This is how it's done

Prowers County commissioner Wendy L. Buxton-Andrad

All is not lost in America. Colorado officials including feminine-looking women and men with, presumably, measurable T levels, show us how to fight for our Constitutional rights:

Ten Colorado counties have declared “Second Amendment Sanctuary” status against a gun confiscation law being pushed by state-level Democrats.

On March 8, 2019, Breitbart News reported that eight counties had made sanctuary declarations. The counties are Custer, Freemont, Kiowa, Moffat, Montezuma, Otero, Rio Blanco, and Weld Counties. The Lamar Ledger reports that Prowers County commissioners declared their county a “Second Amendment Sanctuary” on Monday.

Prowers County commissioner Wendy L. Buxton-Andrade said, “We are elected officials when we raise our hand to take office. We are sworn to protect the United States Constitution. In passing this resolution, we are protecting that right and protecting our constituents from those trying to take away that constitutional right, the Second Amendment.” [...]

The Ledger notes that counties are making these Second Amendment declarations as state-level Democrats push “a bill, known as the ‘red flag’ bill, which would allow a judge to order the confiscation of firearms from someone found to be a danger to themselves or others.”

These "red flag" laws, which 13 states have adopted since the Parkland massacre, are totally unconstitutional:

Colorado Republicans defeated a similar bill last year, insisting it infringed on citizens' Second Amendment rights. But Democrats won both statehouse chambers in November, and Democratic Gov. Jared Polis called for a "red flag" law while campaigning last year.

Let's see what the party of treason is pushing:

This year's bill was being heard Thursday in the House Judiciary Committee. It would allow family or law enforcement to seek a court order to have guns seized if they believe the owner is a threat. If approved, a subsequent court hearing would be held to determine whether to extend the seizure, up to 364 days.

The bill also would leave it up to the person whose guns were seized to prove at any point that he or she no longer poses a risk.

The burden of proof is on citizens to show the state that they are compliant, psychologically normal sheeple who therefore deserve to have their basic rights upheld.

Fight!

The language gap: AOC edition

I don't like to write about AOC. It's an unpleasant subject in more ways than one, and I don't like to give her any more attention than she already gets from a crazed media (especially the conservative media, which is making the same mistake with regard to AOC that the mainstream media made with Trump).

That said, AOC fits so perfectly into a phenomenon I wrote about last September that I couldn't resist. From that post:

One worrying sign of the sharpening polarization in America is the increasing inability of the Blue Church to communicate with the rest of the country. Not only do the bizarre ideological fixations of the Left appear to the majority of Americans to be increasingly unhinged and divorced from reality, but the very vocabulary of the Left -- the actual words Leftist use -- bear an ever-more-tenuous connection to normal English.

I was recently thinking about AOC's "voice"... the distinctive way that she communicates on Twitter. Love it or hate it (personally, I find it about as appealing as a million fingernails scraping a chalkboard in unison), there is no denying its power and appeal to a large swath of the country.

AOC's "voice" is a millennial voice, narcissistic and self-satisfied, aggressively liberal, but reasonable-sounding enough to command wide assent. Something else caught my attention too. AOC may be the first mainstream, national politician to communicate in the strange vernacular of Social Justice - an idiom that includes terms and phrases such as these:

• "calling in"
• "centering their concerns"
• "climate delayers"
• "frontline/impacted communities"
• "intersectionally"
• "Latinx"
• "LGBTQ+ inclusion"
• "tokenism"

It goes without saying that, although her meaning is usually clear in context, many of the terms that she uses are totally incomprehensible to normal Americans. "Latinx"? WTF?

I close with this characteristic AOC tweet:

GOP defensively say, “we’re not scared of dancing women!” yet proceed to use footage of me dancing “with the color drained to make it look more ominous.” ?? Spoiler: The GOP *is* scared of dancing women, because they fear the liberation of all identities taught to feel shame.

The USA is so over.

Drumpf betrays base on immigration?

I never expected to have to say this, but if you're a #MAGA person and you continue to make excuses for this sort of behavior, you're just an idiot:

Ahead of the 2020 presidential election, President Trump is abandoning his prior “America First” legal immigration reforms to support increases of legal immigration levels in order to expand profits for businesses and corporations.

For the fourth time in about a month, Trump suggested increasing legal immigration levels. With Apple CEO Tim Cook sitting next to him at the White House on Wednesday, Trump said he not only wanted more legal immigration but that companies needed an expansion of new arrivals to grow their business.

“We’re going to have a lot of people coming into the country. We want a lot of people coming in. And we need it,” Trump said:

MAGA!

Immigration catastrophe

Trump's inexorable transition into Drumpf

Last post, I told you to spit out that black bill: the Trump administration, through a variety of regulatory changes at US Citizenship and Immigration Services, is building an "invisible wall" of policies and mechanisms that make it harder to immigrate. This is, of course, good news for those of us who seek to curb the million-strong horde of foreign nationals who are permitted to settle in the US every year.

Well, that was the good news. There's bad news too... and it's really bad.

The flood of depressing immigration-related commentary this week is pretty overwhelming, so I will just post a small sample:

"New, awful data shows that the border invasion is worse than ever"

If Trump had not signed the disastrous budget bill several weeks ago and we were still operating on a short-term CR with immigration remaining the top issue, today’s news could have strengthened Trump’s leverage. According to CBP’s preliminary figures obtained by the Washington Post, 76,325 illegal aliens were apprehended at the border in February, more than any other month in over a decade since the decline of migration from Mexico. A record 40,325 family units arrived, blowing out the previous records by almost 10,000. Sadly, Trump already signed away his leverage to force a national dialogue over this issue.

As a nation, we are left debating presidential power from an obscure statute that enables the president to obtain a mere $2.5 billion for partial fencing to deal with a policy-driven invasion. The joke is that even if Trump had full unity behind this approach, it would do little to stop this invasion, which is strategically directed toward soft parts of our border. Unless we force a national discussion over the courts and the illegal immigration magnets that are bringing immigrants in, this entire debate is a non-sequitur. Unfortunately, without a budget deadline for another seven months, no matter how bad things get at our border, there is no mechanism through which to pressure Democrats into submission. [...]

