in Quillette titled “After Academia,” Allen Farrington summed up the growing consensus. “We need to stop wringing our hands over how to save academia and acknowledge that its disease is terminal.”

DOJ: We would prefer not to

Adam Goldman covers this disregard of the court order in the New York Times story “Justice Dept. Keeps Wiretaps Secret in Flynn Case, Rejecting Judge’s Order.” According to Goldman, “prosecutors asserted that they did not need to provide the transcripts because they were, in the end, not vital to the prosecution of Mr. Flynn. He pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to the F.B.I. after agents interviewed him about what was said on those calls.”

Goldman quotes the prosecutors: “The government further represents that it is not relying on any other recordings, of any person, for purposes of establishing the defendant’s guilt or determining his sentence, nor are there any other recordings that are part of the sentencing record.”

I cannot make sense of the government’s representations to the court. Goldman refers to the “highly classified” nature of the recordings, which is usually an incentive for the Times and the Washington Post to publicize such material. Indeed, the existence of these recordings was originally leaked to the Washington Post by “current and former U.S. officials” in February 2017.

The press does it's best to cover up the truth.

“Spygate is the first American scandal in which the government wants the facts published transparently but the media want to cover them up.”

Cohen asks, how did Russiagate begin? His preferred explanation:

The third possible explanation—one I have termed “Intelgate,” and that I explore in my recent book War With Russia?: From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate—is that US intelligence agencies undertook an operation to damage, if not destroy, first the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump. More evidence of “Intelgate” has since appeared. For example, the intelligence community has said it began its investigation in April 2016 because of a few innocuous remarks by a young, lowly Trump foreign-policy adviser, George Papadopoulos. The relatively obscure Papadopoulos suddenly found himself befriended by apparently influential people he had not previously known, among them Stefan Halper, Joseph Mifsud, Alexander Downer, and a woman calling herself Azra Turk. What we now know—and what Papadopoulos did not know at the time—is that all of them had ties to US and/or UK and Western European intelligence agencies.

Reagan vs. Trump - interesting take

Thus, on one hand, it is reasonable for serious Republican conservatives to harbor concern about aspects of the President’s personal demeanor. Yet he has proven himself to be a truly great President, one of our country’s ten best in more than two centuries. His policies are consistently better and more truly conservative than those of Ronald Reagan, the Republican Gold Standard, whether on border issues, the economy, staring down the enemy in the financial and trade sector, seeing the flaws of weakly negotiated free trade agreements, avoiding entangling Americans in areas overseas where we should not be (like 241 Marines blown up by Arab Muslim terrorists in Southern Lebanon), even on issues like social conservatism at home.

Reagan condemned Israel’s bombing and eradication of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor in Iraq; by contrast, Trump has recognized the Golan Heights as part of Israel, Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and has moved the American embassy there, something that Reagan promised to do but did not.

Reagan extended amnesty to Illegals, setting in motion the border disaster that has unfolded over the next two generations and that has politically destroyed California and New Mexico, while politically imperiling Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, and Texas.

Reagan advanced the Free Trade Agreements that drove so much manufacturing out of America and almost ended our steel and aluminum industries that are essential to our national security.

Reagan used the most important opportunity a President gets — the chance to fill Supreme Court openings — to name Sandra O’Connor and thereafter to name Anthony Kennedy. Yes, Antonin Scalia was a great pick, but one out of three does not compare to Trump’s selections of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

Reagan, then, was Mount Rushmore material, but Donald Trump’s still-emerging legacy is even greater.

Read the whole thing.

Losing is for losers David French

David French is known by some of his opponents as “nice,” even as they point out that the battle he’s been fighting is one long retreat.  But nice is not my appellation.   He's a Christian and he never lets you forget it.  But he's a special kind of Christian.  He reminds you that Jesus commanded you to love your enemies.  And David French does.  It's his friends that he hates.

  

Christians once believed in the existence of sin and the possibility of redemption.  That was long, long ago.  The church has “grown” and sin is now just another lifestyle choice.   But not for David French who is very happy to judge your soul, examine your life and pass judgment.  And right now, his judgment is that Donald J. Trump is a bad, bad man, unfit in every way to lead America.

French – as a symbol - was the subject of a recent critical article by Sohrab Ahmari who finds French the embodiment of the “… conservative consensus that collapsed in 2016.” He calls it French-ism.   