It’s gotten so bad that illegal aliens have successfully taken us past our breaking point, creating a self-fulfilling cycle of catch-and-release. We are so overrun with migrants and detention facilities are so full that now, even those not eligible for catch-and-release are being released. We will never hear from them again, but will have to pay for their public charge and crimes committed.

Money chart:

Judge Sabraw, in case you were wondering, is the US District Judge (a Dubya appointee and son of a Japanese immigrant) who ordered the reunification of children separated from their parents or "parents" at the Mexican border, as a direct result of which, apprehensions of "family units" at the border exploded.

Notice a trend? #MAGA drives illegal immigration down. Judges and the absence of #MAGA drive it back up.

The God-Emperor Trump could put a stop to this treasonous judicial usurpation of power by simply ignoring these totally unconstitutional and ridiculous rulings. But he'd rather whine and bluster, apparently:

"Catch and Release, Birthright Citizenship, Sanctuary Cities Continue Unaltered Despite Trump Opposition"

During his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Trump denounced the Catch and Release program where illegal aliens and border crossers are routinely released into the interior of the U.S. after being apprehended by Border Patrol. [...]

The Catch and Release program, though, was expanded by Trump last month when he signed a spending bill approved by Republicans and Democrats in Congress and strongly supported by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, insiders have told Breitbart News.

The bipartisan spending package Trump signed greatly expands the Catch and Release of border crossers and illegal aliens, codifying into law that border crossers be bused into the interior of the U.S. where they are released with the promise that they are monitored.

DRUMPF denounces his own policies, rages impotently at problems that he refuses to solve! His appointee, DHS head Kirstjen Nielsen, all but rolls out the welcome mat for illegal aliens:

"Beltway Class Praises DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen While She Oversees Illegal Immigration Surge"

The Washington, D.C. political establishment and beltway class are praising their close ally, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, as she oversees a surge in illegal immigration and implements an expansion of the Catch and Release program.

In a glowing piece by Politico, Nielsen received repeated praise for “standing strong” and circumventing President Trump’s criticism of her role as DHS secretary, where she has overseen a continued surge in illegal immigration while focusing her agency’s attention on cybersecurity issues and terrorism prevention. [...]

By all measures of border crossing data and Catch and Release levels, Nielsen’s record at DHS has been dismal. For example, when January 2018 illegal border crossings are compared to January 2019 numbers, the level of illegal immigration year-to-year has nearly doubled.

Most recently, for February, illegal immigration at the southern border hit the highest level for the month in 12 years, surpassing every month of February under former President Obama. Now, experts predict there to be up to half a million illegal aliens who successfully cross into the country this year, alone.

Likewise, Nielsen has consistently privately advocated for spending bills that have provided little-to-no funds for Trump’s proposed U.S.-Mexico border wall to stop illegal immigration.

Daniel Horowitz of the Conservative Review is nearly apoplectic:



But he has a good idea:

https://twitter.com/RMConservative/status/1103003714581917It's time to use Article II, 212f, and 215A to categorically shut down all cross border migration

Great! Any takers? Anyone?

Drumpf?...

The invisible wall

This is how it's done. Walls are great, yes – and the US needs a wall. Equally important, America needs to make it harder to immigrate across the board. A Politico report from last September details how Lee Francis Cissna, head of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, is tightening up the system:

• Creation of a “denaturalization task force” to strip away fraudulently obtained citizenship
• Allowing visa officers to deny applications without first requesting more info
• Refugee admissions slashed
• Proposed legislation to prevent immigrants from obtaining green cards if they or their family members have used a public benefit
• Suspension of a fast-track processing program for H-1B visas
• Planned rollback of work authorization for spouses of H-1B visa holders

Horrors!

The man overseeing these reforms isn’t Stephen Miller, the White House aide publicly known as the architect of President Donald Trump’s most restrictionist immigration policies. It’s Lee Francis Cissna, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency that not only facilitates legal immigration, but historically celebrates it. Miller is rightly seen as the mastermind of Trump’s far-reaching immigration crackdown, but Cissna is arguably just as important because he makes it happen.

Much less visible than Miller or Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Cissna has quietly carried out Trump’s policies with a workmanlike dedication. From his perch atop USCIS, he’s issued a steady stream of policy changes and regulations that have transformed his agency into more of an enforcement body and less of a service provider. These changes have generated blowback from immigrant advocates, businesses and even some of his own employees. Leon Rodriguez, who served as USCIS director under President Barack Obama, said the agency is sending a message “that this is a less welcoming environment than it may have been before.” […]

While the travel ban and family separations grabbed headlines, Cissna has waged a quieter war, tightening and reworking regulations and guidance that make it harder to come to the U.S. as an immigrant or temporary worker.

Cissna, one gets the impression, sees himself as a technocratic civil servant who is faithfully upholding the law and the administration's policies, rather than some kind of anti-immigration zealot. It's funny how the people interviewed by Politico seem unable to square Cissna's immigrant parentage with his tough bureaucratic actions, as if they cannot imagine a government official “of color” choosing loyalty to America over his own perceived ethnic self-interest. There's also a weird line about how being Catholic is supposedly incompatible with “splitting up families at the border,” i.e. separating children from illegal alien adults who may or may not be their parents

Cissna gave a good response to a popular, but retarded, immigration canard:

Cissna sees no conflict in shaping policies that could have kept his own family out of the United States if they had been implemented several decades ago. “There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be able to advocate for a policy that I think is better for the country, even if it might affect or have affected my own family personally,” he told me.

And a recent update on the Trump administration's tightening of the H-1B visa program:

Immigrants with specialized skills are being denied work visas or seeing applications get caught up in lengthy bureaucratic tangles under federal changes that some consider a contradiction to President Donald Trump’s promise of a continued pathway to the U.S. for the most talented foreigners.

Getting what’s known as an H-1B visa has never been a sure thing — the number issued annually is capped at 85,000 and applicants need to enter a lottery to even be considered. But some immigration attorneys, as well as those who hire such workers, say they’ve seen unprecedented disruptions in the approval process since Trump took office in 2017.

Spit out that black pill! Drumpf is far from perfect, but whereas his opponents (Republican and Democrat alike) are feckless traitors who piss on everything you care about, the God-Emperor is at least beginning to move things in the right direction. Let's see how he does over the next year, before the 2020 Republican presidential primaries.

Link roundup

Leading today's roundup of news and views, the eminent historian Victor Davis Hanson offers a devastating synopsis of the attempted Deep State coup against the POTUS, which he correctly characterizes as likely "the greatest scandal in American political history."

In the meantime, Trump continues to allow key positions in his administration to be occupied by people who openly loathe him and everything he claims to stand for. Is it possible, as the blogger Vox Day suggests, that Trump's increasing submission to the globalists and neocons is connected to the winding down of the fake Russia collusion investigation? It does seem odd that the God-Emperor's metamorphosis into a swaggering version of Jeb! Bush is accelerating even as the Deep State pressure on him appears to be lessening. But what do I know.

Autopsy of a Dead Coup

The newly promoted McCabe apparently felt that it was his moment to become famous for taking out a now President Trump. Thus, he assembled a FBI and DOJ cadre to open a counterintelligence investigation of the sitting president on no other grounds but the fumes of an evaporating Clinton opposition dossier and perceived anger among the FBI that their director had just been fired. In addition, apparently now posing as Andrew McCabe, MD, he informally head counted how many of Trump’s own cabinet members could be convinced by McCabe’s own apparent medical expertise to help remove the president on grounds of physical and mental incapacity under the 25th Amendment. This was an attempted, albeit pathetic, coup against an elected president and the first really in the history of the United States.

Why Trump is Losing

The success of Trump’s presidency is similarly inseparable from the construction of a wall. In addition to its practical effects, the wall has important symbolic value as a rejection of globalism and an assertion of American sovereignty. Without control of the border and immigration reform broadly, his presidency will be a failure on its own terms. While some held their nose in voting for Trump and others, like me, had a real affection for him and his style, both recognize that Trump’s chief appeal is that he is a fighter. He fought when most Republicans backed down whether against the media, North Korea, or the Deep State. During the campaign, he consistently affirmed the right of ordinary Americans to have a government responsive to them.

It now appears Trump painted himself into a corner and got played by the Machiavellian Nancy Pelosi. He tried a shutdown without much of a plan in December, but eventually relented and allowed a temporary funding measure. During the interregnum, he telegraphed his intention to use emergency powers—deviating from his own wisdom that one needs to keep such plans quiet—and, in the process, the Democrats littered the spending bill with various provisions that will defang what might have been a plausible plan to use emergency powers to fund the wall.

Why Autocrats Are Replacing Democrats

Yet Congress had the latent power, in Article III, Section 2, to restrict the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and every other federal court. But the big stick the founders left for Congress to corral a runaway Supreme Court was never picked up, never used.

High among the reasons Trump was elected was that, for all his flaws and failings, he was seen as a doer, a man who “gets things done.”

The Naysayers Are Wrong. Bernie Sanders Is A Formidable 2020 Contender

In short, a multitude of factors culminate in the following inescapable conclusion: Bernie Sanders is the strongest 2020 Democratic candidate. Whether you’d call him the “front-runner” is immaterial. That’s kind of trite pundit terminology anyway. The bottom line is that the power and influence he garnered as a result of the previous run, during which he won 46 percent of elected delegates, is sufficient to assume that he is extremely formidable.

Good Riddance to Amazon

Conservatives are right to join with progressive populists in opposing the Amazon deal. And they shouldn’t be either cowed by the hysterics from the business community, or seduced by the chance to score a few political shots against Ocasio-Cortez, into going wobbly now. The rightist opposition to the deal, even if it meant allying with the likes of AOC, was a sign, like the Tucker Carlson monologue and the Trump election, of the growing and important rebellion of rank-and-file Republicans and conservatives against the wealthy “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” corporate and party establishment. This is no time to revert.

(The excellent Selena Zito has a different perspective on the Amazon deal that I think misses the point.)

The View From Olympus: Following the Classic Pattern

Great powers tend to follow a similar pattern of rise, a short time of dominance, overextension, and fall.  It is ever more clear that this country is following the classic pattern.  Our period of dominance ran roughly from 1945 to 1965; its end was marked by our defeat in Vietnam.  We are now in the latter stages of the phase of overextension.  Fall, I suspect, lies around the next corner.

Trump administration launches global effort to end criminalization of homosexuality

The Trump administration is launching a global campaign to end the criminalization of homosexuality in dozens of nations where it's still illegal to be gay, U.S. officials tell NBC News, a bid aimed in part at denouncing Iran over its human rights record.

U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, the highest-profile openly gay person in the Trump administration, is leading the effort, which kicks off Tuesday evening in Berlin. The U.S. embassy is flying in LGBT activists from across Europe for a strategy dinner to plan to push for decriminalization in places that still outlaw homosexuality — mostly concentrated in the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean.

Triumph

It's over.

They threw everything they had at him. They mobilized the entire vast apparatus of the evil establishment for their shameful, lying campaign to take down a good man, a mild-mannered Catholic of impeccable reputation, and they failed. The effort backfired on the Democrats, hideously and spectacularly.

The disgusting and cynical attack on Kavanaugh will not be forgotten. If you come at the king, you best not miss. The Democrats missed, and they will pay the price in the midterms. And they will continue to pay the price in the form of awakened Republican anger, and a newly radicalized Kavanaugh who will, we can hope, exact his revenge from the bench of the highest court in the land.

 

Conservatives are beginning to discover what it means to win. It is an unfamiliar feeling for people on the political Right. We are so used to noble defeat and Pyrrhic victories, to endless, shameless betrayal by the Republican establishment. Fine rhetoric about muh Constitution and muh principles, and perhaps the occasional tax cut and pointless foreign war, while the greatest nation in the history of the world morphs into a continent-sized freak show. "Winning" meant George W Bush in the Oval Office. Now, for the first time in 30 years, under the magnificent God-Emperor, we are starting to win by ACTUALLY FUCKING WINNING.