French rose in his own defense.  He calls the depiction of himself by Ahmari as fictional and describes himself as a fighter.  He cites his courtroom victories defending religious freedom and says:

I’ve also written, spoken, and advocated for significant federal reforms designed to deter and punish university illiberalism, and while Ahmari says I have an “airy above-it-all mentality,” I didn’t feel “above” anything on that night at Tufts University when I literally placed my body between a small group of Christian students and a collection of roughly 100 protesters who were trying to intimidate them in a darkened hallway.

He rejects being naïve, having gone to the belly of the beast and experiencing being shouted down at Harvard.  He believes that radical Leftist professors are in as much danger in academia as Christians and, by gosh, he’s willing to go to court for either one.  He believes that dissident Google employees like James Damore (fired) and kneeling football players (Kaepernick and dozens of others) are equally embattled.  

I’m old enough to remember when speakers at Harvard were not shouted down.  Some were even conservative.

There was a time within my lifetime when Christian students were not mobbed at Tufts and instructors at Yale were not mobbed for defending the right to wear the Halloween costume of your choice.

It was not that many years ago that bakers could bake cakes and wedding photographers could pick and choose the jobs that reflected their values without being fined.
 
French has no problem living cheek by jowl with pagans, atheists, LGBT activists and those radical Leftist professors who are transforming impressionable kids and turning them into those mobs that roam academia.  The may hate him, his skin color, his sexual orientation and the fact that he's part of the male patriarchal oppressor class.  Live and let live and turn the other cheek.  But he draws the line at Trump who has done more to protect religious freedom than his recent predecessors.  The President preceding Trump was busy suing the Little Sisters of the Poor.   Trump signed an executive order protecting religious liberty.

During my lifetime I have seen this country evolve.  My home town had a rifle club in the high school basement and a creche in the public park at Christmas time.   Where men and women got married and had children, in that order, more often than not.  Where women did not celebrate their abortions.  Where babies were given to their mothers instead of made comfortable while doctor and mother debate whether it should be killed.  Where high school valedictorians were actually allowed to proclaim their love of Christ.  Where racial integration and color blindness was the goal to which good people strived.  Today 75 American colleges offer Black-only graduation ceremonies and 43% offer segregated residence halls.

It was a time when America was hailed as a beacon of freedom rather than condemned as the focus of evil in this world.

What French-ism means is the “nice” decision to lose the culture war, encapsulated in the 1992 speech by Patrick Buchanan.  The Right’s intellectual and political leaders set the agenda, rallied the troops, asked for our support and our dollars.  Most of them talked a good fight, but they were not the ones losing their jobs as their mines, mills, and factories closed.   It took a brash, guy with balls of steel to virtually single-handed show how it’s possible to actually win, in contrast to French and scores of people like him were losing the culture and the country they claimed to love.  But what they really loved was pretending to be in charge, bathing in self-esteem, seeing their names in print.  Today, they are simply ankle biters who have been made irrelevant by someone who fights and knows how to win.

Overthrowing the Christian Social Order

David French, a General of the losing army.

David French is known by some of his opponents as “nice,” even as they point out that the battle he’s been fighting is one long retreat.  But nice is not my appellation.   He's a Christian and he never lets you forget it.  But he's a special kind of Christian.  He reminds you that Jesus commanded you to love your enemies.  And David French does.  It's his friends that he hates.

  

Christians once believed in the existence of sin and the possibility of redemption.  That was long, long ago.  The church has “grown” and sin is now just another lifestyle choice.   But not for David French who is very happy to judge your soul, examine your life and pass judgment.  And right now, his judgment is that Donald J. Trump is a bad, bad man, unfit in every way to lead America.

  

French – as a symbol - was the subject of a recent critical article by Sohrab Ahmari who finds French the embodiment of the “… conservative consensus that collapsed in 2016.” He calls it French-ism.    

   

What is David French-ism? As Irving Kristol said of neoconservatism, French-ism is more a persuasion or a sensibility than a movement with clear tenets. …

It isn’t easy to critique the persona of someone as nice as French. Then again, it is in part that earnest and insistently polite quality of his that I find unsuitable to the depth of the present crisis facing religious conservatives. Which is why I recently quipped on Twitter that there is no “polite, David French-ian third way around the cultural civil war.” …

I added, “The only way is through”—that is to say, to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.

French prefers a different Christian strategy, and his guileless public mien and strategic preferences bespeak a particular political theology (though he would never use that term), one with which I take issue. Thus, my complaint about his politeness wasn’t a wanton attack; it implicated deeper matters.