Make no mistake, this is a landmark victory. We now have possibly the most conservative Supreme Court since 1934; this is real power. The Left is in disarray, but it is also dangerous, like a wounded animal that is still far from dead. Having failed to defeat Kavanaugh through the normal political process, and having failed to ruin his life through their despicable lies and machinations, the Left will now extend and widen the battle to the legitimacy of the Supreme Court itself. They are already laying the groundwork for this next phase of the conflict. "Kavanaugh’s confirmation will have poisoned the foundation of the judiciary’s authority." If they cannot keep the court, they will burn it down.

There is literally no institution, no custom, no tradition, no bedrock American value the Left will not eagerly demolish in its insane, totalizing quest for utopia. Do I exaggerate? Forget limited government, forget guns and border enforcement...  now they're attacking the freakin' presumption of innocence!!!

Mike Cernovich made the astute point that the establishment media has lost any remaining credibility through this fiasco. Even the formerly admired Ronan Farrow has completely jumped the shark, penning not one, but two ludicrous hit pieces against Kavanaugh in The New Yorker. Why would anyone even bother to refute a hit piece anymore? The media is totally, utterly fake and everyone knows it. If you're ever accused of something by the media, all you have to do is say "fake news" and you've won the argument.

But the damage runs deeper than that. As @Instapundit noted, "Trump's greatest gift is getting various institutions to make clear in obvious ways that they're as corrupt as he says they are." This was in reference to the story that hundreds -- ultimately more than 2,400 -- law professors had signed a letter arguing that Kavanaugh should not be confirmed based on his judicial temperament. As if the righteous fury of a good man falsely accused, when defending himself before the Senate and the nation in the capacity of a witness, has any bearing whatsoever on his temperament as a judge! And then there is the contemptible bias displayed by the ACLU and the American Bar Association.

The Democratic party. The media. The legal profession. All severely damaged, if not comprehensively discredited, in a matter of weeks.

The Right has won a huge victory, but there are many more battles to come. The Left will grow crazier, more desperate and more violent as their world continues to fall apart. Our political system will devolve into chaos and our institutions will continue to bleed legitimacy. There is little doubt that the United States is on a greased slope to collapse, but we need to keep winning or what replaces the US will be worse than we can imagine.

Kyrie Irving apologies for wrongthink

The heretic has seen the error of his ways:

Kyrie Irving’s unexpected apology tour made a pit stop at the Forbes Under 30 Summit on Monday in Boston, where the Celtics point guard apologized for saying the Earth is flat.
“I’m sorry about all that for all the science teachers, everybody coming up to me, like, ‘You know I have to re-teach my whole curriculum,'” Irving said, according to Boston.com. “I’m sorry. I apologize. I apologize.”

Flat-eartherism is, of course, stupid. The earth's roundness was established before the time of Christ. It is stupid, but it is also completely harmless and fun. As Irving told the New York Times:

Can you openly admit that you know the Earth is constitutionally round? Like, you know that for sure? Like, I don’t know. I was never trying to convince anyone that the world is flat. I’m not being an advocate for the world being completely flat. No, I don’t know. I really don’t. It’s fun to think about though. It’s fun to have that conversation. It is absolutely fun because people get so agitated and mad. They’re like, “Hey man, you can’t believe that, man. It’s religious, man. It’s just science. You can’t believe anything else. O.K.?” Cool, well, explain to me. Give me what you’ve known about the Earth and your research, and I love it. I love talking about it.

What's strange about this case is that Irving apparently felt the need to apologize for his comments. (Whether he was compelled to do so, and how serious his apology was, is hard to discern from the story.) The point is, we apologize when we injure or offend someone. Who could possibly be harmed by a basketball player questioning the shape of the earth? And please, if you're tempted to say some variation of "the children" or "the school teachers," you may be dumber and more gullible than anyone who thinks the earth is flat.

The irony is that most of the people sneering at Irving probably do not know the approximate age or size of the earth. They probably do not know its composition or how it was formed or how the moon was formed. They probably do not know the earth's orbital speed or why the sun and the moon appear to be almost the same size in the sky. They probably have no idea how the ancient Greeks apprehended that the earth is a sphere, and they probably have no idea that the earth may contain, trapped in minerals beneath its surface, a reservoir of water three times larger than all the oceans combined.

As far as they are concerned, Irving must be punished for having wrong thoughts. This is not a search for truth, but a social shaming ritual.

Mass hysteria and sneering, self-righteous ignorance: welcome to the Current Year.

The language gap

One worrying sign of the sharpening polarization in America is the increasing inability of the Blue Church to communicate with the rest of the country. Not only do the bizarre ideological fixations of the Left appear to the majority of Americans to be increasingly unhinged and divorced from reality, but the very vocabulary of the Left -- the actual words Leftist use -- bear an ever-more-tenuous connection to normal English.

I just came across an example of this in a New Yorker article on Linus Torvalds, the irascible creator of Linux, who decided to step down temporarily after the magazine confronted him about complaints that his "abusive behavior" had discouraged women from working as Linux programmers. The article finds no evidence that Torvalds' notorious rudeness was directed specifically at female programmers, or was intended to discourage women as a category from contributing to Linux.

In any case, the article describes the efforts of Sage Sharp, "a prominent Linux contributor," to influence Torvald's behavior and impose a Code of Conduct on the project. I was struck by this sentence:

In 2013, Sharp, who is nonbinary and uses “they/them” pronouns, confronted Torvalds on his home turf—the public Linux kernel mailing list.

Now, I have come across the term "nonbinary" before, and I imagine most regular readers of the New Yorker have as well. They are, I assume, steeped in the vernacular of social justice. A majority of Americans, however -- perhaps a large majority -- when confronted with the matter-of-fact assertion that some individual is "nonbinary" and uses the pronouns "they" and "them" to describe xirself, would have absolutely no idea what the fuck that means.

Other examples abound, of words that are pregnant with meaning to Leftist elites but meaningless, incomprehensible or totally misunderstood by the rest of America. "Cisgender." "Privilege." "Being an ally." "Intersectionality." "Safe space." Insane concepts denoted by fake words or made-up uses of normal words. They infest the discourse of the modern Left, these alien locutions as indecipherable to the average American as a Sanskrit mantra.

It bodes ill for our republic that important segments of the elite no longer speak to the rest of us, but have retreated into a make-believe world, speaking an arcane court language that nobody else understands.

Good luck with that

There is a certain type of ideologue that believes it is both possible and desirable to completely ban civilian ownership of guns in America. It is useful to bear in mind that what these people are calling for, is the confiscation of 40% of the world's firearms:

American citizens now own 40 per cent of all guns in the world - more than the next 25 top-ranked gun ownership countries combined - with the number only set to grow, according to new research.

According to a decade-long survey released by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, not only do Americans own the highest number of guns per capita, but also between 2006 and 2017, US gun owners acquired some 122 million new guns. That represented more than half of the 207 million new civilian-owned firearms around the world during that time.

“The biggest force pushing up gun ownership around the world is civilian ownership in the United States,” said Aaron Karp, one of the authors of the report.

And here's another take on the data courtesy of Stephen Gutowski:

I don't think people really understand how many guns American civilians own. The Small Arms Survey was just updated this week and found there are about 400 million civilian-owned guns in the US.
April Sets Gun Sales Record
April 2018 saw the most gun-related checks run through the Federal Bureau of Investigation's background check system.
http://freebeacon.com/issues/april-sets-gun-sales-record/
This, of course, makes is by far the #1 in civilian gun ownership in the world with the next closest being India at about 70 million. There are more civilian-owned guns in the US than their are people Most people, I think, understand that but don't really grasp what it means.
Every law enforcement agency in America combined have about 1 million firearms in their inventory. That means American civilians have about 400 TIMES as many firearms as American police.
In May alone, American civilians bought somewhere around 2 million firearms. That's twice as many firearms as every police department in America combined IN A SINGLE MONTH.
Similarly, the American military is estimated to hold about 4.5 million firearms. That means American civilians have 100 TIMES as many firearms as every branch of the American military COMBINED.
If you combine May and April's gun-related background check numbers you get 4.7 million. That means the American public bought more guns IN JUST THE LAST TWO MONTHS than the entire American military has on hand.
Furthermore, the Small Arms Survey estimates all the world's law enforcement agencies combined hold about 22.7 million guns. In 2017 alone, the FBI processed 25.2 million gun checks. The American public bought more guns in 2017 than every police agency in the world combined.
Between 2012 and 2017, the FBI did more than 135 million civilian gun checks. That's more than the estimated 133 million guns held by ALL THE WORLD'S MILITARIES COMBINED.
Over the last 5 years, the American public purchased more guns than every military force on the planet combined.
I hope that gives everyone some more insight into American gun ownership. For more details on this please read my piece:
Report: Nearly 400 Million Civilian-Owned Guns in America
A report published this month found civilians in the United States own almost 400 million guns, outpacing every other population, police, or military force.
http://freebeacon.com/culture/report-nearly-400-million-civilian-own

Friendly reminder that the Cold War is over

It made sense to oppose Russia with all our might when the Cold War was actually a thing. Cold Wars are nasty affairs that involve things like your enemy saying they will bury you, enslaving whole nations under a totalitarian government, exporting revolutionary ideologies to the far corners of the earth, and placing nuclear weapons and tens of thousands of troops in a country 100 miles from your own coastline. But given that Russia no longer does any of these things and has not made aggressive moves on anyone since it gave up control of 700,000 square miles of territory and 180 million people in what was widely believed to be the end of the Cold War, one might reasonably conclude that the Cold War is, in fact, over.

This isn't very complicated.

Twitter's massacre of the innocents

Why is Twitter silencing its most interesting accounts?

This week, Twitter locked, suspended, or terminated the accounts of at least 10 prominent users. All affected accounts, as far as I’m aware, were critical of contemporary society and attacked it from the right. They included a fringe continental philosopher, a YouTube pundit, and six leaders of an influential Twitter clique known as frogtwitter. 

Despite journalists breathless attempts to label frogtwitter as neo-Nazi, white supremacist, anti-democracy, Alt-Right, and “NRx,” it’s in reality just a small group of young, vaguely right-wing intellectuals interested in critiquing Western life. They aren’t all white (not even close), nor are they all American. It has an internal list serve, internal communications, and recognized leaders who offer their critiques through tweets and organize via DMs. It’s not a mass fascist movement, it has nothing to do with Richard Spencer, and most traditional conservatives either hate it or don’t understand it. It’s opposed by an equally intellectual and anti-PC group, the Dirtbag Left, though the two sides often share the same ideas and memes. That is, until one side was banned.

The banning of these irreverent and largely apolitical (and hilarious) accounts indicates that Twitter has shifted into a new phase. No longer content merely to silence influential pro-Trump and alt-right voices, Twitter now seems intent on stamping out any form of intellectual edginess. Political bias has mutated into a war on challenging ideas, even if those ideas are expressed in a non-abusive, Terms of Service-compliant way.

By the new rules of the game, if Socrates, Shakespeare, or Orwell lived today, they would all be - to varying degrees - unwelcome on Twitter.

It's a shame, really, because the authors of the banned accounts have clearly put a great deal of time and effort into crafting their tweets, many of which are absolute classics of the medium. To the extent that art can live on twitter, these anonymous posters are artists. They will now have to find a new medium to express their creative vision.

As it happens, I am aware that Twitter is a corporation and that corporations have the right to ban anyone from their platforms for any reason. I'm not making an argument about free speech or censorship or any of that crap. I am simply pointing out, because I find it noteworthy, that the world's ninth-largest social network, with an active user base as large as the US population, seems to have decided to make itself as boring as humanly possible.

Why Twitter is doing this to itself and what this means for the future of the internet, I have no idea. But one thing seems clear, that it heralds a richly-deserved future of lingering decline and probable death for what used to be a great platform.

More on this from Anatoly Karlin.

Don't worry, it'll get worse

Steve Bannon, Evil Counselor to the God-Emperor of Mankind, weighs in on what the future holds for the administration's war with the establishment:

SCHLAPP: [...] What is it that they keep getting wrong and do you think it ever gets fixed? What does the media keep getting wrong about this Trump phenomena and what's happening out there in the country? And is there any hope that this changes? 