French rose in his own defense.  He calls the depiction of himself by Ahmari as fictional and describes himself as a fighter.  He cites his courtroom victories defending religious freedom and says:

I’ve also written, spoken, and advocated for significant federal reforms designed to deter and punish university illiberalism, and while Ahmari says I have an “airy above-it-all mentality,” I didn’t feel “above” anything on that night at Tufts University when I literally placed my body between a small group of Christian students and a collection of roughly 100 protesters who were trying to intimidate them in a darkened hallway.

He rejects being naïve, having gone to the belly of the beast and experiencing being shouted down at Harvard.  He believes that radical Leftist professors are in as much danger in academia as Christians and, by gosh, he’s willing to go to court for either one.  He believes that dissident Google employees like James Damore (fired) and kneeling football players (Kaepernick and dozens of others) are equally embattled.   

I’m neither a lawyer, nor do I write for a living, but I am submerged in the culture and am aware of the tide of the times. The tide is not coming in for Conservatism or Christians. In fact, Christians are the most persecuted religious group in the world. 

So for all the skirmishes David French claims to have won, Christianity - which he claims animates his philosophy - is going down.  But he doesn't think it's critical or an emergency.

I’m old enough to remember when speakers at Harvard were not shouted down.  Some were even conservative.

There was a time within my lifetime when Christian students were not mobbed at Tufts and instructors at Yale were not mobbed for defending the right to wear the Halloween costume of your choice.

It was not that many years ago that bakers could bake cakes and wedding photographers could pick and choose the jobs that reflected their values without being fined. 
 
French has no problem living cheek by jowl with pagans, atheists, LGBT activists and those radical Leftist professors who are transforming impressionable kids and turning them into those mobs that roam academia.  The may hate him, his skin color, his sexual orientation and the fact that he's part of the male patriarchal oppressor class.  Live and let live and turn the other cheek.  But he draws the line at Trump who has done more to protect religious freedom than his recent predecessors.  The President preceding Trump was busy suing the Little Sisters of the Poor.   Trump signed an executive order protecting religious liberty.

He raises the specter of "Christian statism"  (what is that?) and believes that Kamala Harris will be dissuaded by Christian niceness from implementing her plans which include:

·        Supports public funding for abortion services.

·        Opposes parental notification for abortions by minors.

·        Keep federal funding for family planning clinics.

·        Supports restrictions on right to bear arms.

For reasons which I can’t fathom, French actually believes that being nice to Kamala Harris – or any of the other radicals, socialist or Marxists currently vying for the Democrat party’s nomination – will persuade them to leave us alone.  By the sheer power of his Christian witness and nice personality, he will convince President Harris that she should not proceed to make fourth-trimester abortions the law of the land.  And keep in mind that French’s stated goal is (in his own words):

It’s the formulation that renders the government primarily responsible for safeguarding liberty, and the people primarily responsible for exercising that liberty for virtuous purposes. … I firmly believe that the defense of these political and cultural values must be conducted in accordance with scriptural admonitions to love your enemies, to bless those who persecute you, with full knowledge that the “Lord’s servant” must be “kind to everyone, able to teach, and patiently endure evil.”

How's that working out for you?

During my lifetime I have seen this country evolve.  My home town had a rifle club in the high school basement and a creche in the public park at Christmas time.   Where men and women got married and had children, in that order, more often than not.  Where women did not celebrate their abortions.  Where babies were given to their mothers instead of made comfortable while doctor and mother debate whether it should be killed.  Where high school valedictorians were actually allowed to proclaim their love of Christ.  Where racial integration and color blindness was the goal to which good people strived.  Today 75 American colleges offer Black-only graduation ceremonies and 43% offer segregated residence halls.

It was a time when America was hailed as a beacon of freedom rather than condemned as the focus of evil in this world.

What French-ism means is the “nice” decision to lose the culture war, encapsulated in the 1992 speech by Patrick Buchanan.  The Right’s intellectual and political leaders set the agenda, rallied the troops, asked for our support and our dollars.  Most of them talked a good fight, but they were not the ones losing their jobs as their mines, mills, and factories closed.   It took a brash, guy with balls of steel to virtually single-handed show how it’s possible to actually win, in contrast to French and scores of people like him were losing the culture and the country they claimed to love.  But what they really loved was pretending to be in charge, bathing in self-esteem, seeing their names in print.  Today, they are simply ankle biters who have been made irrelevant by someone who fights and knows how to win.

The Trump MIracle

I thank the Good Lord above every night for the opportunity to be alive during his presidency.

Believe me when I say that we've just seen a miracle. The advent of Donald Trump makes the fall of Jericho's walls seem like small change.

It would have been a sour note indeed to play out my last years with Obama as the high point.