PRIEBUS: I think there's hope that it's going to change. I mean we -- we sit here, every day and -- and the president pumps out all of this work and -- and the executive orders and the punching through of the promises that he made to the American people. So we're hoping that the media would catch up eventually. [...] 

BANNON: The reason Reince and I are good partners is that we can disagree. It's not only not going to get better. It's going to get worse every day. 

(LAUGHTER) 

And here's why. By the way, the internal logic makes sense. They're corporatist, globalist media that are adamantly opposed -- adamantly opposed to an economic nationalist agenda like Donald Trump has. President Trump really laid this out, as Reince said, many years ago at CPAC. It's really CPAC that really originally gave him the springboard. It's the first time at Breitbart we start seeing him, and saw how people, you know, his speeches resonated with people. 

And then he would go out to these smaller town halls later and really he got traction with the same message he's bringing today. Here's the only -- here's why it's going to get worse: Because he's going to continue to press his agenda. And as economic conditions get better, as more jobs get better, they're going to continue to fight. If you think they're going to give you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken. Every day -- every day, it is going to be a fight. And that is what I'm proudest about Donald Trump. All the opportunities he had to waiver off this; all the people who have come to him and said, "oh, you've got to moderate." Every day in the Oval Office, he tells Reince and I, "I committed this to the American people; I promised this when I ran; and I'm going to deliver on this."

Trump will not slow down, and he will not moderate. The battle will intensify. Buckle up.

Nationalism trumps ideology

Libertarians, who never mattered much, are finding they matter even less in Trumpmerica:

The "Stand With Rand" shirts were out and the "Make America Great Again" hats were in among the younger crowd at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference.
Libertarians, who normally make up the loudest and most vocal faction at the annual nationwide gathering of conservatives, had a noticeably diminished presence at the 2017 political confab. 

"I think it's disheartening," said Michael Hall, a spokesperson for Students for Liberty. "I'd like to see more libertarians here." 

In previous years, armies of supporters swarmed the conference halls championing Sen. Rand Paul — and formerly Ron Paul — as the future of the Republican Party. These attendees argued that an embrace of libertarianism would usher in a wave of youth support and rescue the GOP from assured death. 

But, after President Donald Trump's surprise November victory, the CPAC program conspicuously changed, underscoring nationalistic ideals while tepidly moving away from principles of small government that were popular among conservatives during President Barack Obama's eight years in office.

Good riddance. Without a doubt, big government needs to be killed with fire - and it's heartening that Steve Bannon understands this, with his "deconstruction of the administrative state" - but this laudable goal is decidedly no longer attached to an ideology that preaches that the personal freedom of the individual is the be-all and end-all of the universe. Thus, immigration and trade are to be tolerated only insofar as they enrich and strengthen the United States; the libertarian belief that everyone has the right to buy anything from anyone in the world at any time, for example, is losing its hypnotic appeal to Republicans as the disastrous effects of free trade on the US economy become increasingly apparent, and will likely go the way of the belief in open-borders immigration. (Libertarians: "But it's good for the Global Economy™!")

I am sympathetic to some libertarian ideas, but the fact of the matter is that libertarians are basically godless leftists who are in thrall to a simplistic, unworkable ideology. All my adult life I've been hearing about libertarians, but they've accomplished precisely nothing. The Republican George W. Bush increased the federal budget by 53%. Libertarians are completely useless.

We should certainly seek to reign in excessive government power, but first things first. It's a new era and our priorities have changed.

The new priority: national survival.

Not as catchy as "MAGA"

The education of Donald Trump

Despite his ruthlessness in business, Donald Trump is no sociopath, and it remains to be seen whether he possesses the icy resolve to comprehensively destroy his enemies in Washington. For they are powerful and merciless, and will neuter his presidency, and possibly impeach him and throw him in jail, if he does not act quickly and firmly to crush them all. His skills have brought him unimaginable fame and riches in the private sector, but the government is a different world, and the waters he has waded into run very, very deep. I wonder if he is just beginning to grasp the immensity of what is required of him:

President Trump may have been wounded more badly than he expected by the Flynn affair. Mr. Trump is, after, a rather decent man. He has no military experience, and as far as I know not much familiarity with military history. His instinctual reaction when an enemy is wounded is to stand back and end the fight. This is the civilized way of doing things, and in civil life it is much to be preferred. 

The military know better. Battles may be won by valor; wars are won in the pursuit. When the enemy is down is the time to put the boot in. Relentless pursuit, slaughter of the retreating enemy, kill them all, take no prisoners because prisoners need guarding and care and reduce your strength; wars are won or lost in the pursuit. [...] 

Valor wins battles; wars are won in the pursuit. Mr. Trump’s enemies know that and believe it. Perhaps Mr. Trump is learning it.

Trump will grow in office, I predict. He will learn to give his enemies no quarter, to show them no mercy, to strip them of all power using every legal means at his disposal. He will learn to ignore their lying shows of friendship and their appeals to fair play, "norms" and other abstract concepts they never gave the slightest shit about as he purges them with fire from a vastly corrupt, out-of-control government.

The alternative is Trump in prison or worse; government of, by and for the National Security State; and the extinction of the republic. Simple choice.

This is an encouraging sign. The showdown continues:

President Trump plans to assign a New York billionaire to lead a broad review of American intelligence agencies, according to administration officials, an effort that members of the intelligence community fear could curtail their independence and reduce the flow of information that contradicts the president’s worldview. 

The possible role for Stephen A. Feinberg, a co-founder of Cerberus Capital Management, has met fierce resistance among intelligence officials already on edge because of the criticism the intelligence community has received from Mr. Trump during the campaign and since he became president. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump blamed leaks from the intelligence community for the departure of Michael T. Flynn, his national security adviser, whose resignation he requested.