Imagine saying to yourself, man it was bad during his tenure but now? With Hillary as President, it’s a million times worse as Hillary makes the Democrats the permanent Overlords.

We didn’t just dodge a bullet, we put rocket boosters on the planet and escaped before the sun blew up.

Slightly adapted from comments.

The thing that makes Trump “seem” so spectacular is that he has balls in an environment that has been nutless for decades.

The thing that makes Trump “seem” so spectacular is that he has balls in an environment that has been nutless for decades. When a normal grown man with AC-DC sized big balls pops on the scene amongst an ocean of cucks and wusses there is an automatic and continuous tsunami-earthquake-typhoon of emotions everywhere simultaneously. Nervous reactions.

Out here in Realville men have been acting like men all along so we have been stymied as to why DC males act like they do. Until Trump, we had nothing in that realm to compare the cucks to. Now we do, and we feel embarrassment for them.

And we want them to know severe punishment. If you are born a male you are a man all of your life but if you choose to behave like a child or a woman then you need to be corrected, violently if necessary, or preferably, eliminated, permanently so as to not infect others.

Out here in Realville Trump would blend right in and seem like everyone else.

Corrected for grammar.

It’s Time for a Thoroughgoing Revamping of the Intelligence Community.

Via Instapundit.

Among the urgent tasks we must quickly undertake, few are so urgent as a thoroughgoing revamping of the intelligence community. At the moment, it isn’t very impressive in either of the two main activities with which it’s entrusted: spying on our enemies and supporting our friends. You can see this easily enough. The Israelis, not the CIA et al., made off with the Iranians’ secret nuclear plans. So much for effective espionage. And there are two very closely linked enemies, Iran and Venezuela, that should be prime targets for subversion, but we don’t seem to be making good progress.

On the other hand, the intelligence community seems to do well, or at least try harder, at subverting our own political order, as we’ve learned over the recent past.

Or maybe not. Although the attempted subversion of Trump and associates produced the downfall of Lt. General Michael Flynn, the centerpiece of the intel operation—the Mueller show investigation—came up empty-handed, and the top levels of the FBI and CIA now face inquiries from Attorney General Barr, Justice Department Inspector General Horowitz, and the U.S. Attorney in Connecticut. Some of our top spooks have been fired.

Rather like Iran and Venezuela, isn’t it?

Here's a link to the original article.

Profiles in Treason Robert Mueller

Rising by failing is Mueller's history.  Read the whole thing. 

When Abortion Suddenly Stopped Making Sense

Powerful argument by feminist about when abortion became real to her.

At the time of the Roe v. Wade decision, I was a college student — an anti-war, mother-earth, feminist, hippie college student. That particular January I was taking a semester off, living in the D.C. area and volunteering at the feminist “underground newspaper” Off Our Backs. As you’d guess, I was strongly in favor of legalizing abortion. The bumper sticker on my car read, “Don’t labor under a misconception; legalize abortion.”
...
But, at the time, we didn’t have much understanding of what abortion was. We knew nothing of fetal development. We consistently termed the fetus “a blob of tissue,” and that’s just how we pictured it — an undifferentiated mucous-like blob, not recognizable as human or even as alive. It would be another 15 years of so before pregnant couples could show off sonograms of their unborn babies, shocking us with the obvious humanity of the unborn.

We also thought, back then, that few abortions would ever be done. It’s a grim experience, going through an abortion, and we assumed a woman would choose one only as a last resort. We were fighting for that “last resort.” We had no idea how common the procedure would become; today, one in every five pregnancies ends in abortion.

Nor could we have imagined how high abortion numbers would climb. In the 43 years since Roe v. Wade, there have been 59 million abortions. It’s hard even to grasp a number that big. Twenty years ago, someone told me that, if the names of all those lost babies were inscribed on a wall, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the wall would have to stretch for 50 miles. It’s 20 years later now, and that wall would have to stretch twice as far. But no names could be written on it; those babies had no names.

We have the worst Ruling Class in history

Let’s Call the Russian Collusion ‘Hoax’ What it Really Is

It was much more than a hoax.  Roger Kimball:

But thinking about it, I conclude that the term “hoax” is wholly inadequate to describe the enormity of the political scandal that was perpetrated against Donald Trump, against the office of the president, and ultimately against the American people.

For one thing, the word “hoax” implies something jocular or prankish. The joke might be malicious, but it is still intended to be humorous. There was nothing at all humorous about what just happened in our political life, though the hysteria of the anti-Trump chorus—the pussy-behatted females complaining about how “crude” Trump was, the “comedian” who paraded about with a bloody doll’s head representing the president, the tears and imprecations and jeremiads disgorged by the press and by Trump’s political enemies: all that did have a sort of ghastly if pathetic humor about it.