Take a deep breath

John Podhoretz in Commentary:

I am myself unnerved by the evidence of high-level lawlessness in the Flynn matter, but a “coup d’etat” refers specifically to a military ouster of a leader, not a leak-driven campaign using the press to nail someone. This is sure to persist, though, if the Flynn-Russia matter accelerates—and if the reluctant House and Senate do begin investigating the matter in earnest. If the language surrounding the investigation remains florid and purple, if Democrats try to please their Trump-hating constituents by screaming impeachment and liberal media tries to garner audience by jumping openly and vociferously on the bandwagon, the Trumpians will respond in kind by stirring the pot through their media and their argumentation.

The result might well be violence. Not rhetorical violence. Actual violence. Actual political violence. Actual conflicts between anti-Trumpers and Trumpers. At demonstrations. In the streets. Of our cities. Political violence of a sort we haven’t seen in 50 years, and maybe haven’t really seen in this country in the modern era. Those who believe Trump is a unique menace whose threat to our democratic way of life will be met with those who believe the elites are using illicit means to oust the legitimately elected president of the United States.

Podhoretz is right about this, and right about the amplifying effect of social media on public hysteria. This situation is getting dangerous, folks.

Time for everyone to take a deep breath and relax...

The Flynn affair

Some noteworthy articles about the Flynn affair:

Eli Lake: The Political Assassination of Michael Flynn

Normally intercepts of U.S. officials and citizens are some of the most tightly held government secrets. This is for good reason. Selectively disclosing details of private conversations monitored by the FBI or NSA gives the permanent state the power to destroy reputations from the cloak of anonymity. This is what police states do. 

In the past it was considered scandalous for senior U.S. officials to even request the identities of U.S. officials incidentally monitored by the government (normally they are redacted from intelligence reports). John Bolton's nomination to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was derailed in 2006 after the NSA confirmed he had made 10 such requests when he was Undersecretary of State for Arms Control in George W. Bush's first term. The fact that the intercepts of Flynn's conversations with Kislyak appear to have been widely distributed inside the government is a red flag.

Mike Cernovich: What General Flynn’s Resignation Means for America

Tonight the fake news media landed a tactical nuke on America. The line has been broken, and the media now knows Trump is far more sensitive to bad press than he seemed to be during the campaign. [...]

When Trump fires or forces someone to resign, he has given power to the media. [...]

Flynn was always a target because only he, Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, and Stephen Miller are in touch with Trump’s base.

Trump should have disbanded the White House Press Corps, as I advised. This lack of access would have put CNN on the state playing field as an ordinary blog. They’d be starved for ad revenue.

Tonight was a major stategic defeat. The fake news media and so-called #TheResistance are inspired.

Vox Day: National Security Adviser Flynn resigns

That's exactly what I said that he should do [resign] if the reports that he had lied were true. And, as I also mentioned, I don't see it as a loss to the God-Emperor at all, because Flynn was heavily influenced by the neocons, and by Michael Ledeen in particular. With him out, and Eliot Abrams being rejected, I anticipate that some of the pressure to instigate trouble with Iran will be reduced. 

The opposition media will consider this a scalp and will try to make the most of it, and they will fail to recognize what I pointed out before the inauguration, which is that the Trump administration is almost certainly going to have record turnover, as the God-Emperor will quickly remove subordinates in whom he loses confidence or trust. It worked for him during the campaign and it will work for him in office.

Vox Day: Curiouser and curiouser

The Saker: The Neocons and the “Deep State” Have Neutered the Trump Presidency, It’s Over Folks!

The Saker: The Anti-Flynn ‘Deep State’ Coup – Spelling It Out in the Clearest Way Possible

And some tweets from John Robb:

The big reason Flynn was the #1 target of the #deepstate : he was rumored to be the point man on plans to reform the Intel Community.

— John Robb (@johnrobb) February 15, 2017

#Deepstate to @realDonaldTrump

"You will die in jail"

Definitely nuclear. https://t.co/LkYVIhcaAD

— John Robb (@johnrobb) February 15, 2017

All of the things we were worried about re: political use of #deepstate surveillance is proving true. The genie is out of the bottle.

— John Robb (@johnrobb) February 15, 2017

Honestly, I can't make heads or tails of this. The situation is far too complex, fluid, and shrouded in secrecy for all but the most informed observers to have a meaningful opinion on it.

My intuition tells me this is a Bad Thing for us Trump supporters. I liked General Flynn and thought he would do a good job of reforming the intelligence agencies and bringing some measure of sanity back to our foreign policy. Also, this is looking more and more like a Deep State coup against the POTUS, in which case, sayonara, America - you were fun while you lasted.

On the other hand, I wouldn't sell Trump short. He has proven himself to be a lot smarter and more strategic than virtually anyone gave him credit for during the campaign, and it strikes me as premature to second-guess every single decision he makes on a daily basis. Trump is playing a long game, and, as Marco Rubio infamously claimed about Obama, he knows exactly what he's doing...

Our president is fighting an array of extremely powerful enemies in the Deep State, the permanent bureaucracy, Congress, the judiciary, the media, academia, the "international community"... it's basically just him and a half-dozen advisers, and his basket of deplorable supporters... versus THE WORLD. He made it this far - let's have a little faith in his judgment and abilities.

And Flynn is problematic, for the reasons Vox points out. I found his neocon growlings about Russia and other alleged enemies in his book The Field of Fight, co-authored by Michael "[Bomb Iran] Faster, Please" Ledeen, disturbing. Also, Flynn apparently misled Mike Pence about his phone call with the Russian ambassador, an offense that I would not expect the God-Emperor to take lightly, much as he may otherwise value Flynn.

The issue with Flynn may simply be that he is a born rebel. As he wrote in his book:

I was one of those nasty tough kids, hell-bent on breaking rules for the adrenaline rush and hardwired just enough not to care about the consequences. [...] 

My rehabilitation was the fastest in adolescent history. I had it coming, and it taught me that moral rehab is possible. I behaved during my term of probation and stopped all of my criminal activity. But I would always retain my strong impulse to challenge authority and to think and act on my own whenever possible. There is room for such types in America, even in the disciplined confines of the United States Army.

But not, perhaps, in the disciplined court of the God-Emperor.