But when we step back and consider what actually happened over the past three years—and, more, what almost happened—it is clear that the word “hoax” does not begin to cover the reality of what I have been calling for many months the greatest political scandal in the history of the American republic.

Does that, too, sound hyperbolic, like worrying about commas when Shanghai is burning? Some people think so. I have several times said why I think they are wrong.

Perhaps the best way of summarizing my disagreement is by suggesting an alternative to the word “hoax.” It’s not a novel suggestion.

On the contrary, it’s often been used in concert with or as a synonym for “hoax.” But I think it is a better word in this context because it expresses the malign intention behind the multifarious activities directed against candidate Trump and then President Trump. The word I have in mind is “coup.”
....
We should face up to that unpleasant fact and call things by their real names. The actions taken by the Obama Administration threatened not just Donald Trump and his presidency but the very processes and protocols by which the peaceful transition of power has been effected in the United States. As L.J. Keith observed, “Even in the most contentious elections and after disputed results, there was never been this sort of dangerous, systematic, deliberate rejection of the will of the people. The abrogation of the constitution to use extrajudicial methods to destroy the incoming president. It is the very definition of a coup.”

Indeed. So let’s call it what it is. A coup.

It's not that uncommon in the Third World and our coup attempt was engineered by our very own Son of Africa.

America is rising again. Trump Inaugural and The Battle Hymn of the Republic

'This Is Exactly Like The Handmaid's Tale,' Declares Local Woman After Man Opens Door For Her

FAIRFAX, VA—Local woman Jenny Parsons was leaving a meeting, minding her own business, at the office building where she works Thursday. She thought she was just filing out like all the other employees.

Little did she know, she was actually about to encounter evidence that her workplace is no better than the oppressive, totalitarian regime depicted in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

Her coworker, Jake, smiled and held the door for her, prompting Parsons to explode almost immediately into a rant about how this was just more evidence that America is literally like something out of a dystopian novel she's read about on the internet.

"Where are we, Gilead?" she said loudly as the confused man held the door for her. "Why does no one else but me see how oppressive this is toward women? This is exactly like The Handmaid's Tale. This is the future Hulu warned us about."

The woman reportedly makes the comparison often.

"Just last week, she stubbed her toe and suggested it was exactly like the dystopian nightmare Mike Pence wants for our nation," said her next-door neighbor, Freida.

At publishing time, Parsons had walked by a brand-new Chick-fil-A restaurant under construction and made the comparison again as frightened and confused building contractors backed away from her slowly.

Why Liberals Hate Chick-fil-A

Table set aside on Memorial Day at Chick-fil-A

Chick-fil-A is unabashedly pro-American. I suspect that is the real reason for the animus that so many liberals bear against the company. There was a time when liberals were generally patriotic. George McGovern is a good example: he was wrong on just about every issue, but he was a veteran who loved his country. That is no longer true.

Now, while no doubt there are honorable exceptions, liberals are usually anti-American. They have been taught a twisted, Zinnified version of American history, and they have internalized a Chomskyite view of the world in which all evils are traceable to American misdeeds. Liberals tend to be angry, unhappy people, and it is convenient for them to blame their problems on their country’s supposed failings. Organizations like Chick-fil-A that are pro-America, pro-religion (Chick-fil-A restaurants are closed on Sunday), and culturally upbeat are anathema.

Segregation Is Thriving on the Left

What did you think would happen if you engaged in identity politics and elected Barack Hussein Obama and his Communist allies?

A massive number of schools have institutionalized racial segregation across vast swaths of campus life: “About 46 percent (80 colleges out of 173 surveyed) segregate student orientation programs; 43 percent (75 colleges out of the total) offer segregated residential arrangements; and 72 percent (125 colleges out of the total) segregate graduation ceremonies.”

Tearing the country apart is not a bug, it's a feature of the Left.

Russia hoax origins to be exposed as Trump authorizes AG Barr to declassify Russia probe documents

Heads are exploding all over the beltway, as the unraveling of the biggest political scandal in American history enters a new stage. Make no mistake, there is a plan and a timetable designed for maximum dramatic impact. President Trump finally has taken the long-awaited step to lift the cloak of classification and uncover the weaponization of the federal government’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies against his candidacy and then presidency.

Meanwhile, the Shithole Press will do all it can to cover for the Democrats and Team Obama.  (many of whom are Communists)