The Left and violence

In case you think I've overgeneralized in calling out the Left's propensity to advocate violence against heretical thinkers, as witnessed by the strange online reaction to the punching of Richard Spencer, consider what this liberal has to say:

I made a miscalculation earlier today. I suspected that many of the people cheering Spencer’s attack did so innocently, and by minimizing the assault– that is, they think that’s okay to hit him but not go much further than that. I made a pretty simple point on Twitter: even a single punch can disable or kill a man, and therefore Spencer’s attacker conceivably could have killed him.

The tweet took off, and not in a good way. Literally hundreds of people responded, all saying that they would have loved if the attacker had killed Spencer. Some went further, calling for the extrajudicial killing of all Nazis.

...

I honestly don’t have room for all the responses along these lines. These are also the polite responses, not the ones calling me a Nazi or calling for my death.

It was an eye-opening reaction. The reason I penned the tweet was because I thought the liberal consensus that serves as the bedrock of the American society was intact. I had this whole spiel planned about how if we as a society endorse violence against one Nazi, we’re responsible if it leads to worse violence, maybe even murder, where do you draw the line, blah blah blah. I thought it was more or less self-evident that you don’t murder people on the street for expressing views you don’t like. I thought we were all the same page, and I was wrong.

What was most depressing is that the pro-violence responses came almost uniformly from liberals. I suppose that isn’t that shocking: 51% of modern Democrats believe the government should ban hateful speech entirely. The more intelligent responses phrased it this way: Nazis are so violent, so dangerous, so outside the mainstream, they don’t deserve the usual protections afforded to political speech, including protection from violence. Still, it is sad to see so many liberal Americans abandoning one of the founding suppositions of liberalism at the dawn of an administration where it will be more necessary than ever before.

The undead

From Politico:

Hillary Clinton will run for president. Again. 

No inside information informs this prediction. No argument is advanced as to whether her run is a good or a bad idea—there are many ways to make a case either way. Instead this is just a statement of simple facts (if facts mean anything anymore, that is). And the facts are clear that the former secretary of state is doing everything she needs to do to run for the White House one more time. If she finds a path to do so, she will take it. And I can prove it. [...]

At the moment, of course, the idea of another Clinton presidential campaign—what would be the fifth since 1992—seems outlandish, even exhausting. Who’d want to go through all that mess again? But four years is plenty of time for memories to subside. 

And it’s true that in another era, a candidate Clinton’s age might have been deemed too old for the presidency. But in 2020, Hillary Clinton will be 73, one year younger than the incumbent seeking reelection. 

Also in another era, her political career might have been seen as having passed its expiration date. She’s twice run for the White House—and lost. But Ronald Reagan didn’t think that way. He ran in 1968, and again in 1976, nearly beating the incumbent Gerald Ford for the GOP nomination, before his ultimate victory in 1980.

I think Matt Latimer could well be right about the gruesome prospect of Hillary running again in 2020 - something that had not even occurred to me until now. Whether she could actually win is another matter. I strongly suspect the public will be clamoring for a continuation of the God-Emperor's reign in 2020, and perhaps even a repeal of the 22nd Amendment in time for 2024. On the other hand, Hillary has an opportunity if an open-source revolution such as described by John Robb sweeps the God-Emperor from his throne before then.

Even if that happens, I don't see Hillary as a likely candidate to succeed/replace Trump. She is a political dinosaur with a tin ear for the forces that are remaking our political system. Her abysmal social media campaign in 2016 provided constant, hilarious evidence of that. But who knows, maybe she could learn from her mistakes. Despite her all-around terrible campaigning, she did come close to winning the election, probably with the help of evil behavioral scientists handling her messaging; maybe the second time's the charm. She would need to hire someone with a profound grasp of social media and open-source tactics.

We have entered the realm of chaos, and anything is possible.

"You still don't get it, do you? She'll run for president again! That's what she does! That's ALL she does! You can't stop her!"

Civil war watch

The verdict is in: Political violence is cool!

The major student-run paper of UC Berkeley ran five op-eds Tuesday defending the riots on campus, and arguing that violence was an acceptable response to a speech from Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos. 

The Daily Californian editorial board published five op-eds from five students and former students, who uniformly believed the riot was justified.

I read the op-eds. That is an accurate summary. Here is one example:

In light of recent events, there has been a resurgence of the belief that in order for a protest to be effective, it must also be nonviolent. This belief especially plagues liberals, who are talented in drafting long Facebook posts about how they are down with the cause, but not really because windows were broken and some white nationalists got their asses beat. Here’s looking at you, Berkeley.

I’m here to explain to this particular segment of the “jolted from a coma, but went back to bed” crowd that they are wrong. Listen closely, because if I have to hear this flawed, problematic and deeply cowardly line of reasoning the next time some people invite a violent fascist-endorsing hate monger to UC Berkeley, we’re fighting.

From another op-ed, hilariously titled "Violence helped ensure safety of students":

Arguments on campus, on the other hand, revolve around students defying the acts the AntiFas  —  an anarchist and anti-fascist group that uses black bloc techniques to meet its ends  —  took that night. They want to ensure that there is a distinction between the rioters and the students who were there to protest peacefully. 

Well, I’m here to thank the radical measures the AntiFas took to ensure my safety.

Unfortunately for these psychos, the violent protests at Berkeley (which included such heartwarming acts of anti-fascist street justice as macing a woman wearing a Trump hat) caused pre-order sales of Milo's book to surge 12,740% overnight, making it once again the #1 Amazon bestseller.

Unfortunately for America, the violence and thundering lack of condemnation of it from the Democratic elite - which California-based Scott Adams has correctly described as the Democrats failing to "police their own ranks" - is pushing us closer to the brink of civil war.

Fortunately for America, we have been blessed with a POTUS who has a fucking pair of balls and isn't afraid to call out these vicious animals for what they are - and, it seems likely, TAKE ACTION to roll back their reign of terror:

If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view - NO FEDERAL FUNDS?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2017

It's safe to say that most Americans are behind him on this. Deny funding to the forces of anarchy and terror. Stop supporting and associating with the people who are tearing our country apart. That means you, and the federal government, and everyone who cares about protecting what remains of our sacred liberties.